Saturday, January 07, 2006
Who's to blame when a child dies?
A toddler died in a freak accident:
"Two-year-old Kenny Sweet died last month after swallowing two magnets that fell off his older brother's 'Magnetix' building set.
At first, his parents thought he had the stomach flu - but his condition got worse.
'We just know in the middle of the night he was crying a little, and then in the morning he began throwing up at 10:00,' said mother Penny Sweet.
As his symptoms got worse, Kenny's mom rushed him to the hospital, where he died after only a few minutes.
Two tiny magnets in the toy are believed to have caused Kenny's death.
'They said there were two cylindrical magnets in his intestine,' Sweet said. 'One was at the bottom of the GI tract, and one was at the top of the GI tract. When they got close enough, they magnetized and they pinched his intestine between the magnets ... and they closed his intestine down, basically.'
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/122205dnnatmagnet.7afac44.html
I'm sure that every person on the planet would agree that this was absolutely tragic... but it's a FREAK ACCIDENT. Have we forgotten what that means in this country? Read on:
"Kroger Co. stores voluntarily pulled Mega Bloks Inc.'s Magnetix building sets off their shelves until the investigation of the death of a boy nearly 2 years old is complete."
"The Magnetix set was purchased at a Fred Meyer store. Fred Meyer is a unit of Kroger."
http://money.aol.com/news/articles?id=n20051229135809990003&cid=403
Say WHAT? We're not talking about some defective, dangerous thing, we're talking about a terrific educational toy that a 1 in a billion set of circumstances caused to be involved in a, I'll say it again, freak accident, so why does it need to be pulled off the shelves, much less investigated?
And there's more:
http://www.katu.com/stories/81908.html
"'It does say there is a choking hazard on here,' Penny Sweet said. 'Unfortunately, they don't say it causes serious injury or death, which is the kind [of] warning they need to have on here.'"
NO, it's NOT... and not just because choking KILLS, which means that the current warning on the box provides sufficient incentive to not led your kid eat the parts of the toy. Literally ANY item you can name could, under bizarre enough circumstances, cause harm or death; do we therefore need to put warning labels on EVERYTHING? I feel really bad for this woman, and I know that she's speaking out of unimaginable grief, but people are listening to her claims, and significant official actions are being taken based on them, and that's just ridiculous:
"Mega Bloks reported Kenny Sweet's death to The Consumer Product Safety Commission. The commission confirmed for KOMO 4 News it does have an 'open investigation.'"
Investigation of WHAT? Toddlers will stick anything in their mouths, and swallow it if they can, if you don't watch them every single second, and the list of things that could cause injury, or death, that are small enough to be swallowed is virtually endless; are we going to investigate every single one of those things? No, and we shouldn't be scapegoating any particular one of those things because it happened to be the one that a child died from swallowing.
What's next? A toddler will swallow a pushpin from his sister's corkboard, or a pierced earring from his mother's dresser, or a nail from his father's workbench, and have it pierce his intestines and kill him, and they're going to "investigate" and... what? Recall or ban pushpins, earrings or nails?
Americans have lost total sight of the difference between a faulty product and lack of personal responsibility; we try to blame corporations because we got fat from eating too much high-calorie food, spilled hot coffee on ourselves because we're too clumsy to drink it while driving, and now because we've forgotten how to monitor a toddler.
Parenting is the hardest job in the world, especially with little kids, because in just the blink of an eye they're running into the street, sticking their hand on a hot burner, chugging a bottle of bleach... a friend of a friend lost her little boy when she took her eye off of him long enough for him to run into the back yard, jump in the pool and drown. Each of these scenarios is horrible, and we all feel sad when they occur, but that doesn't change the fact that in each of those cases the fault for the harm to the child belongs to the PARENTS, not to the manufacturers of the stove, the pool, etc; while it's true that modern parents are far more busy and distracted than parents in the past, their responsibility to their offspring has NOT changed, and they need to either make sure that their small children are being monitored every minute by an adult or other mature caregiver... or be prepared to take the blame if the unthinkable happens.
My heart goes out to the Sweet family for their loss, doubly so because it could have easily been avoided if they'd been watching Kenny when he decided to eat magnets and prevented it, and I understand their urge to point the finger; instead of essentially "warning" parents to not have anything with magnets in the house, though, they should be warning parents to watch their toddlers as if their lives depended upon it... because they DO.
"Two-year-old Kenny Sweet died last month after swallowing two magnets that fell off his older brother's 'Magnetix' building set.
