Hi Friends,
This week has been a crazy one, with lots of good and lots of bad to report. Honestly it breaks my heart to think about it all too much. However I'm going to try and write about some of it and we'll see what happens from there!
News
Giveaway
First off I'm pleased to announce a winner to my giveaway (found in this post). Congratulations to Melissa K! Her prize will be shipping soon, and if you missed this giveaway please stay tuned to my blog. I'll be hosting another in the near future!
I'd also like to thank everyone who entered my giveaway. I loved reading your ideas for what I should be writing about and noted many folks want to see more about plus size fashion and reviews. I can't wait to bring you more of this!
Liebster Award
Last week I was nominated by my lovely colleague Sadie at Sadie By Design for a Liebster Award! The Liebster is an way of giving bloggers a better platform to tell their story to the world. I wanted to acknowledge it in this post even though I haven't had time to fully address all that goes with the nomination yet. I'm thrilled and flattered to be featured this way and can't wait to write more about it. Please watch for a more in depth post about this in the next few weeks!
#BlackLivesMatter
This is just exhausting to keep track of, and the more hate that builds as people start to see race as an issue to take sides on the more sick I feel. I can't think about other people that way. 506 black lives have been lost so far this year, and now more are being added from the police force thanks to a few renegades who are taking things into their own hands. One of the 506 was my cousin a few months back.
I keep thinking things will change for the better, and then there is only more violence and tragedy. It leaves me an emotional mess, feeling guilty when good things are happening in my own life and others are experiencing so much loss. Guilty for being white and having the privilege to go and do what I want without being anxious for my life. I feel bad that the best I can do most days is simply have dialogue with you, my readers, or the other folks I know in person or online. It just feels like nothing I do will be enough to help. And for that I am sorry.
However I try to read and stay educated about what is going on. I don't just block it out with my own moderately happy life. If this strikes a chord with you and you'd like to learn more about concrete ways you can help find peace and ensure a better future for everyone in this country please check out this amazing article featuring a list of practical ways to become an ally.
Pokemon Go
This has been the happy thing of my week I have been enjoying this app I have eagerly awaited the past 8 months. I'll be writing more on this in the near future, including a full review! For now I have my Bulbasaur, a gym next door to my house (First to claim! Though it's already been taken over and....well, I'll come back to that later).
My Nerd Origin Story
My friend and fellow blogger Mickey came up with this writing prompt and opened it up as a bit of a group project within the Geeks & Beauties community I'm a part of. I think it's a great topic to think about as we get introspective about life because it helps us look on the bright side of things and view our own life as a story that we get the power to write. Just as some of our favorite superheroes lives were shaped by adversity so are our own at times. And as with superheroes, sometimes we keep our nerdy identity a secret from the general public. However, today I'm opening up about it to you all.
My own story starts when I was learning to read. I was homeschooled and my mom had some curriculum to help that included a series of books with stepped difficulty and little racetrack to move along as you read each. I remember after the first dozen or so I think I completed the rest in a day, and then started begging my mom to take me to the library. From then on I loved reading and would get a dozen or more books each visit, multiple times a week. When I was 10 years old my mom, brother and I spent some time living with my grandmother and great grandmother to help them out. As soon as we realized we might be there long term the library visits started there too, and in some ways reading became my best friend when there was no one my age to play with. While I love my brother, when you're cooped up in a house together you get sick of each other eventually. Books became my escape from that, and later my comfort as I had to figure out how to make friends with kids again when I had left a kid and came back to my hometown a middle schooler. Fantasy books were my favorite, from retellings of fairy tales to waiting for each new Harry Potter book.
I was the kid who while perhaps 13 walked to the mall on black Friday to buy myself a Game Boy when they were finally cheap enough to be affordable to my family, and then patiently wait to receive it on Christmas day along with a cartridge for Pokemon Blue (my brother got Red!). We had an old Nintendo we shared and played the first few Super Mario games on, and I vividly remember playing all of the Legend of Zelda on a 6 inch black and white tv. As he got further into his teens my brother took over most of the gaming systems in our house, deeming me unworthy to play them as a female. But I was already hooked.
Growing up we had a closet full of board games, stocked by my mom that we used often. Before she homeschooled my brother and I full time she had been a librarian at a university, and before that a high school biology teacher. She loved learning and finding us new projects to work on that stimulated our curiosity. Even when we watched tv with my parents they would often be watching Star Trek or other science fiction shows. On Saturdays my dad would take us on walks to 7-11 to pick up some small item the family needed and buy me a Barbie or Strawberry Shortcake comic. I didn't realize how nerdy this all was until much later in life. I just took joy from reading about gardening and teaching myself to grow roses, or learning to identify birds, trees, and insects. I never thought of myself as an outdoorsy kid, but I loved nature and the science and beauty of it. To this day when I'm creating art or decorating my home themes from nature are constantly finding their way into my work.
