I was gone...

I am not sure how common this problem is in the blogosphere, but things happened, I got busy, I stopped posting, and then more things happened. So many things happened which I wanted to talk about, so updating the blog got to be a longer and longer task, and I still didn’t have any more time to do it than before. In the past, I have started other blogs and this same thing has happened to me. And then, after one guilty post (like this one) where I try to explain why I was gone, and try to suggest that I’ll do a better job of updating things in the future, I go silent.

There are a lot of reasons why I haven’t updated this blog in a while, but here are some of them:

1. My day job started taking more of my time and energy.
2. Perfectionism – I wanted to do a really good job of writing, but did not have the time to write / edit to my satisfaction – the list of posts I wanted to write got very long, but things weren’t getting crossed off.
3. Limited time – Every one of us has limited amounts of time, but I had even more limited amounts than usual due to some new endeavors for me, such as: a) selling our house and moving; b) focusing on our finances (which also involved me doing a fair amount of time-consuming research on personal finance to educate myself); c) having a very mobile and active toddler (as #SeriousKid became a preschooler, #BearTed became a toddler, but he has way more energy and engages in riskier behavior than his older brother); d) my spouse wanting switch jobs (which took a lot of mental energy and emotional labor on my part); e) our kids switching daycares; and f) me having out-patient surgery (the recovery period was two weeks!).
4. I had some organizational challenges with regard to my hobbies – this blog is a hobby, as is cross stitch, and I suppose writing outside of my regular job too. It was hard to keep these things in order when I had other things to focus on, like figuring out what box contained my socks after the move.
5. I am not able to easily add photos from my phone to this blog. Right now, I wind up emailing myself the photos, downloading them onto a PC or laptop, and then uploading them. I find this very tedious, and yet, I can’t deny that I prefer blog posts with photos to those without photos.