At first, his parents thought he had the stomach flu - but his condition got worse.
'We just know in the middle of the night he was crying a little, and then in the morning he began throwing up at 10:00,' said mother Penny Sweet.
As his symptoms got worse, Kenny's mom rushed him to the hospital, where he died after only a few minutes.
Two tiny magnets in the toy are believed to have caused Kenny's death.
'They said there were two cylindrical magnets in his intestine,' Sweet said. 'One was at the bottom of the GI tract, and one was at the top of the GI tract. When they got close enough, they magnetized and they pinched his intestine between the magnets ... and they closed his intestine down, basically.'
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/122205dnnatmagnet.7afac44.html
I'm sure that every person on the planet would agree that this was absolutely tragic... but it's a FREAK ACCIDENT. Have we forgotten what that means in this country? Read on:
"Kroger Co. stores voluntarily pulled Mega Bloks Inc.'s Magnetix building sets off their shelves until the investigation of the death of a boy nearly 2 years old is complete."
"The Magnetix set was purchased at a Fred Meyer store. Fred Meyer is a unit of Kroger."
http://money.aol.com/news/articles?id=n20051229135809990003&cid=403
Say WHAT? We're not talking about some defective, dangerous thing, we're talking about a terrific educational toy that a 1 in a billion set of circumstances caused to be involved in a, I'll say it again, freak accident, so why does it need to be pulled off the shelves, much less investigated?
And there's more:
http://www.katu.com/stories/81908.html
"'It does say there is a choking hazard on here,' Penny Sweet said. 'Unfortunately, they don't say it causes serious injury or death, which is the kind [of] warning they need to have on here.'"
NO, it's NOT... and not just because choking KILLS, which means that the current warning on the box provides sufficient incentive to not led your kid eat the parts of the toy. Literally ANY item you can name could, under bizarre enough circumstances, cause harm or death; do we therefore need to put warning labels on EVERYTHING? I feel really bad for this woman, and I know that she's speaking out of unimaginable grief, but people are listening to her claims, and significant official actions are being taken based on them, and that's just ridiculous:
"Mega Bloks reported Kenny Sweet's death to The Consumer Product Safety Commission. The commission confirmed for KOMO 4 News it does have an 'open investigation.'"
Investigation of WHAT? Toddlers will stick anything in their mouths, and swallow it if they can, if you don't watch them every single second, and the list of things that could cause injury, or death, that are small enough to be swallowed is virtually endless; are we going to investigate every single one of those things? No, and we shouldn't be scapegoating any particular one of those things because it happened to be the one that a child died from swallowing.
What's next? A toddler will swallow a pushpin from his sister's corkboard, or a pierced earring from his mother's dresser, or a nail from his father's workbench, and have it pierce his intestines and kill him, and they're going to "investigate" and... what? Recall or ban pushpins, earrings or nails?
Americans have lost total sight of the difference between a faulty product and lack of personal responsibility; we try to blame corporations because we got fat from eating too much high-calorie food, spilled hot coffee on ourselves because we're too clumsy to drink it while driving, and now because we've forgotten how to monitor a toddler.
Parenting is the hardest job in the world, especially with little kids, because in just the blink of an eye they're running into the street, sticking their hand on a hot burner, chugging a bottle of bleach... a friend of a friend lost her little boy when she took her eye off of him long enough for him to run into the back yard, jump in the pool and drown. Each of these scenarios is horrible, and we all feel sad when they occur, but that doesn't change the fact that in each of those cases the fault for the harm to the child belongs to the PARENTS, not to the manufacturers of the stove, the pool, etc; while it's true that modern parents are far more busy and distracted than parents in the past, their responsibility to their offspring has NOT changed, and they need to either make sure that their small children are being monitored every minute by an adult or other mature caregiver... or be prepared to take the blame if the unthinkable happens.
My heart goes out to the Sweet family for their loss, doubly so because it could have easily been avoided if they'd been watching Kenny when he decided to eat magnets and prevented it, and I understand their urge to point the finger; instead of essentially "warning" parents to not have anything with magnets in the house, though, they should be warning parents to watch their toddlers as if their lives depended upon it... because they DO.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
1st new sidebar doodad of the year
It didn't take me long to find one, did it? ;-)
Be glad that CPU usage is an issue, or I'd have about 20 new Flash clocks, and looking at my sidebar would either blind you or drive you crazy; after much agonizing, I only chose ONE, although I'll probably start switching among the others I liked after a month or 2. The clock I picked was the lowest-tech looking one, but that made it different and thus more interesting, plus I LOVE pizza; take a look, and see what you think.
