Welcome to 2014!  Woo, new year!  You have NO idea how happy I am that 2013 is over.  I hope you all are looking forward to the new year as well.

The start of a new year is a good time to start thinking about the way you do things and to make changes, and I’ve decided I’m going to make some changes on the ol’ blog here.  I haven’t had as much time to work on my blog as I have in the past.  Unfortunately, that means that I’ve come to rely on my weekly features almost entirely and haven’t been able to write about scientific papers or other more hard-core science nearly as often as I would like. It has become increasingly difficult just to get Friday 5 posts up!  However, I realized a few days ago that it really wasn’t because I didn’t have time to write the Friday 5’s, but because I didn’t want to write them.  I looked back and found that I posted my first Friday 5 on October 22, 2010.  I’ve written a Friday 5 on nearly every Friday since then.  That’s over three years.  That’s a LOT of Fridays!  Quite frankly, I’m running out of things to write about and I’m starting to find the format stifling – it’s sucking the joy out of blogging for me, and that’s not good. So, say goodbye to Friday 5.  Goodbye Friday 5!  It was fun while it lasted, but I’m not going to miss you.

Now say hello to the NEW DW Friday: Friday Favorites!

Friday Favorites is going to be similar to Friday 5 in many ways, but have a different focus.  Rather than simply making lists of related things, I’m going to create lists of insect-related things that make me happy.  This might sound awfully fluffy, but that’s not my intention!  All my favorite posts I’ve written are about things that I find absolutely fascinating and that I want to share with the world so badly that I can hardly wait to write about them. Those things are a joy to write about, so I want to get away from making my dull, arbitrary lists and instead focus more on the strange or wonderful things I see that make me think, “Wow, I have to write about this!”   My very best Friday 5’s stemmed from those sorts of experiences, but I find that recently I’m reaching to create those lists because I’m forcing myself to find 5 related things to write about.  Life doesn’t always give you things in neat little packages like that and I find that I’m not writing about things that I want to write about because they don’t fit the format I’ve set for myself.  That’s just stupid!  Changing my Friday format will help me refocus my blog on the things that excite me most and bring the joy back into my blogging experience.  I hope it will mean that I’m giving you all more interesting things to read as well!

Friday Favorites is going to be about the insect-centric things that have amazed me or I thought were beautiful or just made me smile.  I might occasionally throw in something non-insect just because the world is too amazing to ignore everything else.  I’m not going to give myself any restrictions for how many things I need to include each week or what those things need to be, but I will keep trying to post weekly because I like the routine.  I do, however, want to try to get back to a more scientific place with my blog whenever possible, so that it’s less about me telling stories about my interactions with insects (how did I even end up there?) and more about the reasons behind why I see the amazing things I observe. Those behind the scenes processes are what compelled me to become a scientist, why I still spend every day wondering at the amazing things filling the world. Deep down, I want to know how it all works – and I want to share what I learn about this awesome place we live with all of you.

So, Friday Favorites is going to be about the crazy cool, wondrous world we live in, seen through the lens of an entomologist.  I hope you’ll enjoy it.  Look for the first post next week!

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