Later in high school I wanted to run my own website for a church group I was in and learned to code some in HTML. We didn't even have a computer at the time, just a WebTV unit that allowed us to do very basic web surfing and checking emails. But I figured out how to make it work, and later when we did have a computer I was the one keeping that up and running for the 5-6 years we owned a desktop the family to shared. And I almost ended up in the field of graphic design, except I fell in love with darkroom photography and preferred it to sitting in from of a computer for long periods of time. And now my work involves a computer (or smartphone) all the time!
For most of my life I didn't think about myself as a nerd, I just did the things I loved, which happened to be geeky. Nowadays when I'm looking for new friends or trying to find my tribe I often go straight for the nerdy girls first. And most of the time that's exactly what works best.
If you'd like to hear some other great nerd origin stories please go read Mickey's here at the Nerdily blog, Sadie's at Sadie By Design, Andrea's at her YouTube channel Chibi Drea (coming soon), and Evelyn's at Princess Eevee. I'll update these links to go straight to their stories, but for now you can check out their sites and get to know these lovely ladies.
What's your nerd origin story like? Let me know more in the comments! And as always, thanks for reading. I really appreciate all my visitors.My own story starts when I was learning to read. I was homeschooled and my mom had some curriculum to help that included a series of books with stepped difficulty and little racetrack to move along as you read each. I remember after the first dozen or so I think I completed the rest in a day, and then started begging my mom to take me to the library. From then on I loved reading and would get a dozen or more books each visit, multiple times a week. When I was 10 years old my mom, brother and I spent some time living with my grandmother and great grandmother to help them out. As soon as we realized we might be there long term the library visits started there too, and in some ways reading became my best friend when there was no one my age to play with. While I love my brother, when you're cooped up in a house together you get sick of each other eventually. Books became my escape from that, and later my comfort as I had to figure out how to make friends with kids again when I had left a kid and came back to my hometown a middle schooler. Fantasy books were my favorite, from retellings of fairy tales to waiting for each new Harry Potter book.
I was the kid who while perhaps 13 walked to the mall on black Friday to buy myself a Game Boy when they were finally cheap enough to be affordable to my family, and then patiently wait to receive it on Christmas day along with a cartridge for Pokemon Blue (my brother got Red!). We had an old Nintendo we shared and played the first few Super Mario games on, and I vividly remember playing all of the Legend of Zelda on a 6 inch black and white tv. As he got further into his teens my brother took over most of the gaming systems in our house, deeming me unworthy to play them as a female. But I was already hooked.
Growing up we had a closet full of board games, stocked by my mom that we used often. Before she homeschooled my brother and I full time she had been a librarian at a university, and before that a high school biology teacher. She loved learning and finding us new projects to work on that stimulated our curiosity. Even when we watched tv with my parents they would often be watching Star Trek or other science fiction shows. On Saturdays my dad would take us on walks to 7-11 to pick up some small item the family needed and buy me a Barbie or Strawberry Shortcake comic. I didn't realize how nerdy this all was until much later in life. I just took joy from reading about gardening and teaching myself to grow roses, or learning to identify birds, trees, and insects. I never thought of myself as an outdoorsy kid, but I loved nature and the science and beauty of it. To this day when I'm creating art or decorating my home themes from nature are constantly finding their way into my work.
Later in high school I wanted to run my own website for a church group I was in and learned to code some in HTML. We didn't even have a computer at the time, just a WebTV unit that allowed us to do very basic web surfing and checking emails. But I figured out how to make it work, and later when we did have a computer I was the one keeping that up and running for the 5-6 years we owned a desktop the family to shared. And I almost ended up in the field of graphic design, except I fell in love with darkroom photography and preferred it to sitting in from of a computer for long periods of time. And now my work involves a computer (or smartphone) all the time!
For most of my life I didn't think about myself as a nerd, I just did the things I loved, which happened to be geeky. Nowadays when I'm looking for new friends or trying to find my tribe I often go straight for the nerdy girls first. And most of the time that's exactly what works best.
If you'd like to hear some other great nerd origin stories please go read Mickey's here at the Nerdily blog, Sadie's at Sadie By Design, Andrea's at her YouTube channel Chibi Drea (coming soon), and Evelyn's at Princess Eevee. I'll update these links to go straight to their stories, but for now you can check out their sites and get to know these lovely ladies.
