Clearing the fog

This perhaps hardly needs an announcement, but for the faithful few who might wonder where I have gone, I am going to make a small one. I have decided to let this blog fall behind a few other things and clear some of the fog. I have been posting a lot more lately than I previously did in any case, and feel like it is now taking up too much time, not just in the writing of a post, but in the fiddling around loading it up (partly due to our hopeless internet connection, which is something I have to sort out). For example, the bat post below which took me about five minutes to write and then about an hour to get up on the blog loading photos etc. I can no longer access blogs at work so I can’t do any of the fiddling there (which I occasionally used to do during my own time) and I don’t want to be on the computer most evenings.

Also, I feel like much of what I have been writing lately is simply twaddle that I am not pleased with. I have been thinking about this for some time and I was challenged by a paragraph that addressed this The Little Red Writing Book. I won’t reproduce that here because I don't want this to read as any kind of judgment on blogs, which it isn’t; it’s just something I decided to apply to myself. (I am of the belief that if someone wants to start a blog to say what want to say they are as entitled to as the next person – it’s a democratic and free society :).) Then I read this post at the Purple Cellar and nodded my head in agreement, not because I thought Lydia’s blog was mediocre, quite the opposite and being written by a single Christian woman it was of particular relevance to me and I was disappointed it closed, but I agreed with the idea of evaluating what is the best use of our time. I am not writing books but there are a couple other things I would like to write, which are not the stuff of a blog – perhaps more’s the pity, because if our best writing comes from our authentic self, this blog would be better reading if I wrote about those things that meant most to me.

I revisited what I wrote in a very early post on the why of blogging and decided that the best remedy to spending increasing amounts of time on my own isn't writing blog posts to no-one in particular. I have had a small revelation that I am hopeless at using the telephone. So there are old and good friendships I have let slide because those people don’t live in Sydney and I haven’t been intentional about phoning. But those friendships are worth hanging onto, especially given the difficulty of making new ones of equal depth, which I wrote about here. So I am going to put more of my weeknights into that, for one thing. I also want to read more. That has slipped, in part because I tightened my belt on buying books, but I am not getting a lot of food for thought elsewhere and I need to read! (And if I get a tax return I might consider purchasing an iPod, so I can join the podcast generation.) I suspect I’ll be back when I read the next George Eliot :) (and I was pleased to read this post with reference to George Eliot by Jennie Baddeley – thanks Karen for that link).

So, I will still be here, posting when I feel moved to post about something for one reason or another. For now I will cease Poetry Friday, just so the blog doesn’t become nothing but poetry Friday, but poetry will still find it’s way here, you can be sure of that. So this is just bye for a little longer than usual.