This morning I read about two ice climbers, Will Gadd and Sarah Hueniken who scaled the first ever ice climb of Niagara Falls. One of my most viewed posts is about about Niagara Falls when I was there with my German cousin three summers ago. To this day I still get readers who find that blog post. Today Frizz from Flickr Comments commented on this historic feat from that site..
I read the article on the Toronto Star and was able to download the video from YouTube. Here it is:
…..I can’t believe it
Thirty three months ago when I started this blog I couldn’t have imagined writing 1000 posts. When I first hit the keys I wanted to record and track my weight loss journey, write about my past, share recipes and have a platform to air my feelings about retirement. Well here I am almost three years later and I’m still going strong.
My focus has changed somewhat. I managed to lose 32 pounds and today I’ve kept a good chunk of it off but it’s a struggle every day.
I don’t share many recipes. Others do it much better. I’m still working and I don’t bring up retirement very often. My colleagues won’t hear of it but I have to admit that I am getting closer to that day. I don’t talk as much about my past and most of my personal posts reflect what’s happening in the present.
What is surprising is how my blog has morphed into an art and photography journal. I started teaching art to more classes shortly after starting the blog and I started to share my student’s work.
I also started to do more of my own art and I took a number of on-line art classes.
I’ve always liked taking photos but recently I discovered that I was pretty good at it. I enjoyed experimenting with my little digital camera and later my iPhone and I started to participate in a lot of photography challenges here on WordPress.
I also started to dabble in writing poetry. For someone who hated poetry in school I’m somewhat surprised that I enjoy writing free verse and Haiku as much as I do. I guess I like writing in general.
When I look back on my first dozen posts, I wonder what kept me going. There wasn’t a lot of feedback. Many of my first posts had no likes what so ever. Reading over them I couldn’t fault the writing but there were only a few photos in the beginning and I didn’t always ‘tag’ those pieces. Some of them I wrote for my children so they would have a record of their mother’s past (here, here, here, and here).
The one thing that I was pleased about was that many of my early followers are still with me. Hats off to Michael Lai, oneanna65, Domestic Diva, MD, Uthamz, The Ranting Chef, Lesley Carter, Ellis Nelson, Conor Cullen, Dorothy, Anne, Paul. Beth, Baz, Dina, Island Traveller, Bert, Lee, Jeanne, Maia, Frizz, TK Morin, Masqua,Leanne, Art Expectations, Rosemarie, Viveka, Donna, Michael, T.J., Melissa, Ann, Neal, Woolly, Mrs. Euken, Dan, Mark, Brenda, and in the last year many more followers have come my way. Here are some of the regulars: Cee, Megan, Lisa, Ab, Jennifer, Joe, Rachel, Chris, Geraint, Miranda, Trisha, Janaline, Hello, Fig, Elizabeth, Marsha, Ayse, Folly Girl, Judith, Sarah, Ronovan, Seb, Audrey, B, Kimmi, Conrad, CJ, Boeta, Peggy, Debbie, Colline,……
A special thanks goes to the people who like to comment on my blog, a lot,……Dorothy, Viveka, Rosemarie, Leanne, Colline, Judith, Cee, Elizabeth and Mark and my sister Chris. I know that my FaceBook friends also read my blog and when they comment it’s usually on FaceBook. I’m sure I’ve missed a few people and for that I apologize. I am about 40 people shy of reaching 1000 followers and I hope by my 3rd anniversary in April I can reach that goal as well.
Cheers!
….my youngest daughter has gone back to her first love
Forgive me, as I take a moment to gush over my daughter’s new blog. After high school she studied to become a chef. Three years later, she decided that she really didn’t want a career in a professional kitchen. Luckily her love of food and food preparation wasn’t totally extinguished. Four years later after graduating with a degree in photography she met her husband. He too was a foodie and their common interest in cooking and photography was literally a match made in heaven. Two years later they became engaged to be married and G started her first blog. A wedding blog.
To make a long story short, they were married a year later and the blog was rated as one of the top ten wedding blogs in Canada. Unfortunately it was difficult making a living from the blog alone so she gave it up and worked on editing other people’s blogs.
After taking a long hard look at what she really loved she has decided to return to food and created a food and recipe testing kitchen. This is where her new blog comes into play. She is producing about one recipe a week. So far I can vouch for every recipe. They are all delicious. I hope you take a minute to visit her site. She has added a subscription button so you can be notified whenever she posts a new recipe.
Enjoy!
….can’t believe that it’s already week 35…check out Cee’s Photography for more great posts of Share Your World or join in
Have your blogging goals changed?
I think they have. I started as an incentive to lose weight and record stories from my childhood. I still do a little of both but now it’s become a venue for sharing my art, photography, and life’s adventures and challenges.
If you were to perform in the circus, what would you do?
I don’t know why this came to my head first but I thought clown. I’m not a big fan of clowns but I do like to make people laugh.
If you could go back and talk to yourself at age 18 what advice would you give yourself? Or if you are younger than 25 what words of wisdom would you like to tell yourself at age 45?
