Two years ago I began a blog about my favorite pastime, stained glass. In my first post, I indicated that the blog, Glass Manifestations, would be about:

“glass (sort of) because working with glass is how I do a lot of my processing (thoughts, feelings, ideas, inspirations…), and hence a lot of my thoughts, feelings and ideas are made manifest in my art. But… also about insight and growth, in the hope that what I manifest tomorrow, or next week or next year – in life as well as in glass – will continue to improve. In quality, in meaningfulness, and in pure, simple pleasure.”

A month into the blog, I signed up for a WordPress Blogging U course on writing poetry. With the very first assignment, I realized that my poetry attempts might not fit into my Glass blog theme of insight and growth and meaningfulness.

Nope. That first poem was about leaky water faucets and dental floss. I decided I needed a different venue where I could express those random, ridiculous and totally irrelevant thoughts that obviously didn’t get the “meaningfulness” memo. Hence, What Rhymes with Stanza came into being.

In the two years since, my Stanza blog has grown and expanded beyond poetry to where now I express my random, silly and possibly meaningful thoughts through photography, prose, embellished conversations amongst animals, and sometimes art.

The Glass blog, in the meantime, just wasn’t as fun a place to hang out for me. And so the blog languished in neglect.

With the new year, I’ve done a bit of reassessing about my blogs and have decided to combine the two, moving some of the material from the withering glass blog over to this site. Hopefully that will occur seamlessly and behind the scene, so long as I don’t confuse the export/import process with the reblog function. (If you see fifty new posts from me in a single day, you’ll know I failed.)

This blog-meld won’t change the Stanza site to any significant degree. You’ll likely see more posts about stained glass and art, and I’ve added a gallery of my glass work for those of you who care to look. Other than that, you can expect my usual deep and evocative take on what chickens discuss when no one else is around, fascinating tips on how not to handle home improvement projects, copious photos of my pets, and maybe even a poem or two.

I’m looking forward to a fun, random, insightful, meaningful year! I hope you stick around to share it with me.