I've spent the past week weeding through all of the posts I've written since I started this blog in 2002, and I think I deleted nearly 200 of them. Those that went were either boring, no longer pertinent, or just plain embarrassing...
It's okay, though, because I republished some that I'd reverted back to draft at different times in this blog's history. I may clean out even more posts. Who knows? I found a few that I thought were rather good, so I feel some hope that I still might one day make a decent writer.
The one thing I realized has been missing from my posts in the past three or four years is the personal tone my older posts had. My voice became stilted and I began being less silly. That may have been a consequence of the serious turn my life took in the mid-2000s, when I was sideswiped by ill health and financial distress. Hey, I'm only human. I'm going to be working on bringing back my lighter side. Life is much better, after all, and I'm feeling better than I have in years.
What's hard for me now is, how do I write about my inner and outer life and still maintain the privacy I feel I need to establish now that it looks like my work may go hugely public? I considered going through every post and changing all names to initials, but I like that kind of blogging even less. And if I resist mentioning friends and family members entirely, then I'll be omitting a huge part of my private life. So, what to do? I'll go on as I have been where the kids are concerned, because, since they're all grown and out on their own now, they can let me know if they don't like being mentioned every now and again.
That solved, onward.
We finished watching the US production of House of Cards on Netflix last night, and now we don't know what we'll watch in the evenings. We do that. We get our teeth sunk into a series, spend a week or two obsessively watching it, and then feel a bit adrift when it's over. I think a lot of people do that. In the afternoons, during my hour nap time, I've started watching Monarch of the Glen, which is pretty nice to nap through. A few months ago I napped through Star Trek: the Next Generation. I'm trying to get addicted to napping through Deep Space Nine, but I'm not terribly fond of it.
Meanwhile, Life with Puppy continues; he'll be eight months old next Tuesday. Unbelievable, not only that we've had him that long, but that I've actually survived it. He's a great dog. Smart, joyful, and sweet-tempered, but he's also part Dachshund, which also makes him stubborn, mouthy, and a proficient ankle-biter and cat terrorist. And if it lands on the floor—regardless of what it is—it belongs to him. I
If I don't see you before, have a great weekend. After a few days of warm, sunny, spring-like weather, we're expecting rain and snow. Damn. Walking a dog in those conditions is no fun.