Isn't it FAB? What's even more amazing is that the same guy who made it made a staggering array of other brilliant clocks
http://www.mat.gr.jp/fc/library.html
Yes, it's a Japanese site, but all you have to do is click on the pic of a clock you want to see, and then there's a "download" button if you want it. Once you've got it on your computer, you can upload it to a file-storage site such as this one
http://ripway.com/
and then use my embed command (you can get it from my source code), with my URL replaced by the one for whatever file you chose, to post it on your blog.... but take a moment to check and see how much of your CPU your chosen clock eats up, because there are plenty of folks in the blogosphere with slow computers, and it's a good idea to make your site accessible to them as well as to those of us lucky enough to have fast machines.
I had a trouble-free doodad installation again; I'm not gonna get too used to it, lol, but it was nice. The only hitch was that my "clock code" is in a Word file, which is on my desktop machine, that's STILL dead (the files are safely on a hard drive, thank goodness, but my husband's been procrastinating about detaching it from the computer and making it available to my laptop via the network, grrrrrrrr), so I had to go to a site that I knew had a Flash clock, copy their code, and change the URL and size to what I wanted in order to put my new find in my template.
Speaking of my desktop; my husband said that there was only about a 5% chance that the expensive part he'd ordered for it would fail to fix it... and guess what? Now, he's going to pull some part from one of the other dead computers, swap it for the comparable part on mine, and see if that'll do the trick; if it doesn't, that'll mean that my motherboard's fried, and THAT would mean that it's time to get me a new computer, sigh... or, rather, HE would get a new computer, and I'd inherit his old one, since he needs far more power and speed than I do. He's dragging his heels getting this handled, and meantime my back is KILLING me from having to just use the laptop (because it's on the family room floor, which is literally the only place in our nearly furniture-free home to have it)... and trust me, when I get cranky, ain't nobody happy.
A friend of mine called tonight and announced her intention to drive down and visit me on Sunday, so that we can eat, shop, and have our Christmas gift exchange (yeah, it's pretty late, but hey, we haven't done the gift thing with my mother yet, either); this is good news, of course, but it means that my husband and I have to get going on our 30 hours or so of work to get our house, which hasn't been "cleaned for company" in about 6 months, ready for her arrival... I'm going to be REALLY grateful for only blogging on alternate days, and catching up on sleep, because my husband and I are always up, screaming and cleaning, until 5-6AM of the day a guest is due, trying to get it finished, and this way I won't be so wiped out when she gets here.
I've missed 2 nights of blogging now, and am amazed that it doesn't bother me at all; maybe it will once I stop being so eager to leap into bed early, but for now it's clearly a positive change... it really was unhealthy to be letting every other aspect of my personal life go hang to have time to blog, and now I'm headed in the right direction. I'm not remotely thinking of stopping blogging, fear not, but it's a whole new world to not live every day with finding time to blog being my main focus; I'm hoping that the reduction in my exhaustion, stress and distraction will kick-start my spiritual growth for the new year, although it hasn't happened yet... karma, are you listening?
And finally, a possum update; there's clearly been more fighting going on, because now the littlest possum boy has showed up with an injury, a scarily big patch on his back with no fur, and with dried blood all over it. He seemed to be walking around without pain or difficulty, though, and he had his usual good appetite, so it must not be as bad as it looked; still, it's dismaying to see a sweet creature smiling in at me with a wound like that on him. Wild animals bring a certain amount of grief with them, because they don't live in bubble wrap cocoons and bad things DO happen to them; I get so much enjoyment out of being close to them that it's well worth it, but on days like today I do alot of worrying about them.
I've found that some people are dubious about possums smiling, so here's a site with 2 smiling babies on the front page; enjoy!!
http://www.opossum.org/
Be glad that CPU usage is an issue, or I'd have about 20 new Flash clocks, and looking at my sidebar would either blind you or drive you crazy; after much agonizing, I only chose ONE, although I'll probably start switching among the others I liked after a month or 2. The clock I picked was the lowest-tech looking one, but that made it different and thus more interesting, plus I LOVE pizza; take a look, and see what you think.
