Holy crap, it’s November!

I’ve had an incredibly busy and eventful 2021 so far (mostly good, some great, some bad), but in the pandemonium of it all, I’ve found myself making certain trade-offs, one of which being that I haven’t blogged nearly as much during the past several months as I would have liked (which you can clearly see by looking at the list of entries from this year in the archive list).

I’ve missed blogging terribly. I don’t really do it for others (although I’m always grateful when people say that they’ve read something I’ve written, and that it provided either entertainment or, on rare occasion, a bit of useful advice in one capacity or another), but I do find it to be a really worthwhile exercise for my own mental clarity. I suppose that’s one of the things I used to enjoy so much about teaching and tutoring — a lot of times, you don’t really understand something until you can explain it to others. Sometimes what you’re explaining is an indelible fact, while other times it’s just an idea you’re mulling over or a position you’ve taken. Even then, I find that there’s often a little bit of fuzziness to an idea until I’m able to really peel it back and write it out on paper.

I’ve noticed my mental acuity declining a bit in the past few months. It’s possible that it’s because of my worsening kidney disease, or my chronic fatigue (more on both later), but I suspect it’s more to do with the fact that I haven’t been reading or writing as much as I used to. Much like the proverbial sword, if you don’t sharpen it from time to time, it loses its edge and ventures further into dullness. The other night my girlfriend remarked “when we first met, you remembered every single detail about everything,” a clear indication that others are noticing it, too. I admit, I sometimes forget a conversation, or that I was supposed to call and follow up about an appointment, or where I placed my LED camping lantern (I swear it will turn up somewhere). But hey, it happens. Hopefully, with enough determination, we can keep that from happening more and more.

I have a sizable bank of blog post ideas that I’ve been squirreling away over the past few months, with the knowledge (or, more aptly, hope) that eventually I could work my way through them all (“if only I could find the time!”).

I’m hoping that, moving forward, I’ll be able to devote more time to blogging.

Specifically in the near-term, though, I’d like to challenge myself.

NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, is an event that takes place every November where a group of foolhardy novelists attempt to write an entire, 50,000 word novel in the span of 30 days.

I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but in the spirit of it, I thought I’d like to challenge myself to blog as much as possible this month.

This is the inaugural blog post of that challenge, meant to serve as a way of getting my blogging juices flowing, and reminding my brain how it feels.

Before I embark on this challenge, I want to establish my boundaries:

  • This is not going to be a 50,000 word effort. Nobody wants to read that, and I don’t have the time to do that. I’m going to aim for 1000 words per day, but that’s a soft goal, and failure to hit it does not constitute a failed day. The blog posts will be as long as I think they should be to fully explore a topic (or until I’m tired of writing about said topic), and then that’s it.
  • I reserve the right to skip days here and there, or to bank up blog posts and stagger their publication. I’m also going to be shameless about lying about publishing dates. I make no guarantee that the stuff I publish on, say, Tuesday, is the stuff I wrote on a given Tuesday.
  • I reserve the right to abandon this effort entirely due to life stuff without feeling like a failure. This is just something fun.

So with that, let’s get going! These posts are going to be a mix of genres and topics. Some are personal, some are of general interest, and some are just… weird. As all good blogs should be, really.

I have a blog post coming tomorrow about making Bluetooth suck less on Linux.

Wednesday is about a productivity life hack I discovered that I’ve never seen anyone talk about, but has worked quite well for me (I’m not searching for it because I don’t want to be disappointed to find out that everyone else already knows about it, and I’m the last person to get with the times).

After that? Stay tuned. I don’t want to spoil all my plans.

If you want to comment privately about any of the posts, suggest a topic, or just entertain me for a few minutes, reach out to me via email.

This should be fun! Onwards!