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.

One day you wake up and you wonder where everyone went.

I was noting how sad my blogroll was, sitting over there on the right with only two or three of the current inhabitants regularly updating their blogs.

I decided to do some pruning, so I removed a few that hadn't updated in over a year. In some cases close to four years. It's probably a safe bet that leaving the blog unattended for over a year indicates you've abandoned it for one reason or another.

I know I've gone through some dry spells when I didn't update for several months....I think years 2009 and 2010 were pretty pathetic in terms of writing output.

Anyway, as I went through my blogroll I tried to think of bloggers -- even those that I didn't put on the blogroll -- that I read back in the halcyon days, when there were always some good blog wars to follow and there seemed to be a fairly active blogger meetup social scene (which I didn't participate in, but I did follow the blog recaps). Many of those folks are gone or have changed blogging identities/sites so I don't know where they are anymore.

A few remain.

Reya had a very nice post yesterday on writing. It made me think more deeply about why we write, and that also made me think about why it is we stop writing. I stopped for a time because I was finding writing outlets in different places, and part of that also had to do with my feeling of disconnection from the scene of writing that gave birth to this blog.

There's a lot of good writing still going on. I need to pay more attention.

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.