I would tell myself to pursue my interests, take risks. I was very practical and played it pretty safe at 18 but I was also somewhat romantic and probably naive. My biggest piece of advice would be to put aside money for retirement and not touch it. I’ve been lucky to have a job with a great pension plan and to own a house in the city. Not everyone is as fortunate and sometimes I think we could have been better prepared.
What is your favorite comfort snack food?
My favourite comfort foods are ice-cream and cheese. Not at the same time. When I want something sweet it would be ice-cream and for my savoury moments it has to be cheese.
Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?
I’m grateful for a wonderful birthday week with family and friends. I spent the day with one of my oldest friends at the spa earlier in the week. My good friend L took me to the nail place and she treated me to a pedicure. My aunt and cousin sent me a beautiful bouquet of flowers, my sisters sent me gifts through the mail, my son called me long distance from the Netherlands, my daughters and I spent time together at the CNE, my husband cooked a magnificent meal for six of us and my dear friends at the cottage prepared a birthday lunch with cake done in the BBQ and gave me a set of beautiful earrings. WOW!
I’m looking forward to using my new Jawbone Up (a gift from my family) to record my fitness and sleeping patterns and learning some new songs on my ukulele from the ukulele book that my sister sent me. I’m also looking forward to going back to school (believe it or not) to catch up with my colleagues and meet my new students. Getting the library up and running is number one on my priority list. I just hope I get some help doing it.
….being at the cottage makes it difficult to keep up with some of these weekly challenges
If you had your own talk show, who would your first three guests be? (guest can be dead, alive, famous or someone you just know)
There’s always one question that stumps me or makes me hesitate as to how I will answer. This is the one. After giving this some thought I think my three guests would be John F. Kennedy, Meryl Streep and Ray Cattell (my favourite contemporary artist and my girlfriend’s father).
One of Ray’s paintings in my sister’s home.
What can you always be found with?
I always have my camera or iPhone with me.
What is the most fun thing you did in school?
It was probably in art class or home economics. I loved those two subjects in elementary school. In high school, however, the one thing that really stands out for me was our trip to Expo 67 in Montreal. I think it was a three day trip and it was probably my first experience away from home with a school group on an overnight trip.
Photo courtesy of : http://www.westland.net/expo67/aerial.jpg
What’s something you know you do differently than most people?
Writing a blog is something that I do that most of my friends and colleagues don’t do. Whenever I mention that I have a blog a lot of people are intrigued but very few of them actually try to create their own.
Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?
I’m grateful for the company that I have at my cottage. My neighbours are always so generous when it comes to sharing meals. This week my girlfriend’s adult son made me a lovely breakfast of blueberry pancakes and scrambled eggs and later in the day I invited him to my place and we shared BBQ chicken, grilled zucchini and sweet potatoes, steamed broad beans from my daughter’s garden and fresh strawberries and cheese for dessert.
Looking through the trees to my neighbour’s cottage.
Later this week I’m looking forward to spending time with a couple of friends from the city at the cottage. One daughter is coming over for dinner on Friday and on Saturday the other daughter is coming to the house with her brother-in-law to help us clean out the garage and take all the garbage to the city dump.
For more Share Your World posts check out Cee’s site.
…..just a quick note of thanks
One of my blogging goals was to reach 30 000 views on my second anniversary with WordPress. I didn’t quite make it but yesterday, almost two months later I finally reached that magic number. Thank you to all my followers. Without you it wouldn’t happen.
I’ve been incredibly busy this month and I haven’t been able to keep up with all my emails. No matter how hard I try to keep up I can’t get my emails below 100. Those of you who write longer posts are sitting in a back log. I’ve saved them because I really do want to read them. I haven’t forgotten about you and when I do get to them you’ll probably notice a spike in views from Canada. Love you all.
….after two years I’ve met and surpassed most of my blogging goals
Back in February (here) I wrote that I had already met many of my blogging goals before the anniversary of my second year. I reset some of my goals and set my target date to be April 30th. Well today is the day and I’m happy to report that I’ve met most of my goals and surpassed some of them again.
Here are my original goals and where I stood in February and where I stand now.
200 views for one day (currently sitting at 159) I reached 303 views on June 7th – I’ve reached 360 views for one day
600 followers one year from today I reached 600 followers 10 weeks early – I’m now over 675 followers
30 000 views one year from today I am 5500 views away from this goal – That would be 550 views a week, 79 views a day – right now I average about 50 views a day- this is the only goal I didn’t reach – I’m sitting at 27 500 views
300 new posts in the next year I’m at 262 so I have 38 posts to go – that’s 3.8 posts a week….very doable. My magic number will be 614 posts in total. – this is my 650th post
Again none of this would be possible without the support of my loyal followers. When I started this journey two years ago I had no idea how long I would do this. Now I don’t see myself stopping. I love writing, taking photographs, setting goals and participating in new challenges. I’ve enjoyed reading blogs from all around the world and I take great pleasure reading your comments.
