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I have decided to lay this blog to rest for the time being...maybe someday I will come back to it but maybe not. I love blogging and will still be doing it but I no longer feel that this personal blog is benefiting me and I don't have a desire to update it. I have imported most of its contents over to Happiness and Lace, which I will be doing all personal posts on for the next while. I think this post, written by Erin Loechner from the blog Design for Mankind totally captures the way blogging can mean different things for someone at different times in their life. Maybe, to the average person, blogs don't mean anything at all. For me it always has. When I first started blogging in 2007 I was basically just looking for something to keep me busy while I was working a desk job, write down all of my weird thoughts and share  things I thought were funny. It was something of a journal, and I didn't want anyone but my very close family and friends to know about it. Over the years I had more of a desire to blog not simply keep in touch with friends and share pictures of fun things I did as kind of a journal for myself, but as a way to express my passions and things I found inspiring. On this blog I shared less and less personal stuff and started to feel guarded. I was somehow self-conscious. I still wanted to blog, and I tried to get H&L going on different topics, but I couldn't decide on one topic I felt truly passionate about or good at and it was an overwhelming idea to start fresh with a new blog. Even though that's really what I wanted to do, I didn't know how. I didn't have time.

Then last year in January, Jess told me she wanted to start a blog about saving money and she needed me to do it with her. She had mentioned that I should do one in the past, that I could be good at it, but the idea was too scary for me. When she asked me to do it with her though, that sounded so much less overwhelming. That was perfect, exciting. That is a subject I am passionate about. I had so many ideas and even though I truly did not have the time, I was obsessed. So we did it and we have been so blessed throughout the past 8 months with Pretty Providence and are so excited for what lies ahead for us in the blogging department. I am grateful to have a dear friend of almost 20 years who helped me to get out of the rut I was in and get me going on something I love so much! We have found a sense of community there with others who share our value of frugality and are amazed by the new opportunities it brings to us every day. 

Since I began blogging there almost daily though, I started to get the itch that I wanted to still blog about personal things, or things that just aren't relevant to PP and aren't relevant here. Three blogs though? That's just too much to maintain. It's too much for anyone to want to keep up with for only one person. So, I'm combining. Happiness and Lace is going to be my place for whatever. It's my place for pretty photos, it's my place for personal musings on whatever I feel like expressing that day, my place to talk about relationships do's and don'ts, it's my place to share things I think are funny, and my place to rave about music, movies or TV shows that I love. I have been and will be blogging there whether anyone reads it or not. If you want to keep up with me there, I would love it. If not, that's okay. We can still be real life friends, instagram friends, facebook friends and twitter friends, or whatever.