Today is the third anniversary of Capital City Sidewalks, a blog I started on a whim (with a placeholder name that I stuck with) because I had started a daily walking habit during the lockdown. I still have that daily walking habit but the blog decreased to three times a week on its first anniversary and twice a week on its second. I think you can guess what the third anniversary brings: another reduction in posting frequency.

Anyone who has been reading regularly has surely noticed that I’m running low on new and interesting stamps to showcase, and have been more often resorting to tangential topics and apologies. I have exhausted, or nearly so, the contractor stamps available in my usual walking radius; while I obviously have not catalogued every stamp on Lansing’s east side, I believe I have at least one example from each contractor, including style variations when they have more than one. Every once in a while I still turn up something new but those finds are getting further and further apart. I’m not done being interested in finding new ones, but it will require more forays into other neighborhoods and I can’t guarantee that I will be able to do that regularly enough to keep posting twice a week.

So, I will be switching to one post a week, most likely on Fridays, starting this coming Friday. I hope that will allow me to get a reserve of new material to use, and I hope that keeping up at least some posting schedule, even if it’s a less frequent one, will continue to reinforce the blogging habit so that this project doesn’t peter out entirely. I’ve been quite proud of keeping it up for this long, and I’ve also learned a lot about the history of my neighborhood and Lansing in the process.

Sunday will mark the 2nd anniversary of Capital City Sidewalks, which debuted in 2020 with a photo of an undated O&M stamp on Regent Street. Over the last year, as I have exhausted the interesting stamps to be found on Lansing’s east side (where I take my daily walks), I have increasingly covered adjacent topics like utility covers, odd or mysterious sidewalk arrangements, and old newspaper accounts of sidewalk construction issues. At this point I will likely have to continue to widen my focus if I am to keep the blog going, since I am close to wringing out the east side of the last interesting markings. I need to make more frequent trips to other neighborhoods, although it’s possible I will find nothing but the same contractors that are well represented closer to home. I may also need to reduce posting frequency again. A year ago I decided to drop to three times a week after a year of daily updates, which served me very well for a while, but is starting to feel too frequent again. I am considering going to two days, if not now, perhaps when my day job picks up again in a few weeks.

I don’t mean to sound downbeat, however, as I mark my second anniversary. Instead, I want to express my appreciation for the sidewalks of Lansing and how glad I am for having discovered I like learning about them (and about Lansing history, for which they have often served as a proxy). I have found this blog to be a highly satisfying endeavor, and if no one but my husband has been reading, that’s all right. Developing the habit of studying sidewalks so closely, and even having opinions about them, has enriched my life in a small but noticeable way. After all, they are nearly ubiquitous… except in Lansing Township.