Isn't it FAB? What's even more amazing is that the same guy who made it made a staggering array of other brilliant clocks
http://www.mat.gr.jp/fc/library.html
Yes, it's a Japanese site, but all you have to do is click on the pic of a clock you want to see, and then there's a "download" button if you want it. Once you've got it on your computer, you can upload it to a file-storage site such as this one
http://ripway.com/
and then use my embed command (you can get it from my source code), with my URL replaced by the one for whatever file you chose, to post it on your blog.... but take a moment to check and see how much of your CPU your chosen clock eats up, because there are plenty of folks in the blogosphere with slow computers, and it's a good idea to make your site accessible to them as well as to those of us lucky enough to have fast machines.
I had a trouble-free doodad installation again; I'm not gonna get too used to it, lol, but it was nice. The only hitch was that my "clock code" is in a Word file, which is on my desktop machine, that's STILL dead (the files are safely on a hard drive, thank goodness, but my husband's been procrastinating about detaching it from the computer and making it available to my laptop via the network, grrrrrrrr), so I had to go to a site that I knew had a Flash clock, copy their code, and change the URL and size to what I wanted in order to put my new find in my template.
Speaking of my desktop; my husband said that there was only about a 5% chance that the expensive part he'd ordered for it would fail to fix it... and guess what? Now, he's going to pull some part from one of the other dead computers, swap it for the comparable part on mine, and see if that'll do the trick; if it doesn't, that'll mean that my motherboard's fried, and THAT would mean that it's time to get me a new computer, sigh... or, rather, HE would get a new computer, and I'd inherit his old one, since he needs far more power and speed than I do. He's dragging his heels getting this handled, and meantime my back is KILLING me from having to just use the laptop (because it's on the family room floor, which is literally the only place in our nearly furniture-free home to have it)... and trust me, when I get cranky, ain't nobody happy.
A friend of mine called tonight and announced her intention to drive down and visit me on Sunday, so that we can eat, shop, and have our Christmas gift exchange (yeah, it's pretty late, but hey, we haven't done the gift thing with my mother yet, either); this is good news, of course, but it means that my husband and I have to get going on our 30 hours or so of work to get our house, which hasn't been "cleaned for company" in about 6 months, ready for her arrival... I'm going to be REALLY grateful for only blogging on alternate days, and catching up on sleep, because my husband and I are always up, screaming and cleaning, until 5-6AM of the day a guest is due, trying to get it finished, and this way I won't be so wiped out when she gets here.
I've missed 2 nights of blogging now, and am amazed that it doesn't bother me at all; maybe it will once I stop being so eager to leap into bed early, but for now it's clearly a positive change... it really was unhealthy to be letting every other aspect of my personal life go hang to have time to blog, and now I'm headed in the right direction. I'm not remotely thinking of stopping blogging, fear not, but it's a whole new world to not live every day with finding time to blog being my main focus; I'm hoping that the reduction in my exhaustion, stress and distraction will kick-start my spiritual growth for the new year, although it hasn't happened yet... karma, are you listening?
And finally, a possum update; there's clearly been more fighting going on, because now the littlest possum boy has showed up with an injury, a scarily big patch on his back with no fur, and with dried blood all over it. He seemed to be walking around without pain or difficulty, though, and he had his usual good appetite, so it must not be as bad as it looked; still, it's dismaying to see a sweet creature smiling in at me with a wound like that on him. Wild animals bring a certain amount of grief with them, because they don't live in bubble wrap cocoons and bad things DO happen to them; I get so much enjoyment out of being close to them that it's well worth it, but on days like today I do alot of worrying about them.
I've found that some people are dubious about possums smiling, so here's a site with 2 smiling babies on the front page; enjoy!!
http://www.opossum.org/
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Everything fell apart, except ME
I had my 1st non-blogging night in 2 years last night; although I expected to have symptoms of blogging withdrawal, I honestly didn't miss it... I guess I'm NOT a blogging addict, although most of you probably thought I was. I got a good night's sleep, and I'm feeling optimistic about continuing with alternating days; I hope I'll be able to have time to read a BOOK sometime soon.
You know how disasters always seem to cluster? That's certainly the way it usually works in the Omni household, especially around the holiday season, and the past few days are a classic example; my desktop died right before the long weekend, adding extra delay to the part it needs, which of course isn't available in any store, arriving in the mail, we discovered a fruit fly breeding ground in our kitchen, as I mentioned in a recent post, and it's been a huge project to clean that up, an evil cat broke our birdfeeder from its many leaps at the innocent tweeties eating on it, and the poor birds didn't understand about the new feeder and wouldn't eat from it, they just hung around chirping anxiously for DAYS (I saw them using it today, thank goodness), my husband damaged one of our chairs when trying to clean it, something freaky happened with one of my bank statements, and of course that couldn't be resolved over the holiday weekend either... and then, yesterday, my husband's monitor died, again taking advantage of the long weekend to maximize the time until it can be fixed, AND the deadbolt on our back door broke, and if my husband hadn't made an issue to the guy at Home Depot when he tried to purchase a new one moments before closing time that he had a "hysterical wife" at home who was screaming about not being able to secure the door, THAT would have had to wait a couple of days, too... can you believe all this? Oh, and then tomorrow we have an adjuster coming to decide how much damage was done to my husband's car when he got rammed into in a parking lot a few weeks ago... yes, WEEKS, it's taken that long for them to get around to handling it.
