My dad has this thing he likes to say about buckets. To him, life is a bucket and if you have a lot going on that makes you personally happy and fulfilled, your bucket is full. Sometimes we’ll be talking about someone who seems a bit lost or preoccupied with irrelevant drama. He’ll say, “Her bucket isn’t full,” as an explanation for the behavior.

I started this blog in 2010 when I first moved to Austin. In the early days, I wrote sporadically about things that entertained or intrigued me. Most of these posts live here now, and although friends & family liked reading what I shared on Facebook… it was hard to build an audience. In 2012 I started blogging exclusively about Simon and horses.

I’ve treated my blog almost like a part time job. For three years, I’ve reliably posted content on Monday – Friday, oftentimes dipping into Saturday as well. I’ve followed well over 250 equestrian blogs and commented faithfully daily when they updated. I’ve hosted contests, giveaways, showcases , interviews and product reviews. I spent a little bit of money and a lot of time growing my audience on Facebook to over 800 followers, and solidly hit my lofty goal of daily visitors earlier this year. I try to be fairly modest, but I set out three years ago to do my very best to write one of the best personal equestrian blogs out there. I feel like I’ve done that. It’s taken a ton of work, but I did it all happily because my bucket was overflowing.

I could keep on blogging like before. I know the formulas that help create successful content, and I’m fairly familiar (although some times I miss) on what the audience I’ve garnered likes and dislikes as far that content goes. I could keep doing the same thing, but it doesn’t fulfill me like it used to.

Part of the problem is that I feel like the story of Simon and I has been told. He’s gone from a questionably sound and gangly thing to my dependable friend and partner. We came, we saw, we jumped around some stuff. We’ll jump around some more stuff in the future, but there’s only so many posts I can write that say, “Wow I love my horse. I wish he had lead changes, but I sure do love him.”

The other, larger problem with me and my blogging lately is how I’ve changed. I’ll never be the same person I was when 2015 began. That’s okay, but there’s some collateral damage to be had.

My blog, as it has existed in the past three years, is part of that collateral damage.

This is not to say that I’m going to quit writing, or even quit blogging. In fact, I don’t plan to quit at all although I don’t really know what the future holds for me as a blogger in this space. I feel by posting and commenting on your own blogs over the past three years, I’ve carefully constructed a network of friends. The people who read this blog and use this site to share information or just laugh with each other are good folks. I love these people.

What I do know, is that I can’t commit to my reliable schedule of writing anymore. I also know that I’ve spent years writing a mostly upbeat blog with horses as a central theme. My audience expects that, but as I move into my new life I find that I can’t deliver in the same way.

I know I’ll write again here, and I even know I’ll write again about my horse here. She Moved to Texas 1.0 was a fairly scatterbrained documentation of my daily life. She Moved to Texas 2.0 was an unwavering chronicle of my devotion to Simon and horses in general. I don’t know version 3.0 is going to be, but I know it’ll be fairly quiet until I figure it out.

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