Freshening Up

Well, after careful consideration and mulling, I have decided to abandon my plan to move to a new blog and to stay here at Sunshine and Shadow, at least for a while. Hence the pretty facelift.  :-)

I had a couple of reasons for deciding to keep things the way they are for now. Firstly, as I pondered moving to a more public blog, I realized that blogging under a pseudonym gives me a measure of privacy and freedom that blogging under my real name would not. I can come to my blog as Vicki and talk about my struggles and successes honestly, because I'm not afraid of my writing accidentally being sent to my boss or my major professor or anything like that. While I would dearly love to be the "real me" and show you pictures of my home and my town and my school, at the moment I would much rather have the freedom to be genuinely open about my life.

Secondly, as I worked on setting up my new blog, I got really sad at the thought of cutting loose from all the history and memories I have built here at S&S. I love bloggers that stay in one place for years and let their blog grow with them, rather than having separate blogs for separate life stages - I love being able to go back through their archives and see when they were young girls, when they were launching their careers, when they got married, when they had children, and so on, all the way up through their current life stage. It's an awesome testimony of God's faithfulness and provides a much more cohesive story. I want S&S to continue to grow with me, not to leave it behind.

So ... what does this mean for my content?

Well, I still want to try to move away from using this blog as an emotional dumping-ground, and give it some structure. For example, I do want to blog about life as a grad student, just as I planned; I'll just do it here instead of there. And I want to continue showing lots of pictures - I'm in love with my new camera, and though I can't show you big pieces of my world, I can show you the little details that I see every day. The tree branch that I brush with my hand every afternoon, the sun reflecting off the science building windows in the morning, the blanket I snuggle under while I work in the evenings. Pretty things that I love to share. I'll make sure there are a lot of them!  :-)

So what do you think? Did I make the right decision?

~ Vicki