Hello, Old Friend, Once Again.

I have taken a break, more or less, from blogging over the past few years. Sure, I had some spurts of energy where I blogged for a month or two on a fairly regular basis, but nothing sustained beyond that...I couldn't even get terribly fired up for the general election last fall.

(Look, Mitt, it really wasn't your fault. You were a complete bonehead and your pandering did set me off, so you did your part, but I couldn't hold up my end of the bargain. I simply didn't care, given that the best you could muster in the polls was a dead cat bounce.)

Do you know I posted all of five times in 2012? Five times.  

Life's been busy. I have a garden to tend. I have classes to teach. I have kids to shepherd around. I tend to regard blogging the same way I regard going to the gym...you have to make a commitment and once you've decided you're too tired or busy to hit the machines one day, well, you might as well tear up the gym membership, because next thing you know you've paid for three months simply to say you're a member.

It's spring. Let's give it another chance.

Changed my clothes ten times before I take up my template...

Some of you may have noticed that my blog changed its look for the first time ever. That was something of an accident. All I wanted to do was get my charts to fit. They used to fit. No matter how inept I was, blogger always fixed the size of my pictures and charts so they fit in the main window.

No longer.

Apparently, some template change has my charts etc spilling over the margins into my housekeeping column. I am not happy about this feature.

I am also having difficulty returning to my original template without returning to some god-awful version of my blog layout and blogroll from 2006. All I want is Rounders 3 back.

It should be simple.

It probably is.

And no, I do not have the time to sit around coding this crap myself and I'm not at the moment interested in moving to a more professional self-publishing tool such as wordpress. I'm actually pretty happy with the crap I can do with blogger.

I just noticed...

I posted as much during the month of July as I did for the entire first six months of the year! Sure, fifteen posts from January - June wasn't exactly a hard mark to beat, but now I can set my sights even higher.

I'm looking to eclipse my 39 post total from 2010. To sweeten the pot, I'll throw in the fifteen from January to June, and the fifteen from July so far, and this post as well, so the number to beat will be 70.

Seventy posts from now until December 31, 2011.

Five months to post seventy times.

Easy as cake, some of you might say. Circa 2008 I would agree with you, but lately I've had a habit of stopping for long periods of time.

Let's see what happens.