Year One

It's now officially been one year since I started writing this blog.

It's actually been easier and a lot more fun than I initially imagined.

My first worry when I started the blog was that I would soon run out of things to blog about.  That's why I decided not to make it a specialist blog, just about Breyers, say, or about Clinkies, or Hartlands -- although those are the three kinds of model horses I probably know the most about.  Instead, I thought I'd give myself leave to muse about whatever aspect of the hobby caught my fancy at the moment, although I hoped to be able to impart some useful information while doing so.

A  real Dust Pony -- image courtesy of tumblr.com. The blog name is actually a play on the word "dust bunnies" as in "I don't have dust bunnies; I have dust ponies."  It also refers to my OF plastic horses who usually stand around under a "protective" coating of dust.

At first I wasn't sure how often to blog, but it didn't take long to settle into my current schedule of two new posts a week -- one on Wednesday and one on Sunday.  That gave me enough time to think of a topic, take or round up any pictures I needed to illustrate it, and to write, edit, and proofread before publishing.  Like most authors, I still find that some errors creep in, no matter how diligently I edit or carefully I proofread.  Typos happen.  No one is immune.

There have been days, though, when my self-imposed deadline was approaching and I was completely out of ideas.  Looking at some of my favourite bloggers, I've noticed how many of them fill the "no inspiration" days with snippets from their lives outside of the hobby.  I love this stuff too, but my life outside the hobby is pretty boring, and unless I wanted to turn this into a "model horse/let me tell you what my cat did today" blog, that still left me without much to say.

I did pick up some pointers from other bloggers though.  Many of them regularly highlight a model from their collection as part of their blog.  I could do that too.  I still didn't want to make this a "just about Breyer" blog, so I tried to think of a way to highlight models that would draw on all aspects of my collection.  An alphabetic tour through my collection seemed like a good solution, and it was one that could be repeated over and over as long as I had enough horses with names beginning with each letter of the alphabet to keep it going.

My forays into sing-alongs illustrated with Breyer horses sort of came out of nowhere.  I wanted to do something original (or at least something I hadn't seen before) and I always seem to have various songs playing away in the background of my brain.  One day it just sort of struck me that Breyer had probably produced something to symbolize many of the lyrics of my favourite songs, and so the sing-along blog was born.  I revived the idea around Christmas time so I could have a couple of blogs ready to go when I would be too busy with holiday stuff to sit down and write.

My other initial fear when I started this blog is that no one would read it, but fortunately this has proved not to be the case.  I'm still hoping that the blog will gain a greater readership over time, but I've really loved all the comments and positive feedback I've received so far -- I read every comment I get and try to reply to them when I can.

And just to show you what model horse nerd I truly am, I leave you with this tidbit.  The other day a friend of mine gave me this card:

This was not for the blog's birthday, but for mine, which was just over a week ago.  

It's a lovely card, but when I saw the tiny little clothespins and clothesline on the front I immediately thought "I am totally going to cannibalize this card and put the clothespins and cord into my box of model horse performance accessories."  This despite the fact that I no longer live show and have not yet attempted to photo show in performance.  What can I tell you? This is who I am.