Erratic Engineeress is 3 years old today and yes, that is a photo of me with paint in my hair.

Here we are again, it’s 18th of February 2022 and my blog is now officially 3 years old, woohoo! Last year I wrote about work-life balance and how the pandemic had shifted everything in regards to working from home, which also meant I had a lot of time for blogging, so this year I feel like it has been the exact opposite.

As I’ve mentioned in one of my previous posts, my boyfriend and I are currently in the middle of renovating our future home (yes, I’ll show you in a series of posts when it’s done) and since we’re on a tight budget and like to think we’re handy, we are doing a lot by ourselves. If my previous blogging cycle between February 2020 and February 2021 was all about staying at home, writing and generally making my blog better, about half of this cycle between August 2021 and February 2022 has been a hectic rat race between work and renovation work, which means that I am almost never home. It seems unreal that I’ve had a whole series of sponsored recipe posts during spring and summer of 2021, since I’ve now lost track of how many times we’ve gotten food delivered and don’t have as much time to experiment in the kitchen as I’d like to. In other words, exciting events in my real life are getting in the way of my online life and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it. 🙂

Despite that, I feel like I’ve written a fair amount of posts this past year – there’s a grand total of 330 posts on my blog now. I had a lot of online collaborations in the form of round up posts, sponsored posts and bits of writing on other platforms, so I’m glad that my blogging hobby is still alive and well, even with the occasional breaks. I’m also very happy that I was able to leverage my online presence for good for the first time, as an Instagram ambassador for Uresniči željo, a Slovenian charity initiative that grants Christmas wishes and I know for a fact that several of my followers took part in it because of me, which is amazing. As I often say, particularly in my sustainability posts, if I can inspire just a couple of people to try something new or do better in some way, then my posts will have served their purpose.

Also, while I’m at it, sorry to my fellow WordPress bloggers for not dropping by your blogs as often as I usually did – you know who you are and I promise to stop by as much as I can, but I still appreciate your support just as much as before. Like in every situation when there are too many factors at once, something has go to give and in this case it has been my blog and engagement with others online, among other things. For the past few months I have been stuck in a sort of overwhelmed writer’s block with bursts of inspiration, because I feel like I want to write about too many things at once without having the time to really seat down and focus on a single idea. Even when I do find the time, I often don’t feel like writing, as between my PhD and coordinating and stressing about all the renovation stuff, I really just need a mental break and prefer not to force myself into writing bad, soulless posts for the sake of writing something. Similarly, my Erratic hat podcast is still on a break, because that takes me a while to edit the episodes, but if everything goes well we will be moving into our new home in May, so I’ll hopefully have time to start it up again after the summer. For now I’ll just keep writing new posts whenever inspiration strikes and time permits, but don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere yet!