Happy Halloween!  We are ending this month with a new start.  After a hiatus of much too long, actually longer than we realized, we are back to mixing things up here at Sifted Together.  Read on if you are interested in where we have been and where we are going!

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What do you think of come the fall?  Cooler temperatures?  Colorful Leaves?  Apples and pumpkins?  Halloween?  Beginning  your holiday shopping?  That seasonal PSL?  Those are all normal thoughts at this time of year…unless you are us.  When we think of fall, the first thing that comes to mind is falling off of the blogging bandwagon.

We knew it had been a long time since we last posted, but neither of us realized that it has been over two years.  Two years!!!  How they hell did that happen???  Here’s how.  Our last post was in June of 2019.  Throughout our blogging “career” we often took the summers off because it was too hot to heat up the kitchen baking, especially for the one of us that does not have central air conditioning. To be perfectly honest, we can’t remember why we did not pick back up in the fall of 2019.  But, we didn’t.  Then came the holidays.  Then came COVID.  At that point, all bets were off as far as anything normal happening.  One of us was teaching seven college courses totally online having never taught online before and the other one of us was responsible for getting a fifth grader through his last year of elementary school in a totally virtual setting.  Needless to say, the learning curve and daily responsibilities had us both up to our eyeballs in work.  The only writing we did was daily text messages bemoaning our current state of life.  Then again came the summer heat.  Also, during COVIDtime, obtaining ingredients for scheduled baking became unreliable and expensive.  Since neither of us was getting out of the house and thus were getting minimal move minutes on our Apple watches, we didn’t need the extra calories that came from anything that we baked.  Staving off the COVID 15 was hard enough without adding weekly baked goods!

Another fall came (2020) and we were both still responsible for education from home.  Who knew in September of 2020 that this would last for the whole next school year?!  Virtual learning should have gotten easier for both of us.  In some ways it did in terms of navigating the process, but the amount of work did not diminish.  In all honesty, it was exhausting for parents, teachers, and students.

Then came vaccines and another summer.  It looked like things might return to some semblance of normalcy.  Yeah, no.  Things changed, but nothing was normal.  Harry went back to in-person school.  Though that reduced mom’s responsibility for his education, it upped the worry factor in terms of COVID exposure while at school.

Then, the other one of us retired from teaching after thirty-five years.  Yay!

Fast forward to the present…

We have maintained our regular silly communication with one another throughout this time.  Many times we have both said that we need to get back to regular blogging, but we didn’t make it happen.  The intentions were there but for whatever reason it never felt like the right time.  With the dawn of Fall 2021 we now feel able to pick ourselves up from our “fall” and get back to it.  As we all search to discover the new normal for life after the past eighteen months, we too are doing that with Sifted Together.  It was photography and food that brought us together.  For that we offer much gratitude.  That said, our interests have changed.  The good thing is that we still have many common interests.  Yay!  

So, for good or for ill, we will approach our new content with the same personality that we brought with our baking posts.  We’ll just be writing about different stuff.  Don’t get me wrong, we still love eating and a recipe or two will very likely creep in every now and then, but our posts will be more broad, likely giving you a bigger picture of what being Sifted Together really means to us.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!  If you followed us in our previous incarnation, thank you!  If you are new, welcome!  We are glad you are here.

We’ll be back VERY SOON with words of wisdom…or humor…or irreverence…or…