Our Boolo Blog Commitment to Fun!
Hello everyone - Amy writing here. Our first blog post makes me chuckle:
“So as I might characterize our website efforts as having many fits and starts over many months until my iterative and driving approach and Mike’s spontaneous, creative working in bursts found a harmonious union in our first-ever online platform. Woohoo!! We haven’t clobbered each other, but rather have a new appreciation for how we work differently.”
This was such a true characterization and still is a description of our working style differences. You would think after 23 years of marriage we would have mastered how to bring those two approaches together but this house project and website effort became the true test of our ability to merge the two. Somehow, we have figured out a way.
Our blog experience has been a journey highlighting more differences.
Mike approaches things from an expert point of view; for anyone who knows him, you probably know he knows a lot about a lot of things, and when he’s passionate about something, his brain can digest everything about that topic, and he’s an expert. I call him my walking Wikipedia. And then there’s me - let’s stay at the big picture level and churn out lots of and lots of content, tell a story, and sometimes write in total stream-of-consciousness - that’s when Mike the editor is VERY helpful. I believe at some point in the future, my sub-conscious brain will automatically start using the Harvard comma correctly in a list of things, and Mike will breathe a big sigh of relief.
I can have fun writing about whatever I’m passionate about such that it bleeds into time for us to chill and relax. Then there’s Mike who is way better at prioritizing chillax time.
Often I need it totally quiet to write, or at most, I can listen to instrumental, calming music, while Mike is blasting Lavell Crawford’s comedy at 7AM to kickstart a blog post. “Sure, Lavell is hilariously and irreverently funny, but Mike, I can’t hear myself think - can you please put your ear buds on?” By the way, nothing is quiet when you are married to a drummer! ;)
So now that we moved back into the house and are ready to pick up blogging, how do we make our blogging commitment work for both of us, not just in the end result of what we produce, but in the actual process of working together to churn out great content for others to enjoy and learn from?
Thanks to the Hendricks Institute headed by Gay and Katie Hendricks, we have done some couples work over the years to learn practices to cultivate a relationship filled with as much love, harmony and play as possible. We still have many crazy moments that all long-time partners have where we say: What am I still doing with this crazy person? But then we move pretty quickly into what Mike and I like to call - repair mode. We are pretty proud of that, and various Hendricks Institute practices have helped with that. Thanks to our Hendricks buddies Michele and Dean, Big Leap coaches, who have supported us with several fun virtual couples coaching sessions during this pandemic, we have been able to discover common ground and a sense of inner calm on our Happy Boolo endeavor when we both thought: “How will we get through this challenge? I’m about to clobber him/her.” or “I can’t believe this just happened on the project — this could be a show-stopper!”
Attending Michele and Dean’s wedding reception virtually during the pandemic
Thanks to a recent wonderful session with Michele and Dean, Mike realized he could just play homeowner and simply enjoy the process of writing about our experience and learnings along the way. That’s expert enough for all those homeowners out there who are thinking about doing a renovation, or living more sustainably and want some ideas and inspiration. Mike’s essence is Fun; yet his expert persona had been playing buzz kill during some of our earlier blogging making it feel too much like work. I credit this man’s essence of Fun with helping me move from workaholicism to living a full and vibrant life where I can kick back my feet to chillax early on a Friday afternoon —- much different from when we met and I actually skipped a Thanksgiving holiday because of work. Yes, I was a bit crazy back then.
Two of our common personas when website and blog development hasn’t been so fun!
From our session of co-creation with Michele and Dean, we committed to: fun. Actually, we committed to SUPER-FUN. And if it isn’t FUN, we step back and restart later when we are in FUN mode again. We also committed to using the blog as a platform to express our creativity which may at times be an expression of goofiness. And we said: this is just about telling our story. For those who find it useful, informative and inspiring, that’s great.
While Mike and I are still in wonder mode about various questions of where we will go on this blog journey and specific aspects of blog format, we have committed to the following:
Posts that continue our reno journey through the final steps of the build phase
Food-focused posts with recipes for you to try out in your own kitchens
Landscape and garden posts beginning with the philosophy behind our vision and approach including the story of why we couldn’t tackle this part last year
The behavioral story behind the design of each area of the house and some of the challenges and tradeoffs we faced
Posts that deep dive each part of the home with before and after’s - some rooms furnished and some just at the start of the journey to furnish
Ways we invite you to engage with our content and possibly help us make some house decisions
Experimenting with different media and format to keep our content engaging and push the bounds of our creativity
Having fun!!!!
Blog flipcharts make great near-term artwork in our master!
Now that we’ve moved back, we look forward to decorating this place fully and engaging our community in this journey. A confluence of factors will make decorating a longer-term journey - our dwindling savings account, my needing to restart my business fully after a year of focusing mostly on the house while the pandemic made running a small business challenging, and our commitment to help out parents who continue to deal with health challenges during the pandemic. Our designer team has also made the point many times, live in the house for awhile so you really know how you want to decorate it. And my own view: it’s kind of nice to slow down after a year of constant house decision after house decision and actually enjoy making decisions one step at a time in how we want to fully bring the inside of our home to life and embark upon creating our garden paradise.
Thanks again for your interest in our Happy Boolo Project. As we are still on the fence with whether or not to open up comments on the blog (our ever-supportive web designer Jason encourages us not to so we keep things clean), we would love to hear from you if you would like us to open up comments. And if you have any other feedback or ideas about the content we are posting or the format of what we post, we would love to hear from you at amyandmike@happyboolo.com. Or simply use this link to connect with us.
Super-excited to be having fun and sharing more content with you!