I’ve been thinking about this for a LONG time, and now it’s official.

Bel Joeor is moving!

Please bookmark the new site, http://www.beljoeor.com.

Until December 1, I’ll cross-post each new post on both this blog and the new site. Each post here will have a reminder to follow me to the new site.

After December 1, all new content will be exclusively at the new website.

I’m excited for the change, and I’ll see you over there!

A few updates around the blog, mostly recording this for posterity.

– New header! With a few more made & in the wings that will actually correspond to the seasons, as was my intention a long time ago when I designed a header

– I spent about two hours (yes, really) inputting all the horse blogs I read into a widget for the sidebar, which is ordered by most recent update. Final count was over 100, maybe close to 120.

– I combined a few of the pages up top; namely, all the reviews (book, movie, and product) are under one tab.

Going forward, I plan on updating the About page, and adding a page with my favorite posts on it. Maybe something else I think will be useful, but I have no brilliant ideas right now.

I am pondering many things, and I need your help!

Can you take just a few minutes to answer some quick questions? I have lots of ideas for things to write about, but I am trying this adult thing where I focus and narrow down instead of going everywhere at once. Your opinions will help me do that.

I’m pleased to announce that I have taken a big step forward in my blogging life and have made a Facebook page for Bel Joeor.

I will have some horse stuff to talk about later, but I’d like to take a moment to boost the signal on a project that is near and dear to my heart.

Louisa May Alcott and her family moved to a house in Concord, MA in 1858. Her father, Bronson, named it “Orchard House” after the apple orchards that surrounded it. It was in that house that Louisa wrote the book that would make her famous: Little Women. She blazed through the draft in one month, sitting at a little desk overlooking the front yard.

Orchard House is a truly special place. If any house can be said to have a soul, Orchard House has one. I worked at Orchard House in college, mostly as a tour guide. When I was promoted to opening and closing, I would often get to the house 15 minutes early and sit on the floor in one of the rooms, soaking up the atmosphere. I love that house like I love few other places in the world.

It’s a special place with a really special history, on both the emotional and the intellectual levels.

Right now, Orchard House is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary telling the story of the house itself, which dates back to the Revolutionary War and contains fascinating American history above and beyond the Alcott family, whose story is much more far-reaching than just Louisa’s literary career. The house has been a museum for over a century, and has a remarkable portion of original family furnishings and artifacts.

If you’re a fan of Little Women, please consider donating to the Kickstarter campaign.

I’ve done some housekeeping and updated the review pages at the top of the blog.

So, the product reviews, movie reviews, and book reviews are now all thoroughly linked.

One big change, one small change.

First: I’m changing the blog title. I’ve never been wild with “An Eventful Life.” It was a bit generic, a bit boring-punny instead of clever-punny, and let’s face it: my life is just not all that exciting, and I prefer it that way.

New title: Bel Joeor

Bel Joeor comes from Tristan’s show name, which is “Tristan’s Bel Joeor.” It means beautiful player. In one early French telling of the legend of Tristan, his horse’s name is Bel Joeor. (More about Tristan’s renaming here.)

I’m also putting a label on a gradual shift that I’ve been doing away from eventing. It’s a little bit sadness at the way the sport is going, a little bit unsuitable horse, a little bit lack of funding, a little bit current location and circumstances. I’ve always been interested in all the varieties of horse + human, not just one sport, so it was time this blog officially represented that.

I was bored with the standard Blogspot template, so I tinkered around a little bit. I stuck with one of their layouts + color schemes, because my artistic eye is wholly nonexistent, but I did put together a header. I’d talked about doing this before, but finally got around to it.

So if you visit the blog’s main page, you’ll now see some summery pictures of us out and about. I plan to rotate them with the seasons.

Exactly as the title says: how do you read your horse, cooking, professional, and other blogs?

Do you keep a series of bookmarks and check on them?

Do you use the Google follower/listing service?

Do you use an RSS feeder?

Do you use some combination of the above?

I ask, because at the time of Google Reader’s sad, tragic, unforgivable demise, I had been using it religiously for many, many years. I exported all my RSS feeds to The Old Reader, as it promised the most similar service. I really just want to read: I don’t need bells and whistles.

Well, The Old Reader is now moving to a subscription-based model. Anyone with over 100 feeds will have to pay a small fee. I have 219 feeds and growing – in fact, I have about a dozen on a waiting list right now, since I can’t add any more until I pay up. (And even my existing feeds will be inaccessible soon.)

The small fee is worth it to me, but, it’s just enough to make me think about exploring other options. So I’d like to do that, however briefly.

Anyone have any ideas, suggestions, or words of sympathy about my grieving process for Google Reader, which I still miss nearly every day?

I’ve finally taken the plunge to set up a separate blog devoted entirely to my horse-related pursuits.

Over the next few weeks, I will be consolidating my writing and journaling into this blog, and backdating them, so the archive will begin to grow.

Going forward, I plan to write about all of the horse activities that I engage in, which is quite a few.

I own and ride a 17 year old mustang gelding named Tristan that I adopted from a rescue in 2006. We are continually learning about each other, and training in the sport of three-day eventing.

I groom for friends who are also active competitors, and volunteer for horse shows on a regular basis.

I serve on the Area 1 Scholarship Committee, working to provide educational opportunities to eventers in New England and New York.

In the past, I have been a Pony Club Joint-DC, competed for Middlebury College’s IHSA team, and taken riding lessons in France.

I also read and watch anything and everything related to horses.

That should about sum it up. Watch this space.