And the winner is...

Today's photo is another one from the foggy morning we had on Thursday. I love the look of the end of autumn in Parco di Monza here, the colors still bright but the leaves are sparse on the trees and thick on the ground. Not only have the trees mostly lost their leaves, but the fog has arrived and the air has a decided chill to it... winter has arrived here in northern Italy.

But I have a bit of summer to give away today!  The winner of the flower postcards is... EVA of the blog to be determined!

Thanks so much for all of your comments and feedback. I learned there are more ways to read a blog than I had really thought about, and I also learned that some changes are just not noticeable. In a lot of ways, that's a good thing! I want this place to keep the same look and feel every time people visit, while also being able to update and upgrade as new features come along.

So I'll give you a little blog tour of what's new in the last couple of weeks...

1. Find Your Eye E-course tab - I added the tab with a teaser a couple of weeks ago and filled in the course description this week. I am so excited about this course, I've been working on developing it for months and am in the final throes of completion (hence, the need for KaNoJoMo). It will start January 9 and will run 6 weeks. I'll tell you more about it in the coming weeks! Registration will open soon at wishstudio and I'll let you know when that happens too.

2. I put my last name on my profile. This may seem like a silly minor change, but to me it's about owning my work and bringing my whole self to this space in the virtual world. My full name was appearing in other places I was writing online, so why not here, in my own space?

3. You can follow these links to easily subscribe or find me in all of these places. Before, I had a badge for Facebook, a badge for Flickr and the Followers block on the sidebar. When I wanted to add Twitter, I needed to free up space and make them all easily visible. Since you already follow me in one way or another, you probably don't even notice this space.  Pretty soon I'll have blog buttons available for my Find Your Eye e-course and for Exploring with a Camera to share that will use some of this space too... Watch for them!

4. I added a "Search" box for the blog. I only post the Top Labels on the sidebar, and go through and periodically add and remove based on the labels I've been using, so this search bar lets you easily find things on the blog that aren't available as Top Labels. If you want to see photos from say, Paris (which is not one of the top labels), you can type that in and find all of the posts that reference Paris. I don't know if anyone else will use it, but I've been writing this blog long enough, I've discovered that I can't even find things all of the time. :)

5. The "Join In" section is not new, but I wanted to highlight that I change things here periodically, depending on what's going on and what I personally participate in. Coming up VERY soon is the Mortal Muses "We are Thankful" blog hop. More information is available here or if you click on the image in the sidebar. I hope to see you in the hop!

For those of you who wondered, I changed the blog header in mid-September (the subway image is from my last trip to Paris) and added the tabs sometime this summer (I actually can't remember when anymore). The color of the tab section changed when I changed the header image in September, probably making it more visible now that it's orange.  Thanks so much for participating and leaving your comments! I learned a lot. And if you are sad you didn't win, there are more postcards that will be given away... since I finally got my order. :)

I will not be posting on the blog for the next week, I have a seriously intense week of work this week and will not even be online starting tomorrow. Another reason for KaNoJoMo! (I managed to not join anything this week, even though there were a couple of temptations along the way.) That also means that the next Exploring with a Camera will be delayed for a week or two until I can get things caught back up.

So with that, I wish you a great week, and you'll hear from me later!