There is a group called “cheer peppers” that has a challenge called “Nano Poblano”. I never did figure out what the Chemistry formula-like acronym stood for, but the challenge is to post every day in November. I know that some people post everyday and don’t think anything of it, but for me it is difficult.

I am a disorganized rebel who likes to do things start to finish. The idea of posting everyday for a month was intimidating. For some reason I was intrigued, especially after reading this article: Why Blog Every Day in November? I had a backlog of thoughts and images from my travels this fall so I thought “maybe I can do this”. Since I am a bit superstitious I didn’t say anything about the goal publicly and I didn’t do any of the signing up, because I really didn’t think I could do it.

Good thing since I didn’t quite pull it off: I missed three days. Of those two were because I did not have internet access for my PC over Thanksgiving and I haven’t figured out the smartphone app, the third was because I lost momentum. However, With this post I have published 30 posts in the month of November. I am a little proud because the month included my grandma taking a fall and spending a bunch of time at the hospital and nursing home (more of that to come).

I learned some useful things: one was how to schedule a post in advance. I was planning to use that to get through the holiday week without a hitch, but Grandma’s fall meant that I didn’t have time to set that up.

One other thing I did was to explore and create a list of several challenges that I can use to figure out what to post. I call it my “Post  It Notes“. It contains links to the websites with the challenges. I print it out each week and use it to track themes and make notes so I can see how I am doing. A cool thing about these challenges is to see what other people are doing with the same theme and connect with them. I don’t always use one of them but they are great if I am stuck for an idea. I am really grateful to the creative people who create and maintain these challenges. The cyber world is a much more friendly place because of them.

One thing I missed this month:  I have had less time to read other peoples blogs. Because of this I don’t plan to continue to post everyday, but using my “Post-It Notes” and scheduling I can do much better than I was doing before Nano Poblano.  Thank you, Cheer Peppers!