A wee shuffle

I thought I would refresh this whole space once I left NYC, but I've gotten a little antsy and my impatience got the best of me. With the weather cooling down, changes elsewhere (more on that soon), and a general feeling of blahness with *sparklingly, I wanted to make a move sooner rather than later, even if it means a fairly subtle one, given my lack of design/HTML coding skills.

But first I had to figure out exactly what I wanted to call this new place. Since my day job involves similar queries (what space can this "brand" own? why would anyone care about it? what's its reason for being?), I employed similar strategies to figure this out—I asked a few people what they think I write about and why they like reading and there was definitely a clear thread:

J/*sparklingly = a place filled with homemaking, simple pleasures, balancing city and country, how to indulge graciously and elegantly, tweaks for a gentler life, real/whole foods and living, plus a little snark. Which to me all mostly boiled down to my favorite thing to do ever:

Feather my nest.

I love making something prettier, cozier, homier and more welcoming. Whether it's my apartment, a hotel room when I'm traveling for work, my desk when I'm working at a client site for the day or even an hour, or a little nook at a cafe nearby for a weekend coffee. My thinking is consumed by ideas of how to make my surroundings sweeter, softer, more sacred—which goes for my physical surroundings as well as my physical self.

Thus was born a feathery nest.

But of course I'm still shy and prone to anonymity, so I needed another little handle to sign off with and use on Instagram and things. I created a rationale for *sparklingly before, but it really annoys me now, so a new one had to be made. This time, though, I decided to just use a nickname I already have (General J / Gen J / il Generale) thanks to my particular, some-say-bossy, ways, plus a little finessing to make it better encapsulate me (and my puritanical, modest, hostessing ways), hence ladygenj.

Everything will switch over later today / tomorrow, but just in case my ability to understand complicated code is less stellar than I imagine it to be, I'm posting this last post here on *sparklingly with a breadcrumb trail so you can still find me after today if your feeds and things don't automatically update:

site
http://www.afeatherynest.blogspot.com

feeds
RSS
Atom

readers
Feedly
Feedspot
Bloglovin'

I've also switched my social media accounts over to my new handle, so if you follow me on those, you'll notice my shares under a new name.

Hope to see you on the other side!

Xx,
J.