Happy Birthday, my dear blog!

Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching has been around for a full year today!

So today marks the first anniversary of this blog’s existence. Coincidentally, it also marks another anniversary – congratulations, A&I! You are the best!

Funny story. I started this blog completely spontaneously one night when I was babysitting the bestest I in the world <3. My friend C had just moved to China, and in order to read her blog, I had to create a wordpress account for myself. While I was registering, I got a message saying that I now had automatically created a blog at mirjamsophiaglessmer.wordpress.com – the blog you are reading now. At that time, I was teaching an intro to oceanography class and had been playing with classroom demos for a while. I had often posted pictures of those demonstration on facebook and had had interesting conversations with my friends about the demonstrations and how to use them in teaching. I liked having those conversations and had thought about documenting them somewhere, as well as collecting my photos in a more convenient and structured way, but I had never seriously considered blogging since it seemed like too much hard work and such a commitment.

But anyway, now I had a blog. In addition to the first hesitant “hello world!” post, I posted six other posts that first evening! The next day, I posted “only” two posts and then went down to one post every day of the week for some time. After a while, I went to only posting on working days, and now I’ve been at 3 posts a week for the last couple of months. Which is probably more sustainable in the long run. Sometimes I have a lot more content, but then I force myself to save it up a bit and schedule it for those weeks when I’m on conference travel or on no-internet vacation (it does happen!).

In any case, except for on one rare occasion when I wrote a blogpost to force myself to think a concept through for work, blogging has never felt like work to me. Yes, I had those Sunday nights when I thought “ooops, I have no content lined up for next week”, and then I went to my kitchen and got out the food dye and straws or test tubes or kettle or whatever other props. But that never felt like a chore, it was always more of a reminder that even though I really really do enjoy doing experiments, I had not done enough of it recently, so when I started doing something about it I was always really happy to do it. So in addition to professional benefits, this is what the blog does to me – it forces me to do stuff I love more regularly than I would do it otherwise.

Thanks for reading and joining me on this journey!