Hello!

Jacqueline and Randy standing in front of something

We're Jacqueline and Randy, a blogging duo with backgrounds in tech, robots, art, and writing now raising our family in northern Idaho.

Our goal is to encourage deliberate choices, individual responsibility, and lifelong curiosity by sharing stories about our adventures in living, loving, and learning.

Learn more about us.

We'd love to connect—and keep you updated!

Did you know a group of owls is called a parliament?

Curious? Read these stories:

heirloom tomatoes, big and small, piled on plates, bowls, and in a basket

Backyard Suburban Gardening: My Year 5 Harvest

This year's expanded garden was more work, but the increased yield was worth it! I added to the front flower garden, too. Here's how everything grew and what I want to do differently next year.
book cover for Grad School Life: Surviving and Thriving Beyond Coursework and Research by Jacqueline M. Kory-Westlund. It shows a piles of papers behind the title, with a small potted plant on top of one stack, and the bottom half of the page covered in blue as if underwater

Book Update #5: Grad School Life: Publication Day is February 27, 2024 + Cover Reveal

Exciting news: I have a book cover and pub date! Plus, details on the rest of the book production process, receiving page proofs, and figuring out book promotion.
a man in a white bee suit holding up a frame from a beehive, which has capped joney covering 70% of it and some bees crawling on it

Winterizing the Bees, Year 1

Northern winters are cold—so what do the bees do? Here's how we prepared our hives for the snowy months.
great horned owl in flight over a meadow of flowers

3 Years Blogging: Why Write a Blog? How Do You Balance Blogging with Life?

Time flies like an owl! Here's why I continue to write a blog, and why—even when scaling back to fit blogging better in my life—it's still worth it.
the cover of the book Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar, looking like red and white parking sign

Book Review: Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

More space in America is dedicated to parking cars than to housing people. How did our built environment become this way? Why is parking so frustrating, the center of every zoning debate, and the key to reviving our towns?
a snail crawling over a rock

Switching the Blog Schedule to Biweekly

With all the other projects I'm working on, this blog will be taking a backseat. I'll still be writing here, just a little less often!
tags: blog writing work

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Did you know a group of owls is called a parliament?

About

We're Jacqueline and Randy, a blogging duo with backgrounds in tech, robots, art, and writing, now raising our family in northern Idaho.

Our goal is to encourage deliberate choices, individual responsibility, and lifelong curiosity by sharing stories about our adventures in living, loving, and learning.

Learn more about us.


Connect:

whoo@deliberateowl.com

Start here

Curious about our life and journey? Here are some good places to start reading:

Jacqueline and Randy leaning their heads together smiling at the camera

A Blog About Education, Lifestyles, and Community

A brief history of how the Deliberate Owl came to be and why we're writing a blog about us, our lives, and how we're living out our values.
Priests in red and gold celebrate a traditional Latin Mass

Discovering the Traditional Catholic Mass

How I discovered the traditional Latin Mass a few years ago, why that discovery changed everything for me, and what was wrong with the Novus Ordo Masses I'd attended.