Simple Living This Week No. 52 – Reviewing the Year, Beautify, Google’s Control Over Websites

Happy Week Between Christmas and New Year’s Day! I hope you had a lovely Christmas. Ours ended up being very nice. We got some snow! Not a lot, but enough to make everything white and to have lazy flakes floating down off and on during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We took a drive on Christmas Eve to see the outside decorations and were amazed at how many people decorated this year. It’s almost like people were determined to bring as much light and joy to the world as they could at the end of this difficult year.

On a bright note, David was offered a class to teach for the spring semester (starting in January). One of the faculty members has to take a medical leave and she requested that David teach her class. It is online so it works out very well. He doesn’t even have to commute in the winter weather! So this was a nice surprise and we are thankful. We truly thought he was done teaching. It isn’t a regular position, only a substitute one. But it is still a blessing.

My word for 2020 was Beautify. I can honestly say I have done a good job of following through on this. I thought about it all year and made decisions based on it throughout the year. It is something I am still going to carry over into 2021 because it fits with a larger theme I see developing in my life and in what I want to write here.

One of the ways I beautified this year was finally finding a website design I truly loved and also updating all the products in my shop. We are nearing the end of the updating. David and I are pushing hard to get this done by the end of the year, but I’m not sure we’ll make it. We’ll be very close. Then I can add new things. I can’t wait!

I learned a lot about myself as a blogger and business owner in 2020, especially what I do NOT like to do. I spent a lot of time this year doing things I didn’t really enjoy and that sucked the life from me in terms of reducing my ability to write the content I truly wanted to write. It was a valuable learning experience and one I’m correcting moving forward. I also realized I want to reach more women with what I have to say. I’m going to do that in a few ways which I’ll share in the days ahead.

I’ve mentioned Income School’s website and blogging courses before which are excellent. One of the things I’ve been “testing” on my own in recent months is the connection between running Google Ads on my site and how much traffic the Google search engine sends to me. (If you think all of the discussion in the press about Section 230 doesn’t matter, it matters a GREAT DEAL to people like me.) Whenever I take the ads off my site, my traffic tanks. When my traffic tanks, my sales tank. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east. This leaves me with a dilemma of putting ads on even if I don’t want to or losing my ability to bring people to my site in any kind of significant way since Google has a monopoly on search traffic. These are the ways we are controlled in this culture in ways most people never realize.

I also realized that I need to make a few changes in my office to make it work for me and help me with what I want to accomplish. So I am thinking through what I need to get rid of and what I need to arrange differently.

I’m trying to complete a few of my goals for 2020 in the few remaining days of the year. My overall achievement of these was rather pathetic, but I’m going to cut myself a lot of slack since I had no idea what 2020 would include. Some of the things on my list were not achievable for reasons beyond my control. I’ll probably do a wrap-up post and those of you who also struggled to reach your goals in 2020 can know you aren’t alone. And, yes, I’m going to set some new goals for 2021 because what could possibly go wrong?

How was your Christmas? What is going on in your home this week?

Here’s a lovely new CensorTube channel to check out: Apronful of Stones. I’m also adding it to the forum where I have slowly started adding links again.