HAPPY HOLIDAY TO US!

This feels like a good time for me to apologize to my Blog (yet again) for neglecting her. 😔💐 To encourage myself to follow through with my plan to update her, yesterday I posted a message to that effect on Facebook. Here comes more about my good intentions. 

 

I see that my most recent post is from last summer, so it’s hard to know where to begin. I also understand that readers get impatient if they don’t hear from you on a regular basis, so I am working at turning over a new leaf. 

 

Since my book Letters To Men Of Letters came out,  https://bookshop.org/p/books/letters-to-men-of-letters-diane-joy-charney/16485616?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email I was persuaded that it would be important to try to learn how to use social media, and being a complete technodunce, I faced a stiff learning curve. Further, just as soon as I thought I had figured out how to do something on Facebook, there was a change in how the site worked. One moment I had over 200 friends with whom I enjoyed exchanges; then the next, all but a few seemed to disappear, having been replaced by ads🫤. I have never understood the appeal of the new FB Stories feature or how it worked partly because I could never reply fast enough. I like to take the time to choose my words carefully, and Stories did not lend itself to that.

 

Now that my husband, author of the excellent new book, Madness at the Movies, who is NOT a technodunce taught himself how to use Instagram, I started trying to to catch on to it, as well. But mostly I see how easy it is to fall down the rabbit hole of Instagram, and although it and FB can make life feel more interesting, they also make life feel shorter all the time. 

 

What I’ve just said is a prelude to my recognizing that the blog form, if I can remember how to use it, is where I can feel most free and should put my energy. 

 

I have a variety of passions that I put into emails to friends, and sometimes I end up repeating variations on the same material to a number of them: favorite authors, gardening, salad artistry, my Magic Flying Shirt and socks, my new excitement at discovering an extraordinary free app on mindfulness and relaxation, my conviction that letters whether sent or unsent can be a powerful tool for self-understanding and helping others feel better about themselves, writing stories that readers find funny, music as the least disappointing thing in life, and the ever-present issue of grief. 

 

I doubt I will ever run out of things to write about, but enough of my rambling! New blog posts will be coming soon to “In Love With France, At Home In Italy.” For this re-entry post I tried to find the well-loved former "header" photo used for this blog since 2011. It was a brilliant composite of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower designed by my talented daughter-in-law; however, when the site was reconfigured, it could no longer be used 🫤. But in looking through my 48,346 photos, I stumbled on this fascinating one of the Eiffel Tower under construction, so here it is.

 Onward! En Avant! Avanti!✍️😅