Spring Cleaning - April 2024

Hey There Adventurers!

It's been quite some time since I have taken some time to just write, or really have any interaction with you at all if you follow us as a show. No regular blog posts. No new episodes. To cut a very long story short (and trust me, there is a LONG story sitting in my draft folder right now), the last... Honestly, the last year has been rough. I wanna say it all started in May or June of last year. Caitlin and I attended 3 funeral/memorial services in the span of like 5 weeks. Then we hit summer break and were busy spending more time outside and culminating in the Ren Faire in August, which is a huge ordeal for the Adventures in Erylia crew. After the Faire, Caitlin had a work trip in September, right before her and I went on a vacation to Disneyland for our 5 Year Anniversary. In between those, we found out we had to move out of the duplex we had been renting for the majority of our sons life, which meant we had a big decision to make - rent or own? We decided that, while things would be tight, it was time for us to make the push to owning our own place (which is the long post I've got sitting in draft right now). From the moment we got back from Disney, it was a huge focus and push on getting everything we needed to sorted out to be able to put in an offer on a condo and make it happen. And it did! But even once we were started with that process, it still took months to close, and it has taken yet MORE months, to get moved in and settled. We're finally getting there though! I finally published the episode that we recorded in JUNE today, because we have finally settled in enough that I can put some time to editing again. We've got the AinE crew coming over to play games and just HANG OUT this weekend, for the first time in like, over 6 months. Hopefully in the next month, we are back to recording. Which brings me to the title of this blog post...

Now that I have finished editing the last of our newly recorded content, I have a big opening in my hobby time that I don't feel guilty about NOT spending on working on the show itself. Something that no one would have any reason to know is that since we moved from Squarespace to Webflow for our website platform, I have still been maintaining our Squarespace subscription in the back end, and it is all for ONE reason. There are years and YEARS of blog posts on that website that, while I don't go back and read them, and no one else probably would actually read today, are part of Adventures in Erylia history, and I didn't want to just wipe them off the internet when we switched. So, my first big task with Spring Cleaning until we can record and I have content to edit again, is to continue moving the blog content over to Webflow. I've actually had bursts of working on this before, but it's sort of a tedious process and isn't something that feels productive when I only have a short burst of time to work on something. It's been very interesting to dive into these way back archives in short order. Not only am I reminded of some of the things I planned to (and did for a time) do as blog content, but it also really is a time capsule, specifically back into parts of my life, since I am the primary person writing for this blog. Just today, one of the posts that I copied over was from when I joined my local Belegarth community. Back then, in summer of 2021, I was shy and not to sure about it. It was a nerdy way for me to be active, but I wasn't IN yet. Now? In April of 2024? I've got a lot of my own gear, I have traveled to many events, including going out of state, I carve most of every other Sunday out of my life to get out to our realm practices, and I am now even hosting my own small, local, practices every week. Being a part of Belegarth has given me many friends outside of my core group of friends on the podcast and easily worked itself up to being my second main hobby.

Anyways, if you ever feel like taking a trip down AinE memory lane, go scroll through the blog section of the website, most of the content has been moved over from 2021 onward and I will be working my way backwards every night. Once I finished that... I might even be able to squeeze out another Erylian Epic Remaster!