sigh
On a lighter note:
We got a super-yummy snack from Whole Foods; it's a gourmet popcorn called "LesserEvil," and the flavor we got was "SinNamon"
http://lesserevil.com/an_sin.html
We found my husband's long-lost brother:
"It's a good thing for Oklahoma that Clint Ingram didn't listen to his coach.
On Oregon's last offensive play of last night's Holiday Bowl, the Oklahoma senior linebacker was supposed to blitz the Ducks, according to the call made by Sooners co-defensive coordinator Brent Venables.
But Ingram didn't get the message.
So he did something else instead: He went back into pass coverage, watched a pass coming his way toward the end zone and leaped to intercept it for a game-saving play. He landed at the 10-yard line and threw the ball into the stands in celebration of a 17-14 win for Oklahoma."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/college_football/holiday/20051230-9999-6s30hbnotes.html
He screwed up, and that led to him becoming a HERO; my husband is always messing things up and having it massively benefit him, so he couldn't wait to share this with me. He also gave me this one:
"Theresa Smith used her change from buying Christmas cookies to buy what she thought was a Powerball ticket. Instead, the clerk printed off a Lotto ticket. The clerk asked what she wanted to do, and she decided just to keep the Lotto ticket. Good thing. The ticket mistake was worth the $2.5 million jackpot in the drawing December 21, 2005."
http://www.coloradolottery.com/happenings/newsdisplay.cfm?newsid=108
Again, this is the sort of deal that would happen to my husband; he'd get the wrong thing, decide to just stick with what he's got, and profit from it... if it was ME, the ticket I DIDN'T get would have been the winner, lol.
It's been a lively year so far.
You know how disasters always seem to cluster? That's certainly the way it usually works in the Omni household, especially around the holiday season, and the past few days are a classic example; my desktop died right before the long weekend, adding extra delay to the part it needs, which of course isn't available in any store, arriving in the mail, we discovered a fruit fly breeding ground in our kitchen, as I mentioned in a recent post, and it's been a huge project to clean that up, an evil cat broke our birdfeeder from its many leaps at the innocent tweeties eating on it, and the poor birds didn't understand about the new feeder and wouldn't eat from it, they just hung around chirping anxiously for DAYS (I saw them using it today, thank goodness), my husband damaged one of our chairs when trying to clean it, something freaky happened with one of my bank statements, and of course that couldn't be resolved over the holiday weekend either... and then, yesterday, my husband's monitor died, again taking advantage of the long weekend to maximize the time until it can be fixed, AND the deadbolt on our back door broke, and if my husband hadn't made an issue to the guy at Home Depot when he tried to purchase a new one moments before closing time that he had a "hysterical wife" at home who was screaming about not being able to secure the door, THAT would have had to wait a couple of days, too... can you believe all this? Oh, and then tomorrow we have an adjuster coming to decide how much damage was done to my husband's car when he got rammed into in a parking lot a few weeks ago... yes, WEEKS, it's taken that long for them to get around to handling it.
sigh
On a lighter note:
We got a super-yummy snack from Whole Foods; it's a gourmet popcorn called "LesserEvil," and the flavor we got was "SinNamon"
http://lesserevil.com/an_sin.html
We found my husband's long-lost brother:
"It's a good thing for Oklahoma that Clint Ingram didn't listen to his coach.
On Oregon's last offensive play of last night's Holiday Bowl, the Oklahoma senior linebacker was supposed to blitz the Ducks, according to the call made by Sooners co-defensive coordinator Brent Venables.
But Ingram didn't get the message.
