2023 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

I wrote so much more in 2023 compared with 2022. Setting up some recurring themes and columns gave me structure that I stuck with, and my morning poetry reading practice gave me fodder for a variety of collections. I wrote only three posts in 2021, not at all in 2020.

We live with the presence of COVID with few precautions now, and I still haven't had it. Thank you, scientists who developed the vaccine and boosters! I still mask on airplanes where I'm sitting in close proximity to strangers for hours, or when I'm around someone else who is masking, figuring they're immunocompromised or live with someone who is and I can provide that additional level of protection. I write this because I don't want to forget in future years that it was still present, still killing people, still affecting our lives. 

I'm still teleworking nearly 100% of the time, with a few more in-person meetings with my work team as it grows. That growth doesn't show up in my blogging since this is all personal, but it's been amazing and wonderful to recruit so much talent this year, with a few more positions to fill in the new year. 

This is all thanks to the passage a couple of years back of the Climate Commitment Act, which has made it possible for the Washington state legislature to invest far more in clean, green active transportation along with transit, rail, ferries, and alternative fuels. I'm motivated in my work every day by the knowledge that the planet is genuinely on fire and we have to take action if we are ever to bend that deadly curve, and also by my knowledge that the number of people dying on our roads in crashes is also going up and we need to bend that deadly curve too. The work I lead offers solutions to both of these enormous challenges, along with giving more people access to the joy and freedom of bicycling and the community connections of walking or rolling. I feel so lucky to be always doing work I believe in.

January: I kicked off the year with a preview of the bike events and challenges for the year, Reasons to Ride in 2023: A Forecast of Biking to Come. I was still doing physical therapy for the wrist I broke in September 2022 but was finally able to get on my bike. Living in Olympia means my winter riding has more to do with rain than with snow, but either way Riding Always Makes Me Happy. Yes, Always. The end of January brought another of our now-routine weekend walks to the farmers' market and a happy discovery: Walking in January: Of Gloves and Poetry. 

February: Over on my bike blog I decided to start re-upping some of the older posts that still resonate for me and that aren't too dated. Hence Riding Down Memory Lane: February, which launched a monthly series that highlights that month's bike events and my old posts from that month. I retooled some of a keynote speech I made last fall into a column, How Am I Going to Get There? Why We Need Each Other. In one of those cross-fertilizations the world wide web makes possible, a prompt from an online community led to sharing a photo of my grandma's old rocker in a different online space, which came together in The Rocker. I've written so much about bicycling over the years that I decided my January post on my walks should become the first in a series to celebrate the experiences of moving more slowly. Knowing I'd be writing about my walks led me to greater mindfulness and attention to small details that showed up in Walking in February: Of Woods and Water. This one commemorates a great weekend trip with friends to Lake Quinault, and I'll be going back. So, so beautiful.

March: Continuing the events/blog post review series on Bike Style, I published Riding Down Memory Lane: March. Harking back to the bikespedition posts I used to produce when I lived in Spokane, I produced what I hope is the first of many pieces about places to ride in Olympia, Olympia Bikespedition: Poetry and Art, Eastside Edition. Walking in March: Of Woods and Work had me in a different forest than my February walk, still appreciating the beauties large and small all around me in the park near our home. I'd been collecting links to poems I encountered in my morning reading and saving up until I had enough for “Safe passage through countless intersections”: A Baker’s Dozen of Transportation Poems. 

April: You guessed it—Riding Down Memory Lane: April kicked off the month. A trip to DC for a conference resulted in Walking in April: Of Multimodal Miles and Museums. Later that month, some proof that social media may be dying but isn't dead, since some folks on both the dying bird site (Twitter) and Mastodon made contributions to Hashtag Bikes, a round-up of (some of) the many, many hashtags bikey folks use when talking about our favorite invention online. I had the fun of being a co-leader with friend Stefanie of my neighborhood's ride to join the Earth Day Market Ride. The ride is organized by Duncan Green, long-time staff at Intercity Transit whom I first met back when I worked at Washington Bikes. I commemorated this fun little ride with Biking in Olympia: Earth Day Market Ride.

May: Riding Down Memory Lane: May had to happen since May is National Bike Month. Maybe I should have published a round-up of bike poems to celebrate; instead it was “Do Not Drive Through, This Poem’s In The Way”: Transportation Poems Keep Rolling In. A conference in Seattle (yes, my job involves going to lots and lots of conferences) led to Walking in May: Of Downtowns and Dancing.

June: More bike events and older posts in Riding Down Memory Lane: June. This was a prolific month for writing, or at least I published more posts than usual. Some posts take longer to develop because they involve more research so I may start in one month and publish in a later month, as with South Sound Short & Sweet Bike Tour. I haven't gone on this tour; I was laying out the options and inviting comments from people who've lived and ridden in this part of the state longer than I and who might have advice I need to make it better (or ditch the idea). The poetry collections on this site carry more of my personal thoughts than the ones on Bike Style. Making Soup: A Pot Full of Poems is another post that had been growing over time.  I had fun with Choose Your Own Adventure: Creating your Version of an Athlon and learned a few new Greek words along the way. A bike ride on Sweetie, my road bike that has been fairly neglected since I got Zelda the e-bike, led to Riding Thoughts: Privilege Is a Tailwind, which I actually recorded as a draft on my phone while I rode so I wouldn't lose the idea. (I have a bone induction headset that comes in very handy at a time like this.) I really can't stop with the poetry collections, hence Yes, Even More Transportation Poems. I wrapped the month with Walking in June: Of Habits and Herons. 

