2012: A Year in Review (Part 1)

Best of Mosaic Monday

January 9 - Resolutions

February 13 - Conversation Hearts

May 7 - Purple and Yellow Macro

May 21 - Long, Lazy Weekend

June 11 - Valley

June 18 - Betta Fish

List of Recipes

Seedy Banana Date Muffins
Napa Cabbage Side
Roasted Asparagus and Tomato Salad
Leftover Ratatouille Soup
Peach Crisp (and galette)

List of Recommended Books

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
Empress by Shan Sa
For One More Day by Mitch Albom
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland
The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice
Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
By The Time You Read This, I'll Be Bread by Mathew Ferguson
Personal Geographies by Jill K. Berry

Lessons Learned

• When you're writing a long blog post, save the html in a word or notepad file so you have it when your browser or blogger fails.
• My blog calendar was awesome! I'm definitely keeping it up again this year.
• At the beginning of the year, I was posting daily, if not twice daily. By the end of the year, I was posting much less frequently, but these posts were more personal, more thoughtful. I realized over the summer that I was no longer blogging for me but for increased readership. So I stopped Mosaic Monday and Project 52 and I switched from weekly to monthly forecasts. I want to continue this trend of blogging for me - things that make me happy, things I want to remember. After browsing through Mosaic Mondays from the beginning of the year, I may start them again, once a month or something. We'll see. I also want to revamp my blog a bit, change the colours, the banner, etc. Slowly, as I find time.
• I didn't take that many photos of everyday things, family or nature, especially the second half of the year. I want to change that this year. I want to use my camera more. 
• Looking at photos of our old place in Hamilton makes me feel strange... odd that I can't go back there, that the place technically doesn't exist anymore (as it was in those photos). Change is rough, but I'm glad I'll always have those photos... which is just another reason to break my camera out more often this year!

As you may have caught from my first lesson learned, I had a much longer blog post prepared for today, but somehow, blogger wasn't saving it every time I pressed save. So.... back to the drawing board, here's a better version of my year in review! The month-by-month recap will be rewritten for a later date. 

Next up - a year in photos (also in part 1 and part 2).