Well Hello There, Stranger!
Well my gosh, I haven’t seen you in a long while. Hello, stranger – it’s been a minute!
As someone who’s kept (or tried to keep) a somewhat daily blog since 2002… there’s been an odd amount of radio silence, lately. No updates for a few months on here, which is a bit out of the ordinary.
Let me explain.
Back in April, Liz and I relocated to Georgia for a few months. Tricia was headed to Arizona for some military training that would have her out of state for about two months, and Liz and I offered to go and watch over the kids and the house.
So at the end of March, that’s exactly what we did.
I made some posts from Georgia for a while, but neglected to include any of the details. While I’m pretty open on the blog about personal topics, I felt like my time in Georgia didn’t quite belong to me. And it wasn’t quite my story to tell.
Also, I wasn’t wild about announcing on the Internet that “Hey, I’m going to be away from my house in Chicago for a few months.” Just general precaution and all.
After the first month, things got harder for me in terms of updates. I got busy with work, and found myself putting more and more hours into my job. I missed a day or two of blog updates, which turned into a few more days, which turned into a week. And eventually, I got too far behind to catch up.
We returned to Chicago in mid-June. And around that time, my computer up and quite on me. So that involved getting a new laptop and transferring the files, etc etc.
And in all that time, not posting on the blog became the norm. And not doing any updates became the thing I did each day.
But the interesting thing? In the last few weeks, I started to spend my free time looking over old blog psots. I’d search for the big events that I wanted to look back on – our trip to Scotland in 2021, Liz’s 40th birthday trek to Shenandoah, and the best ten days from the last two decades of my life.
Reader, I found that I *missed* the blog. I felt some relief from not needing to worry about updates and generating content… but I found I wanted to continue this archiving. I looked over some of the photos from the last few months, and there’s so much I want to docuemnt on here (that hasn’t made it up yet).
A small example of this: I’ve taken up running again, and been pretty disciplined about keeping up with it. To the point where I’ve been running 3-4x per week.
I actually got up to 5K, which was something I didn’t quite think was possible (given how often I’ve tried [and failed] the Couch-to-5K program]). I actually got up to 10k, recently. Pretty big stuff.
But all of that exists mostly in my memory (and Liz’s). But this blog is the place where I share and document all these things. And while it might have been easier to omit the task of archiving… I found I missed the records. I want these things to look back on.
So suffice it to say, I’m back. At least, for now. I’ve had several moments where I’ve wondered about what might happen if I just up and quite/stopped the blog. And I did just that for a short while.
But in the last few weeks, I’ve learned that I actually want this record to continue. I do miss the process somewhat, but miss the ability to look back and see all these important (important to me) events that would otherwise go unaccounted.
I’ve started to process a lot of the photos from the last few months. And at the moment, I’ve just got a plan to post up the images, without any narratives or text. I think I’ll fill in the gaps from the last few months, but there will still likely be gaps and spaces. But the important stuff should still be there.
Moving forward? I’m going to try very hard to do daily updates again, and avoid slipping into the “do a week’s worth of updates” mode.
We’ll see how this goes. But I guess for now, I guess for today – hello again. Welcome back, blog. Welcome back, visitors. After a very unusual hiatus, let’s see where things go from here.
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