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casa azahar

~ my life in sevilla

casa azahar

Category Archives: blogging

casa az is 8 years old!

01 Thursday May 2014

Posted by azahar in blog 365, blogging, friends

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

blog, blogging, blogoversary

8 years old

It was 8 years ago today that I published my first blog post, not having any idea what I was doing here, nor what I was going to do with it. So, that hasn’t changed then! 🙂 But I can say without any doubt that my life has been changed by everyone I’ve met via this blog. You’ve become friends – many of whom I’ve met in person! – and some of you have also become my family, standing by me when I was sick and supporting me through that very hard time. And of course we’ve also shared some very good times.

Having this blog also led to me starting other blogs like this one and getting involved in other social media platforms when they came along, especially Twitter, which in turn led to meeting even more people and eventually starting a new life for myself as the Tapas Queen of Sevilla.

It was during my illness that I started doing the “blog post a day” thing, mostly because it gave me a focus, something to achieve each day, even if all I did was put up some photos or a video. And that’s when casa az turned into a “daily scrapbook” which I’ve kept going ever since, even if sometimes I have to play catch up. In part I keep posting stuff in this scrapbook for myself, so I can look back and see what a particular week or month was like. But honestly, if I did ever let it go for a few days or a week, I’d somehow feel like my next post would have to be something IMPORTANT. Too much pressure. I’m okay doing that with my other blogs – yes, I am a blogaholic – because they are actually about something (Sevilla events, recipes, photos, tapas guide, Spain, travel) so I just post stuff as it happens. But this personal blog is just about me and my day-to-day life. Hence the name.

So thanks to all of you for sticking it out here in the hope that I may post something interesting some day! 😉 You are always welcome in my home – mi casa es tu casa!

to the rescue…

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by azahar in blogging, friends

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

blogs, friends, internet, sherry

heavy artillery
Back in January I offered to help my friend Fiona @Seville_Writer move her blog from WP.com to self-hosting using WP.org. No problem. Have done it for myself and also for a few clients. Easy Peasy. Except… it wasn’t. After a few frustrating hours we gave up and planned to get back on the case once I got back from Barcelona. Which ended up not being until today!

I don’t even want to go into detail about WHAT WENT WRONG (prefer not to relive it). In the end it turned out to be something (well, a couple of somethings) relatively simple, but ones that were only and finally resolved by my friend David @IrlandesnMalaga, amazingly helpful and wonderfully patient guy that he is. Half-way through our ordeal today I opened up this fabulous bottle of fino that I was given by the owner of the bodega at a sherry tasting last month. It helped. But mostly David helped.

So between me, David and Carmen, Fiona has a new self-hosted blog!

instagram az

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by azahar in blogging, internet, photos, social media

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

instagram, internet, photos, social media

instagram
Okay, I finally gave in and opened an Instagram account. A kinda “if you can’t beat em…” thing but I’m also kinda enjoying it. So I owe apologies to both Lizzie and alejna for previously giving them grief about using such an awful platform with its over-saturating filters, blah blah. Turns out you don’t have to use any filters and latest updates include being able to straighten the image and probably some other stuff I haven’t noticed yet. I still prefer spiffing up my photos using Picasa, which is very basic but enough for what I need – cropping, straightening, lightening. But Instagram is something that I can also link to Twitter and the dread Facebook (which now owns Instagram – surprise!). Anyhoodle, here is my newish Instagram account. You’ll notice I don’t use any filters on the food pics, and neither should anyone else…

azahar on Instagram

the best I can be

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by azahar in blogging, cancer, change, chemo, friends, hope

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

cancer, friends, life stuff

polaroid patThe other day I came across this post written by Pat Is this the best I can be? in which she’d linked to this post that I’d written on the same day in October 2009, and in those blog posts both of us were questioning our lives and our behaviour, ways of coping, etc. And it got me thinking…

First of all, I spent a bit of time on Pat’s blog listening to her voice again. She was such a naturally talented writer along with being wonderful in so many other ways. And I realised that it’s been almost three years since we wrote those posts. I’m still here, Pat is not. But who knows what the next PET scan in September will reveal?

And so what I mostly started thinking about was “wasting time”. It seemed that for awhile I was doing everything very intensely because it truly felt like DEATH was just around the corner. These days I am mostly aware of my condition (stage 4 cancer survivor – at least so far!) during my monthly visits to the hospital to get my chemo port cleaned out, and of course every six months when I go for my PET scan. The latter always terrifies me and I’m a mess for about a week or so before. Lucky for me that I get the results straight away and don’t have to also go through the stress of waiting a couple of weeks afterwards.

Anyhow, there are, and always have been, a lot of things I don’t like about myself, so that is a daily struggle. I mean, I think I am mostly a “good person” (whatever that means) but my days are full of self-criticism because I could always be Doing Better. And then I don’t do better because this (rather abusive) inner-dialogue tends to wear me out, though I think I still end up mostly Doing Okay. When I was going through chemo and recovering from operations I tended to cut myself some slack and not be so hard on myself and I guess that reading those blog posts made me aware that I’d slipped back into this beating-myself-up rut. Which is, frankly, a waste of time. Not to mention counter productive. And exhausting.

When Azar, the love of my life, died last September I made a promise in honour of his memory to try and be the same person I was with him when with other people. You see, he was just so easy to love and it turned out I actually really liked who I was when I was with him. Because with Azar I was always the best I could be. And well, I haven’t always remembered that promise but all this recent thinking has brought it back. So I’m going to start making that my daily goal, and I even think I’ll try to include myself along with those “other people”.

Wish me luck!

come out, come out…

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by azahar in blogging

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

blogging, internet, lurking

lurkers
I just noticed this past weekend that I have more than 900 followers who subscribe to this blog so that they will recieve email notices whenever I publish a new post. Which is EVERY DAY.

So where is everybody? Wouldn’t you like to say hi?

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