My first blog was in 2007 on Blogger as “Working Title” (leabhran.blogspot.com). I wanted to join reading challenges, and having a place to record book reviews was a prerequisite of that. It was also the year I bought myself my own, personal digital camera, as well as the year I learned to knit.

I still read a lot, though not for reading challenges. I’m also a knitter, and a small scale gardener.

Over the time of having a camera where I do not have to ration film, I’ve evolved into a photographer of places, and plants. I lived in Portland, Maine, and have a partner who loves to go out on random weekend drives as much as I do (and fortunately, he enjoys the driving piece of that). We’re often out in the non-winter seasons visiting the various interesting places here in Maine and New England.

In 2020, because why not make things crazier than they already were?, we bought a house in Westbrook, ME (one of the towns bordering Portland). That’ll be upping my gardening game, which is a nice distraction since travel of any consequence is out of the question. (I write this paragraph in 2021 – hopefully things will be changing soon and I’ll be posting things from outside of New England in 2022.)

It’s 2023 now, and having run out of space in the free version of WordPress for my Wayside Flowers blog, I decided I might as well invest in my own domain. However, I don’t have of all the time in the world, so I’m going to combine the two blogs together under the North Wind and the Sea name. We’re going to have some fun with categories, and see how things go. This will be a bit of a work in progress – I’m going to migrate everything over, which will require some formatting. We’ll see how long it takes – if older posts don’t look perfect, that’s why.