Sunday Thoughts and Happy Birthday to the Blog!

There are two things to celebrate this week: the first Sunday in February, and it’s the blog’s birthday! 15 years ago I started typing random thoughts, and here I still am 15 years later!

I think I’m one of the original bloggers at this stage, I also still haven’t found my niche, the blog is still a mix of everything and anything. Sometimes I try different things to see how they work out; for example the Sligo Food News, I enjoy compiling it but it is a lot of work, so I’m not sure if I will keep it up. I know a lot of people think that I’m given free food, that’s not true, and I will always tell you when I’m given something. I put a tip link on the last food post and I got €9, thank you to the people who donated, I treated myself to a coffee and a cake, to celebrate the blog’s birthday (pic at the top of this blog).

As I type this I’m wondering if I should get rid of the website altogether, it costs to run the blog, as I have to pay for storage for photos and videos and also the domain name. I did look for a sponsor at one stage, but it didn’t work out, who knows what’s around the corner though. Maybe I’d be better just keeping the social media pages. I’ll have a think about it over the coming weeks.

It’s been a busy week, one of the highlights was my visit to Boyle, it restored my faith in social media, and it was so lovely to meet two absolute gems of people.

I also took a trip to see Lucy, and visited Castlerea when I was there. I love both Bastion K2tchen (pic above is the Vegan Breakfast Bowl in Bastion), and Benny’s Deli, so it was great to be able to pop in a buy some goodies. I’ve written about Benny’s before, and you can read the blog post here. Also have a look at my Castlerea blog post, it’s such a lovely place, and well worth a visit.

It took part in a podcast recently, about my love of community radio and also my own Hands of Sligo podcast. I was interviewed by Lola from Momentum in Leitrim (where I also work), but this was in connection with my experience on the airwaves. You can listen back to the interview here. The COMM UNITY Radio Project aims to empower community radio organisations & volunteers to become an influential pillar of adult education in civic engagement of diverse & vulnerable groups.

I went to Achonry Farmers Market yesterday, and Eileen from Eileen’s Kitchen Table was doing a Boxty demo, I took a video of her making it, in case you fancy trying it out for yourself.

Tomorrow is a bank holiday in Ireland, it’s the first St. Brigid’s Day bank holiday, and it’s about time that a woman was honoured. Well done, and thank you to Her Story for running such a successful campaign. If you’d like to know more about the history of St. Brigid’s Day, there’s a really interesting article here.

So, there you have it. My week in a nutshell. I hope those of you in Ireland have a lovely bank holiday Monday, and thank you as always for reading.