Day 30 - Write it Down

Well 30 days turned into 395 days, but I did accomplish my goal of 30 total days of blogging.  Thanks again Holly for your 30 Day Blog Challenge.  It started off as a blog to promote agriculture and life on a farm, but quickly turned into a book of memories that I wanted to log for my kids, nieces and nephews, and to share with the friends and family who helped create them.  

Writing is an interesting beast for me.  I've always enjoyed writing, putting my thoughts down on paper.  So much so that here I sit at 12:50am typing away on my iPad, sleep-deprived and still driven to continue as long as the words keep flowing. From as long as I could remember, writing came best to me in the late evening hours.  

My earliest spiral notebook journals started in 7th grade, mostly written under my covers with a flashlight late at night.  I had some pretty deep thoughts back then, and they were incredibly entertaining to reread when I uncovered them while cleaning out closets over the summer.  My junior high journals included anything from the boys that my friends and I were dating, to the horrible treatment I received from my older siblings:), frustrations with my parents' rules, the number of points and fouls game by game of our basketball season, and even the race times of our 4x200 relay team.

High school thoughts got a little deeper, more serious boyfriends, bigger sports events, and decisions like college and my future outside of Paxton, Illinois.  Most enjoyable was a decent amount of documentation I kept in college on the phases of "Trying to get Ted Mies's Attention."  According to actual documentation from 7th grade on, I never worked so hard for something in my life as I did to try to get that boy to like me!

After I finally got his attention, I guess I put my pencil down.  It only took 17 years to find the inspiration to pick it up again.  I would also like to thank Loraine Pitman for the inspiration.  At age 90, she had the help of her daughter to write down several memories of her years on the farm, in college at the University of Illinois, etc.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the past generations of Mies Farms.    So very many things have changed in agriculture over the last 90 years.  But interestingly, we also learned that many of the challenges are still very much the same as those of the generations before us.  

Should time or inspiration allow for it, I hope that at least one person who has read my blog takes the time to start writing one of their own.  Writing has been my therapy over the years, and I'm excited to publish my Shutterfly book full of blogs and pictures for our coffee table viewing only.  And maybe one of these days I will bust out those 7th grade journals for my 7th grader to read.  Although, I had a few boyfriends back in 7th grade, maybe she doesn't need to know about that just yet.

1:17am,  blog complete.