peak perspective

The Gathering of the Bloggers, Washington DC and Virginia, Spring, 2015

A year ago last spring, I spent an extraordinary week gathering with bloggers from around the world. It was an experience I’ll never forget. We traveled from Canada, parts of the US and as far away as New Zealand, gathering in Washington, D.C. and Virginia.

Laurie of Life on the Bike, and Julia of Defeat Despair, invited us to stay in their homes. They were excellent tour guides, showing us the sites and sharing stories about their community. Shelley, of Peak Perspective hosted several of us for an engaging afternoon atop a hill in Virginia. We enjoyed laughter and an amazing spread of food under the watchful, curious eyes of Haggis the dog.

Lisa of Arlingwoman provided local perspective as she guided us through the enormous Washington Mall. Her knowledge increased my enjoyment of the incredible history that resides there. We toured Lisa’s community garden and learned about her Plot Against Hunger.

We shared a meal with Lisa as well as Stacy of Visual Venturing and Patti of Displaced Beachbums.

Rounding out this amazing journey: Kelly who blogs at Boomdeeadda and Kelly’s Korner and Pauline of The Contented Crafter.

What started as “blogging friends” became “friends who blog.”

One of the visual reminders of our time together is my beautiful light-catcher. Pauline made one for each of us, selecting charms to reflect our interests and our lives.

You can see the amazing details in the short video below.

Five years and 940 posts later the most amazing statistic is this: there are nearly 16,000 comments on this blog. Comments become conversations, conversations lead to friendships and in this great big world of ours, interesting, like-minded, bright, clever, talented, and wonderful people from around the world, log on and add sparkle to my day. I can’t thank you enough.

If you follow Shelley Sackier’s weekly musings at Peak Perspective you’ll know why I’m excited. If you don’t, go take a peek. You’re in for a treat.

Shelley writes brilliant and entertaining prose with wit and charm.The equally talented Robin Gott provides the doodles. They collaborate across a continent, producing weekly gems that make you smile and think. I want to be like them when I grow up.

As readers, we voted each month for our favorite doodle. The best of the best made it into his 2015 calendar.

Robin Gott: The Clever Doodler

On November 22nd Shelley published Gotta Have a Gott announcing

“the grand unveiling of the crackerjack cartoon collection of Peak Perspective’s illustrator extraordinaire—Robin Gott. We’ve been ballyhooing this exciting event for ten months, and have decided that for this first year Rob will create and put FIFTY calendars up for sale.”