This morning I added the above photo to the Maggie-a-Day series, as entry 722.

It’s not from day 722. It’s from day 689.

Day 689, by the way, was August 26, 2012. That’s summer, last year. It’s now May, the sun is out, and there’s every chance that I’ll be spending some of today outside, in short sleeves, in the sun.

So it’s pretty much the summer again. This photo is a year gone by.

It has also been five days since I posted entry 721 in the series.

There are good reasons for the last break. A busy schedule, Maggie’s been sick, I’m a little sick, and quite honestly this morning (Saturday) is the first time I’m firing up my laptop since Tuesday.

There are always good reasons. And the problem is that they’re cumulative; so much so that I can see a point coming where I am literally a year behind in posting, even though the project is not even three years in.

I’m pondering options.

The easiest way to catch up is to abandon the daily nature of the whole thing. I no longer take photos of Maggie every single day. If there’s no photo for a day, I could always just skip that day.

I could also double-up. Try to post twice a day.

Will I abandon the daily nature of the project? Will I seriously claim that my response to not being able to reliably do something daily is to do it twice every day?

I doubt it.

For those who follow the Maggie-a-day, I hope you don’t mind how far behind it’s falling, and continue to enjoy the photos of very-slowly-aging-Maggie.

Some twenty-one-ish months ago, I started a little project called the Maggie-A-Day. And dutifully, almost every day, I post a photo of Maggie. Like this one:

And generally, I’m proud of myself for it.

There are too many days when I have to dip into my archive of photos, and more than a few days where the photos aren’t particularly great, but it’s actually a very hard thing to do. I’m doing it. It’s fantastic.

And then I found Jason Lee’s blog, Kristin and Kayla, which is his own project, which is similar, but much, much better.

And me? I’m back to thinking that I have a long, long way to go.

When Maggie was born, I began the Maggie-A-Day project.

The concept is simple:
Every day, take a photo of Maggie.
Every day, post a photo of Maggie to my Flickr stream.

Here is today’s photo:

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we are trying to figure out what to make of this.

Is this a rousing success? That I’m still posting photos of Maggie nearly every day, eighteen months later?

Or does the fact that there are four months – over 120 days – between today’s date and the most recent Maggie-A-Day photograph constitute an embarrassing failure?

I choose the former; this is a project for which the delivery schedule is unimportant. It is creating a slideshow of beautiful moments from my daughter’s life, to look back on whenever I want a fit of nostalgia (or when she does). And the latter leaves me abandoning the project after documenting little over the first year of her life.

But I do need to remind myself of that; it is a qualified success. And it neither looks nor feels like a good omen for my creative reset. Things have been moving however. In the last half of April I have:

• Bought a new lens – nothing brings out the urge to play with my camera like new kit.
• Enrolled in the Photocritic Photography School
• Decided on my May “planned photograph” – Karen needs professional (or indistinguishable-from-professional-amateur) photos of herself for her business

All in all, a good start — I’m set for the first full month of my creative reset in May. I have a course to learn from, and a photograph to take.

And, of course, another month of daily Maggie sightings.

Dear friends who knit,

I want bees.

I want knit bees.

I want hundreds – nay, thousands – of knit bees.

I want bees for practical jokes. I want bees for odd photographs. I want bees for odd photographs in the middle of practical jokes.

Hannah Haworth has made some. You can too. She has photographic evidence:

See? Bee.

So knit me some bees, Internet. Lots and lots of bees.

Sincerely,
Mr. Topp