Happy blog-aversary to us! It’s hard to believe that your Friendsville Square duo, Heather and Jodi, are celebrating two years since we launched our blog. It truly has been a labor of love – and hard work – that has brought us so much pride and satisfaction. Not only have we explored a great many lifestyle topics, but we have also enlisted the talents of several friends from various parts of our lives.
On the occasion of our blog birthday (birthday, anniversary – either works for us!), we thought it best to provide an update on our About Us (a section found on our website), and we decided it was a good time to take stock of the many benefits of taking the blog on. Plus, it seems appropriate to thank our guest bloggers and remind you of their contributions of the past two years.
An Update on Us
Outside of blogs that include a slice of our lives, the last time we provided a proper update on our lives was when we first published our blog website on our About Us page. Two years is a long time, right? Let’s dive into some life updates!
The Latest from Jodi
The most important part of my life is, of course, my family, so I’ll start there. As I shared in our “About Us” section, my husband and I are the proud parents of two – Rachael, 26, and Ryan, 22. In the last year, Rachael got engaged to fiancée Isabel, and Ryan graduated college and started his first job in the nation's capital – both major life milestones! We also became pet owners when we permanently adopted young sibling cats, Fritz and Sally. I finally renewed my passport a couple months ago, so I’m looking forward to some future international travel, especially when my husband retires in a couple years.
The Latest from Heather
I’ll start with family updates, just like Jodi! My husband continues to work in the finance and cyber security industry and is really looking forward to retirement in the next few years. Our son, Liam, celebrated four years with his partner, Kenzie, and they are thriving in their first apartment together (well, townhouse, actually). Our two Australian Shepherds, Cobi and Moose, are as kooky as ever. As for me, in addition to being a co-author of Friendsville Square, I took on a (very) part-time job at my local Hallmark store (a dream for this Hallmark- and Hallmark Channel-obsessed girlie). I’ve also fit in a bucket list trip to Ireland this past summer with my cousins and four (new) friends. Life is good!
Why Did We Start a Blog?
Shortly after we joined the ranks of the retired in 2021, we began meeting for lunch and, inevitably, discussing what we each wanted to spend time on and achieve in the next few years. Before long, our discussion of individual plans turned to things we could do together – attend figure skating competitions, head to the movie theater to catch a new film release, or take a day trip, for example. All great things to do together, but we were both craving some kind of special project or activity.
After at least a couple more lunches together, we sorted out some guidelines to help us brainstorm this future effort:
Allow us to be creative.
Use the skills from our careers – and be open to learning new things, too.
Require only part-time involvement with little to no stress – something different from our previous work roles.
Avoid the pressure of making money.
We talked about several ideas, and you know which one we settled on – create a blog. But how do you start a blog? We scoured the internet for tips and checklists, decided on a niche content focus, researched technical platform options, started a list of content ideas for blog posts, and worked out logistics like how often to publish.
Coming up with the name of our blog was one of the harder tasks. We wanted it to be catchy, reflect our niche, and represent us (two friends who met in college and remained friends for 40+ years). Finally, as you know, we settled on Friendsville Square as an homage to our circle of friends and the college town of Kirksville, Missouri, where we first bonded while working on student media. The “ville” in Friendsville comes from the town name, and Square is a nod to the town square there. Imagine our surprise when testing out domain name ideas to find there are several Friendsville towns and areas. In fact, we visited them all on a week-long road trip for our one-year blog-aversary and naturally published the “Our Road Trip to the Real Friendsvilles” post about it last October.
How It’s Going After Two Years
Time for a bit of reflection on blog life so far. After surviving the learning curve of setting up the blog and publishing our first few posts, we’ve hit a steady rhythm as bloggers. Fortunately, we’ve realized many of the expectations and objectives we agreed to during many lunchtime discussions and working sessions.
Without a doubt we have stretched our brains to maintain the blog site, write new content and strategize how to reach more readers. Even using our career-related skills pushed us into new territory – such as looking inward for topics that make us feel vulnerable. Both of us also love how we can challenge ourselves to be creative as we come up with new content ideas, write what we hope you think are attention-worthy headlines and social media posts, and look for ways to increase our readership and subscriber numbers.
Equally important as continuously learning and being creative, being co-authors of a weekly blog provides us with a structure to our days. Typically, on Monday evenings we finalize the next week’s social media posts while on Wednesdays one of us finalizes the blog post page and the other proofs it. Jodi usually writes and sends post notification emails on Thursday mornings while Heather takes the main responsibility for creating and scheduling our social media posts on Facebook and Instagram. (You can follow us at Friendsville Square and @Friendsville Square.) We can each do all the tasks, but it’s helpful to have some consistency in how we share the work.
Spending quality time together ranks as one of the top benefits of this blog project. As long-time friends, we obviously enjoy being with each other, and that friendship has grown stronger as we discuss new ideas for the blog, give each other feedback on possible topics or consider what the next year of blogging might look like. Heck, Friendsville Square was the reason we found new travel opportunities like our Friendsville road trip, a visit to the Missouri History Museum to see the 1904 World’s Fair exhibit, our trek to neighboring state Iowa to surprise one of our friends, and our Olympics-themed trip to Colorado Springs. (Spoiler alert: We have more travel plans coming up!)
Perhaps the best reward we’ve garnered so far centers around the many friends who have contributed in multiple ways to the success of Friendsville Square – from encouraging us to go for it in the beginning, to offering to write a guest blog post (more about that below), to providing their artistic and technological talents to the look and functionality of the site. That’s the sense of community we want to continue to build here!
With the Help of Friends
While we have tapped our life experiences, hobbies and travel for blog post topics, some of our most read and commented entries have come from the friends and colleagues we have enlisted as guest bloggers. Friendsville Square wouldn’t be the same without the varied voices and interests of our featured writers. We know these folks have added quality content that has entertained and made our readers (and us) think! And we are excited that we have a couple new guest bloggers joining our site soon! Stay tuned.
In the meantime, we would like to thank our guest bloggers for their contributions to Friendsville Square – they are awesome, and we appreciate their talents and time.
Here’s a list of our guest writers (in alphabetical order) with links to each of their blog posts. We encourage you to pick a few of the headlines that are most intriguing to you and read (or reread) their wit and wisdom.
Alan Campbell
Amy Wittman
Beth von Behren
Cathy Allie
Jay Scherder
Jim Gazzolo
Kanna Rook
Karen Gordy-Panhorst
Karman Wittry Hotchkiss
Laurie Bergman
Mia Jazo-Harris
Pamela Warren
Sally Chapman Cameron
Sally Troutman Boyd
Friendsville “Squared”
Needless to say, we feel we have learned a lot about ourselves in the past two years of building Friendsville Square. We learned more about our gracious friends and colleagues who have shared their stories, tips, and interests as our guest bloggers. We’re also VERY grateful to our readers and subscribers who have made the work all worthwhile. (Of course, we’d love to welcome even more readers, so we encourage you to spread the word about our little corner of the Internet, Friendsville Square.)
What started out as an endeavor to keep our minds engaged and skillsets sharp following retirement has brought us more benefits than we could have imagined. Perhaps the most valuable gift this blog has given us both is a friendship that is stronger than ever with (new) shared experiences and special memories that have enriched our lives.
Our review of taking on a retirement project? Highly recommend, 10/10. 💜
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~ Heather M. and Jodi B.
Sending you a big bouquet of (cyber) cotton to celebrate the milestone! Was fun to learn more about your process and see the list of all your great guest bloggers :) — Jan S