The Betrayal
Credit: niccha03
Slay me, betray me
Filet me, all the way me.
Douse me in alcohol
Set me aflame and flambé me.
It was rapidly approaching 8pm. Darkness was engulfing the land. Wearily my wife and I made our way to the bedroom. It was time for the nightly ritual of getting ready for bed. The end of another long day.
For me, going to sleep is like giving up. It’s saying, “Once I close my eyes it will be time to open them again, on a new day, and do all of this stuff all over again.” Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
I can’t imagine a more gloomy sentiment.
Yet little did I know at that moment the betrayal that was heading my way before I’d even had the chance to experience that sadness. I wasn’t going to make it to bed unscathed.
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See the Light
I can occasionally be photographed. It looks a lot like this. Enjoy!
It’s rare, but sometimes the Abyss has visitors.
We’ve lived in this house for over three years now. Three bedrooms feels like the lap of luxury after our single-wide. Before we moved in, we scouted the house. I brought a tape measure and scoped out the smaller bedrooms. One was slightly larger than the other. I called dibs for my home office. (I was still working at home at the time. Something the Universe snatched away the day after we moved in.) The smaller room went to one of our gerbils that was still home nesting.
Eventually that gerbil moved out and entered his “no permanent residence – mooching” phase. (Where he remains to this day. It’s not a specific place. It’s a state of mind.)
The room he left behind was devastation. Firefighters showed up with sniffing dogs to look for survivors. The Governor declared a state of emergency. The President himself even circled the scene several times in his helicopter while on the way to the links, and although he didn’t land and actually step out, that still held a lot of symbolic meaning for us.
The walls were covered in gerbil spray. As my wife cleaned, she found dishes we hadn’t seen in years, in various states of decay. At last our collection of flatware was almost fully restored. (Many pieces, unfortunately, were lost forever when tossed in the garbage by our disinterested gerbildentia.)
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Blog-o-rhythms
Blogging every day can be a bear.
To blog every single day takes considerable effort. And just a bit of planning.
I find that maintaining a regular routine is helpful. Establishing a rhythm and maintaining it is very helpful to meeting a post-every-day objective.
My normal routine is to always write at least one day in advance. So if I write a post in the morning before work, that post will be scheduled for five minutes after UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) so that the post will have the correct date. For me, that’s 4:05pm or 5:05pm depending on if daylight savings time is in effect or not.
So, by knocking out a post and scheduling it, I’ve effectively taken care of tomorrow’s post. That’s a good feeling. You’ve given yourself a bit of a cushion and you can adapt a bit if something unexpected takes you away from your normal writing time.
If you’re going on vacation and won’t have access to a computer, you need to kick it up a notch and have enough posts queued. So far the WordPress scheduling feature hasn’t let me down.
What sucks is when you get knocked off that routine. I’ve been really sick with phlegmitis for far too long. (Tomorrow will be officially two weeks.) And I was out of town two weeks ago and was one post behind on auto-scheduling for the vacation. So I got behind on my blogging rhythm and I’ve been behind ever since.
Now when I sit down to write a post in the morning, I’m writing for the current day. If I somehow don’t get it done before I leave for work, then I’m screwed because I won’t be home before WordPress rolls over to a new date. And that will mean I missed a day. It’s now or never. That adds a bit of pressure.
When I’m on my routine the days seem to fly by. When I’m off my routine I find myself worrying about how and when I’ll write my next post and everything feels off-kilter.
Hopefully I’ll feel better soon, get an unexpected chunk of free time, and maybe even enough energy to get back on my game. It could happen.
What are your blogging goals and what methods do you use to help you get there? What works for you?
Shouts from the Abyss 
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