Celebrating #Beltane, Kelly's Birthday, And My Bloggerversary, All While In Lockdown

Beltane (May 1st) went largely unobserved this year.  In fact, that's putting it mildly.

We went for our daily walk allowance as early as we could without the dogs' excitement disturbing the neighbours, but couldn't go to anywhere with flowers we could enjoy, because the park is still closed due to lockdown, and it's the only place with flowers near enough that we could have walked in it under normal circumstances. Luckily, Lilie and Logan weren't at all bothered by the fact it was raining that morning - not heavy rain, but enough that we were all a bit damp by the time we got home, despite only taking a short walk.

Other than that, I ate foods involving grains, and Kelly ate foods involving dairy - both of which are customarily common additions to pretty much any Pagan holiday as a rule - and I called it good, with no other acknowledgement of the day.

The following day (May 2nd) was Kelly's birthday.

I baked him a chocolate cake, though it wasn't up to my usual standard. I'd had to use coconut flour, because it was the only kind I could find, and I didn't compensate for it enough with liquid, so it was a bit dry. Kelly liked it well enough, but ended up eating most of it with custard due to how dry it was from the coconut flour. Still, he was grateful for the cake, and the fact I have a rule that there should be birthday cake if there's a birthday, especially since lockdown and horders meant everything he tried to get with the birthday money he'd been given was out of stock, which - combined with how the situation had already been affecting him - he didn't handle too well.

Normally we get to choose on our birthday if we want to go out for a meal or order in, and what we want to order. With us in lockdown, and a lot of places currently not taking orders, his choices were incredibly limited this year. He enjoyed his birthday meal well enough - we had Mexican food - but some of the enjoyment was taken away from it by the fact what he really wanted to do was something he couldn't do because of the virus situation having us in lockdown.

I wish I could say otherwise, but... All in all, while it wasn't a bad birthday for him, it wasn't a particularly great birthday for him either. I hope he'll have a better one next year, especially since next year will be his 50th.

I would hope though that if the virus issue isn't resolved by this time next year, they'll at least have procedures put in place where we can have returned to something resembling normality, so he'll have more choice of what he wants to do for his birthday, I'll be able to make him a better cake because I'll have the proper flour (or have had enough experience making things differently to compensate properly for the issues faced with using a different kind of flour) and he'll be able to spend his birthday money on what he wants to spend it on.

Anyway...

The day after Kelly's birthday - so, May 3rd - was my bloggerversary.

Apparently, Blogger decided to mark the occasion with some changes to how it works, so it's a good thing I took advantage of the recent offer from Sight And Sound Technology - the people who produce JAWS (my screen reader) to upgrade JAWS to the latest version for a fraction of the usual costs, because at least it means JAWS is up to the task of helping me figure out how to navigate the new dashboard.  Although, if the formatting of my posts happens to look odd at any point, you now know why.

Anyhow, as I was saying, I've now been blogging for 14 years, and have published more than 4,000 posts in that time.

Well, I did have a bit of a blogging break in that time, where I almost stopped blogging completely. I'm glad though that I didn't delete my blog like I first considered doing, and that I returned to blogging. It's just a shame I lost touch with some people through my blogging break. Thankfully though, I also managed to keep in touch with a few people... People who I have come to consider great friends, even if I've never met most of the people I've met online in person.