The Occasional Navel-Gazing What-Am-I-Doing-Here Post

Two years ago I wrote about taking a break from blogging because I was sick of the sound of my own voice. Nowadays I’m feeling the opposite, that I miss all the odd ways it used to echo around this cavernous site and feed back into my head, and desperately want to get back to it all... but can’t. All the stuff on my plate at work this year has crowded out any hope of it, and in the odd snatches of time that do occur it’s easier to contribute to other conversations than to cook up something new here. Not that there’s been any conversation here for a while... even a photo of an upended BMW hasn’t raised a peep. Turns out that reducing your posts to a trickle for a year, taking a break for another year, and then trickling back for a year is a foolproof way to lose an audience.

So, time for a rethink, reboot, redesign, re-something. Maybe I should just embrace all the social networking sites I’ve half-heartedly toyed with and ditch the idea of following some personal out-of-date notion of what blogs should or shouldn’t be. Maybe Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr are all you need, and who cares about bringing it all back home.

This needs further thought, but I’m in the mood to try something radical. Though whatever that turns out to be—assuming I get the time to implement it rather than just carry on by default—the old stuff will remain.

Actually, maybe Further Thought is exactly the problem.

15 July 2010 · x5

Rumblings

This blog used to host a stream of posts about my travels, but now there’s barely a trickle—not through lack of travel (although that’s been part of it), but through lack of time to write it up. This has been my busiest semester of teaching yet, not to mention the rest, and everything else has had to go on hold. I’m still sorting out photos from a visit to Australia in December-January, and now a brief trip to hang out with friends in their family holiday home in Spain has turned into something much bigger, thanks to a Certain Volcano. Even though thousands of others are no doubt doing the same—and those who weren’t affected are no doubt bored with the whole subject—I’m determined to write it up. If I let such (mis)adventure go unrecorded I may as well shut up shop here for good.