…..600 followers as of yesterday
Thank you to everyone who has chosen to follow me since I started blogging. My second anniversary is coming up in mid April. Last May I set a new set of blogging goals for myself but the only one I remembered was reaching 600 followers by May 1, 2014. So I went back to my post on May 1, 2013 and reviewed what I had written. Here is an excerpt of that post:
…. I reached 300 followers
I reached all my goals before the end of April with your help.
Where do I go from here? Here’s what I’m thinking:
150 likes for one post (114 for https://mamacormier.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/a-word-a-week-photograph-challenge-blue/) This one will be more difficult to reach. It seems that I get most of my likes when I participate in a photo challenge
200 views for one day (currently sitting at 159) I reached 303 views on June 7th
600 followers one year from today I reached 600 followers 10 weeks early
30 000 views one year from today I am 5500 views away from this goal – That would be 550 views a week, 79 views a day – right now I average about 50 views a day
300 new posts in the next year I’m at 262 so I have 38 posts to go – that’s 3.8 posts a week….very doable. My magic number will be 614 posts in total.
Of course once you reach a goal it’s time to set new goals. So in the next 10 weeks my revised goals are to:
• attract 75 more followers
• write 50 more posts
• reach 320 views in one day
• average 80 views a day
Of course none of this is possible without your support. Looking forward to hearing from you. Hopefully I can give you something that sparks your interest and makes you want to visit here. Carol (aka mamacormier)
Cheers!
Assignment: Blogger’s Choice
It’s been a crazy couple of days. Yesterday I had book club and didn’t get home till quite late. I tried to add a blogroll but it was taking too much time. Nothing seems to work when you’re in a hurry. Now that I know where to find the help I’ll attempt it again at a later date.
Today I got a phone call at work from my daughter. She called K at home and discovered that he had fallen on the ice and was in a lot of pain. He bought me a new iPhone for Christmas but forgot to put my new number on his contact list. Why he didn’t phone the school was beyond me. Anyway I phoned home and he asked me to come home right away. That’s saying something.
When I got home he was mobile but I could tell he was suffering. I checked his back and there were no bones sticking out or even any inflammation but I thought it was better to be safe than sorry so off to the hospital we went.
The emergency department wasn’t too busy when we got there and we went from triage to the admitting nurse to ambulatory care pretty quickly. We didn’t have to wait too long to see a doctor and he quickly assessed the situation and orders a series of x-rays. Now the wait began and the place quickly filled up.
To make a long story short, after 3 1/2 hours we left with good news that there were on broken bones and a prescription for Tylenol 3. There was also one other bit of new that we weren’t expecting. Apparently K had suffered a broken rib sometime in his life. When, where and how is a mystery to us both.
When we got home I took the dog out and then drove up the street to have the prescription filled and to pick up some dinner. Despite his pain K was hungry and of course nothing had been prepared because of his injury.
Today’s Zero to Hero assignment is the blogger’s choice. I decided to reply to comments made on my last post and to check out the one blog I wasn’t familiar with. Other than that there really hasn’t been enough time for anything else.
Last day of school for me tomorrow. On Friday we take the train to Chatham for my sister’s wedding (hopefully K will be feeling better and will still be able to make the trip).
Cheers!
Today’s assignment: leave comments on at least three blogs that you’ve never commented on before.
I understand the value of leaving comments on new blogs. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I didn’t do that but it’s always good to be reminded of its benefits. Once people start coming to your site you might feel somewhat disappointed when you have a day or two when very few come over to read what you thought was an awesome post. Sometime though, as in my case, no one came over because when I pushed the Publish button (it appeared that the article was sent off and it even showed up on my Facebook page) it didn’t really publish and the next day I discovered that it was still sitting in a Draft file. I still don’t know why that happens but closing all my tabs before publishing usually helps.
Some of you may be uncomfortable leaving a comment but WordPress has all kinds of great suggestions on how to do this successfully. If an article resonates with me I want the writer to know how it affected me. I usually leave highly political or religious commentary alone. Once I got involved in a conversation that made me very uncomfortable and it wasn’t the author that caused the angst but the people who stopped by to comment. In the end I think that blogger had to moderate all her comments before she would publish any of them.
For the most part people appreciate your comments. Just follow the guidelines that WordPress has drawn up.
Day 11 – The Small Task That Ended up Being a Big Job
Earlier in the week I mentioned that I still had to put away my Christmas ornaments and decorations. I tried to do a little bit every day but the bulk of the clean-up happened today. I think it took me over two hours to pack up the remaining signs of Christmas. I even brought in the wreath that was hanging on the front door. The only thing I haven’t taken done is take down the outdoor lights. I’ll save that for another day, probably closer to the end of the month or even February. 
Earlier in the day I read a book for school and I completed a sample for my art class. I loved how the day started and how it’s ending. Dinner is out of the way, dishes are done, the bags for the Goodwill are packed and ready to go in the car, two loads of laundry are done, my Zero to Hero post is written, I watched a pilot from the UK called Derek and loved it and it’s not even 6:30. Maybe I’ll have time to write another post about the art project and the book.
Cheers!
Mama Cormier 
