✋I am raising my virtual hand, Terri! I do remember the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenges.

It connected me with so many other bloggers who share a similar interests as me. It was sure a great way to make blogging friends and connect with others. This is the link to my entry for Vivid originally published back in June 2015.

As I am writing this, I realized I will have been a resident of the blogging world for 10 years come February 2023. That is a long time, probably like a millennia in the land of the internet, and especially for someone like me who has trouble committing to anything. I think this blog is a symbol of perseverance because it took me a few years to build up a group of regular reader and an audience who actually enjoy the stuff I write.

A surprising fact about this blog – its very first name was called The Random Blog. Another surprising fact is that this was a place focused primarily on writing down my observation of the real world.

In March 2015, the photo above sucked me into the world of photography. That was how I became a hobby photographer. I suppose this also sort of lent a hand with my entrance into the gardening world though I didn’t know it at the time.

I was living in my mom’s house (next door to my current house) back then while pursuing my second undergraduate degree in accounting. Some of the hardest years were already behind me – (cough) 2012-2013 when I was struggling in my Junior year in college with my first undergraduate in Civil Engineering while working 3 crummy-paying jobs at mom’s request. By 2015, I had quit all my previous jobs and was working as a remote translator after failing an interview to get into Georgetown.

During the minutes between work and school, especially during the spring, I would step into the small garden, armed with a small Fuji point-and-shoot, and try my luck at taking more closeup like the first photo in this post. Though I didn’t know how dull the pictures were at the time, I thought the pictures were incredibly vivid – the colors, the detail…

Maybe it’s the color white, which gleams under the high-elevation sun. Below is my most recent flower shot. I would say it’s improved quite a bit though improvement may still be needed.

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Unfortunately, I don’t remember when I added landscape photography to my repertoire. After searching my archives, it appears this might be one of the earliest shot of my attempt at landscape photography. Compare that to the photo below, which is one of my recent shot, I’d say I’ve come a long way thanks to all the inspiration from browsing photography blogs and photo challenges.

#SundayStills