July: Riding Down Memory Lane: July kicked off another month that wasn't only posts in the series I'd started. Writing about my walking every month led to Why I Walk. Going through my bookcases and looking at all the books I've collected over the years resulted in Bike Books I Recommend: Policy Edition, along with some drafts of posts on other themes I found in going through a good-sized collection. We kept walking, of course, so of course I wrote Walking in July: Of Findings and Feathers. I kept reading poetry and found More Poems on the Bike Rack to share.

August: This was a delightful month! Riding Down Memory Lane: August kicked it off. Not sure it was a great idea to start doing the same kind of look-back at older posts on this blog that was I doing on Bike Style, but I did: Reruns: August Posts Worth Revisiting. I highlighted a ride I was planning to do later in the month hoping to get more folks to register: Wheeling Sea to Sound. Since my Bike Style blog is evolving to include some pieces on transportation generally I reposted Why I Walk there. So much is (always) going on in the world that I had yet another poetry round-up, We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For: Poems for Activists and Advocates. I celebrated the freedom bicycling gives me in Setting My Own Pace. At work we were in the early phase of research for a new program and getting a lot of questions about it so we shared what little we could in Hold onto your handlebars, we’ll soon charge ahead with e-bike programs, co-written with our great summer intern Brooke Nelson. And then it was time for that wonderful bike ride! I headed to Port Angeles for Wheeling Sea to Sound, Day One, Wheeling Sea to Sound, Day Two, and Wheeling Sea to Sound, Day Three. Ride organizer Ian Mackay and crew put together an amazing experience! I wrapped up the month with Walking in August: Of Sparkles and Shorelines. 

September: I guess June, July and August wore me out. This was a light month with Riding Down Memory Lane: September on Bike Style, Reruns: September Posts Worth Revisiting here, and Walking in September: Of Berries and Bunnies. 

October: I got my blogging mojo back thanks to one of my favorite bike "challenges". Before that, though, Riding Down Memory Lane: October and Reruns: October Posts Worth Revisiting. And then, drum roll please....#Coffeeneuring Is Rolling! I did the very first coffeeneuring and have kept trying over the years, as I tallied up in Coffeeneuring 2011-2022: My Track Record for Bike Rides to Coffee Just Because. Another conference, this one in Kansas City, Missouri, and a research project I signed up for that involves (surprise!) taking regular breaks for short walks produced Walking in October: Of Travel and Timers. So okay, if I'm walking a lot and writing about it, no surprise that I published Walking Poems. All that walking should help me stay healthy, right? But the clock keeps ticking and the calendar pages keep flipping by, so as I headed toward my November birthday I ended this month with It Beats the Alternative: Poems on Growing Older. This was also the month I moved into a temporary AirBnB set-up so our home remodeling could take place without my boss and alpha cat Mr. Stripey Pants "helping" by growling at the carpenters, and so I could work in peace while my sweetie stayed on site to address any questions. (Tiggs is my boss because cats don't have owners, they have staff.) My walks are taking off from a different place these days, still close to the beautiful Squaxin Park.

November: There really are bike events every single month of the year so I kept going with my bike even/old post boosting in Riding Down Memory Lane, along with Reruns: November Posts Worth Revisiting. The coffeeneuring challenge extends over two months so it wasn't until this month that I could write #Coffeeneuring 2023: Success! I often find myself singing (sometimes an earworm, sometimes a song I really like) as I ride, which led to Bike Song Playlist: Tunes to Get You Rolling. Yet another conference (and I haven't even mentioned them all here) shows up in Walking in November: Of Perspectives and Pavement. Unfortunately this particular conference gave me a souvenir I didn't want: a horrendous case of the flu that had me really sick for over 10 days and still hacking and coughing another week and a half as I slowly recovered.

December: And so, to the end of the calendar year, starting with Riding Down Memory Lane: December. Another poetry collection, The Quotidian: Poems Celebrating the Everyday, the Ordinary, because the "everyday" world is genuinely amazing and worthy of sonnets. Another round-up here, Reruns: December Posts Worth Revisiting, and another peek at my bookshelves with Bike Books I Recommend: Art, Cartoons, Deep Thoughts, Miscellany. A question in the grateful.org online community made me ponder What I Stand For. As with last year, I approached the winter solstice in search of ways of reflecting on "the dusk of the year" with Winter Solstice Readings and More. I'm still in that AirBnB while our home is transformed and it's going to be wonderful! In the meantime I'm appreciating the easy park access for my walks: Walking in December: Of Mosses and Memories. 

That brings us to this final post of the year, taking a look back and reflecting on what kind of writing I want to do in the new year on both blogs. I'll let the reruns run their course and I can promise you more poetry collections for sure. In between, who knows? Once we're back in the house with a beautiful new kitchen I have a feeling I may produce some recipes and thoughts on cooking. I can tell you there will be another post about Grandma's rocker.

On the other hand, at the end of my 2019 blogging in review post I was looking forward to a shiny new 2020 that was going to be full of wonderfulness. Maybe it's better not to lay too many long-range plans.