Blogiversary!🎈🎈

Where did the time go?!

I hope you’ve enjoyed!😃
And it’s been my pleasure getting to know you! 

I decided to go back and look at my first couple of posts: Tis the Season and A Chick Making the Most Out of  2014 and took stock of how much I’ve grown as a blogger and as a person. Who would have thought that blogging would have helped me grow personally?

Looking back over the year. I’ve had some highs and some lows. I went back to college to finish my master’s in Adult Education, helped my dad with my mom after she had open heart surgery, successfully completed a blogging challenge, just to name a few. As I continued my year in review, I took a look at The Present & The Future and realized my blog is still morphing. Some things I accomplished, while others didn’t get enough wind under them to take flight.

What I’ve learned about myself

• Commitment. I’m a commitment-phobe. I’ll start something, get bored with it and move on. But with blogging, I’ve learned to refocus and breathe new life into things that bore me.
• Patience. It takes time to build an audience and a loyal following, so patience is a must. I still don’t have a lot, but I’m working on it.
• This is not something I learned through blogging. I already knew this. I’m an introvert, but what I learned is that I’m also an introverted blogger. I thought I’d be able to say all those plucky things I say to my family and friends and some coworkers, but I don’t. Well, sometimes I do — after mulling it over and rereading it a billion times and starting over a billion and one times.
• I suck at proofreading. Not really an unknown fact, but I didn’t realize how much until I started going back and rereading some of my posts.

What I’ve learned about blogging

• It’s a Community I enjoy being a part of — albeit somewhat anonymous, but I’d like to think I’ve gotten to know some of you through your blogging window.
• Quality content is a must (working on that).  I have these wonderfully thought provoking conversations in my head and when I try to convert them to words, up comes the written word wall and that mental conversation never comes out the way it took place in my head. By the way they are conversations between A, B, & C.
• Visiting other blogs is a must (working on it), which I struggle with all the time. There are a ton of good blogs out there and there are a ton of bad blogs, too. (I hope I don’t fall into the bad blog category.) And there’s always that blog that’s a diamond in the ruff.
• Commenting on other people’s posts (working on that, too) is a must and I don’t mean saying something like: ‘I agree with you,’ but expand upon that and tell them why you agree or better yet play devil’s advocate

Here are a few of my favorite posts

• G is for Gummi Bears
• Counter to HarsH ReaLiTy’s “For Men Only – 10 Ways to Lie. . .”
• T is for Tourists
• Blame Shifters
• Remembering September 11, 2001

I’d love to know if you have a post or at least one you liked a lot. 😃

Some of my favorite blogs

• Mara Eastern’s Personal Blog
• Harsh Reality
• Granny Reports Blogs
• My Chordoma Journey
• Ron Mayhew’s Blog
• Rookie Notes
• Fatchick411

So, what’s on the horizon in 2015 for the ever morphing 20/20 Hines Sight. I don’t know. Well, that’s not 100% true. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• Bring back 20/20 Five,
• Changing the Be My Guest feature
• My Hometown will be either a biweekly or monthly
• Breaking Taboo will change frequency

I’m slowly breaking out of my shell and hopefully that will continue in 2015, and you’ll get to know me a bit better. I’m looking forward to spending more time on your blogs in 2015, and getting to know you better.