Notey & Knotty: Can I Gracefully Tie Together Too Many Daily Notes in a Single Blog Post?

If you're only interested in my daily highlights and not the 'How' of how I tackled this blog post, skip down below the first photo.
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The trusty iPhone notes app is all it took to write this detailed blog post. For this post, I referred back to my notes app and scrolled to the date May 16, 2021 to see what I had placed there. I wouldn't have remembered almost any highlights to write about without it!

Looking at this day's notes had me at "coffee." Typical.. but I'm not ashamed to say it. The morning note was 'the first pot of coffee brewed in the new coffee maker.'

The story behind the first pot of coffee highlight

After about four years of bearing with our very hard water (minerals like calcium in tap water or any water can gunk up inside coffee makers and other appliances and ruin their reservoir capacities and even heating elements), our previous coffee maker had given out.

Between coffee makers we had to, goodness forbid (that's a joke), go about a week or two without fresh pots in the house. ..so this WAS truly exciting.. It makes me happy just thinking about it again. I can smell the aroma of that first-in-a-while pot brewing right now.

This highlight alone would have done just fine as it's own blog post but..

Fittingly, given the coffee drinking, I added many more notes after that one.. perhaps Too many notes.. like a hyper amount of notes - coffee fueled for sure.

Therein lies the challenge this day presented from a blogging perspective. Just how many highlight notes are too many highlight notes? How does one write about Too many highlight notes in a single blog post?

Well, firstly.. let's remember there are no rules with this blog.. so, I remind myself. If I don't want to include everything in a post I don't have to.

What do 'many highlight notes' look like exactly? Here's exactly what that looks like. When I wrote these I didn't know what I was doing, what met my own criteria of a highlight ..and I was just jotting down almost anything, new coffee maker fueled, no less!

As a general rule I don't think it ever hurts to take too many notes. That said, what follows here will be my attempt to fit all of a long day's 'highlights' into a single blog post to see how it goes. Will it flow? Goodness I bet the suspense is killing you, really! ;) If you're still reading. Thank you.

​The Highlights..

Sometimes highlights of my day are the internet searches that I do to research topics that come up in conversation or even ads throughout that day. In this particular daily note, I noted two of them of interest: firstly, the origin of the word Doric ..and secondly, the actual story behind Jim Thorpe (it's a mysterious one if you ever get the chance to look into it.) Each of these these things could undoubtedly be their own blog posts.

I'm going to leave them right here however and say the search results were intriguing enough to be 'highlights of my day' and I think that's pretty cool. A highlight doesn't have to be a trip to some remote paradise. It can be as simple as the above.

Getting Knotty

My husband loves birding and photography so on some weekend trips, I do internet searches like the ones I mentioned above while on the road to occupy the time! Car sickness while reading a tiny phone screen be damned. Given that this was a day we took a birding trip... we woke up early and had a lot of driving to do.

​Many birds tend to come out most in the morning. This won't be news to you if you're a birder, but many of us never stop to think about this. In the case of some birds, you will only have a shot of seeing them or hearing them in the morning. Fortunately, that wasn't the case with the red knots we saw later in the day. ..I noted them down as a highlight of course as well, look at them.. they are super cute.

Red Knot

A Group of Red Knots Flying above the Bay

Sometimes human 'peeps' are noteworthy too..

I've found that sometimes highlights will be some of the people I meet throughout the day. While photographing the red knots, we ran into a dedicated local who volunteers to help turtles cross a busy road from the marshland inlets to the beach. He explained to us that unfortunately, the township had added concrete barriers that inadvertently stopped them from doing so. This is of course, not natural or beneficial.

He explained that many other locals were not only volunteering to help the turtles cross the road but also participating in an ongoing attempt to try to explain to the town what was happening and why they should be concerned.

I don't always agree with all "volunteers." Much self-centered tinkering is done under the guise of volunteering. However, with this man.. no so the case. He seemed dedicated and caring. He wasn't tinkering or superfluously tagging / interfering with animals. He was doing the nitty gritty to attempt to undo damage that had already been done. In this case, that means trying to mitigate the effect of the poorly planned out concrete barriers.

This particular man also kept pamphlets in his car to hand out to help anyone he talked to see 'the big picture' and how commercial krill fishing even thousands of miles away affects birds of the Delaware Bay. Clearly meeting others and sharing these pamphlets and awareness was a highlight of his day or sorts too. Anyone trying to help people see how everything, every life / every being is connected is someone I can support. If you'd like a photo of the pamphlet, I have it saved and can share.

So.. I went from coffee to red knots and everything in between. This single blog post handled today's highlights pretty gracefully.. I hope!

Smoothies make great highlights always.. unofficial rule

Being up at 3 am to get ready to drive to see birds / being an early bird yourself will definitely have you in need of an energy boosting smoothie. Fortunately on this day we were able to stop at New Jersey shore area restaurant Seed to Sprout to try one of their green smoothies with CBD oil added for the first time. I've never hopped on that band wagon, but I'm sure it has some benefits.

​The smoothie was tasty and maybe even soothing on the joints. It lead me to research the different types of CBD oil out there and whether or not they have any soothing effects on joint pain - quick spoiler: reviews across the internet seem pretty scattered and inconclusive on that one. It may be worth a shot in the future for kicks but most reviews were lackluster and not very convincing especially for the price point. Feel free to let me know your experience with CBD oil if you've had a good one! Cheers!