So he did something else instead: He went back into pass coverage, watched a pass coming his way toward the end zone and leaped to intercept it for a game-saving play. He landed at the 10-yard line and threw the ball into the stands in celebration of a 17-14 win for Oklahoma."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/college_football/holiday/20051230-9999-6s30hbnotes.html
He screwed up, and that led to him becoming a HERO; my husband is always messing things up and having it massively benefit him, so he couldn't wait to share this with me. He also gave me this one:
"Theresa Smith used her change from buying Christmas cookies to buy what she thought was a Powerball ticket. Instead, the clerk printed off a Lotto ticket. The clerk asked what she wanted to do, and she decided just to keep the Lotto ticket. Good thing. The ticket mistake was worth the $2.5 million jackpot in the drawing December 21, 2005."
http://www.coloradolottery.com/happenings/newsdisplay.cfm?newsid=108
Again, this is the sort of deal that would happen to my husband; he'd get the wrong thing, decide to just stick with what he's got, and profit from it... if it was ME, the ticket I DIDN'T get would have been the winner, lol.
It's been a lively year so far.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
It's my 2-year blog anniversary!! :-)
First, let me say Happy New Year to all in the blogosphere
I hope that 2006 will be your best year ever. For the ladies, here's an additional New Year's image... don't look at it if your man's around, hint hint:
(Website is gone, along with the photo, sorry!)
If you're seeing this post on New Year's day, you had a cool box pop up with a message for you; if you missed it, don't fret, because I'll do it again, probably for Valentine's Day next. Also, I've been altering the message in the script in my sidebar that's customized for your city to match the holidays, did you notice?
So; it's been 2 years since I made the leap into something I thought I'd never do... post my thoughts online to see if anyone would care enough to read them. If I'd known how many people would eventually be visiting this blog, and from how many countries (147 so far), I think I'd have been too overwhelmed to do it; all I ever expected to have was a handful of oddballs like me hanging around here. I'm proud and thrilled every day to see how many people take time out of their busy lives to check out my ramblings, especially after 2 years; I'm gladder than ever that I took the plunge. To all my regulars, especially those who've been here from the beginning; THANKS!!
My blog looked very different 2 years ago; I didn't have any links, and the counter was the only doodad on the whole site... now, I've got just about every doodad ever made for blogs, and a lengthy link list of blog buddies. I remember when my "archive" was just one little link; now, my archive is so big that I've switched from weekly to monthly to keep it from being a nuisance to scroll through (it'll be easier for search engines to handle, too).
Here's the BIG change; after 2 years of sitting at the keyboard every single day to compose a post, I'm... I'm... I can hardly bear to think it, much less say it... I'm going to switch to blogging on alternate days.
:-(
I hate to do it, folks, but I have to; I figured I should tell you about it in advance, because if a blog *I* read suddenly had half as many posts, I'd be concerned, and want to know what was going on. Here's the deal: I've never been so exhausted in my entire life. I've never been so far behind in my reading, my projects, my EVERYTHING. I've given up pretty much all the other stuff I'd been doing with my "me time," including some of my exercising (BAD) and WAY too much of my sleep, but I'm a slow typist writing long, complicated posts, and the 2-4 HOURS that I needed every day to compose an essay was crushing me. I've been telling myself all year long that I was going to turn it around, and I've TRIED; some of you may have noticed an increasing # of shorter posts, and posts about things like movies rather than substantive topics, but it wasn't anywhere near enough... I'm just too busy, and I finally have to accept that I can't do daily posts anymore. I love blogging, but it's silly to have it ruling my existence; I'm sure that not even my most devoted readers expect me to have the other areas of my life suffer to provide daily posts, and, although I still believe that having the discipline to write every day is a good thing, I think I've given ample proof of my ability to do it at this point... and now I have to start reading, listening to music, posting on my link-buddies' blogs, watching TV without having half of my attention on the compose screen, playing games, looking around online to see what's out there, calling friends when it's not their birthday, and getting a full night of sleep more than once a month, again.
My current plan is to write on alternating days, but I'm not going to be rigid about it; if I have a huge spiritual epiphany, or some other burning issue to share, I'm not going to delay it a day because I blogged the day before, and if I don't have anything much to say I'm not going to sit at the keyboard until 3AM trying to come up with something just because I didn't blog the day before. I'm also not going to push myself to write posts of a certain length anymore; if there's only one little thing that's on my mind, that's what I'll write, without spending an hour trying to come up with other interesting things to pad the post out.
I've gotten enormous satisfaction from the many revelations I've had from the focused thought required to write coherently, and my spirituality has taken gigantic leaps forward because of it, and... I'm USED to it. I can barely imagine what it's going to feel like when my "blogging time" comes tomorrow night and I don't do it.
I'll let you know in a couple of days.
I hope that 2006 will be your best year ever. For the ladies, here's an additional New Year's image... don't look at it if your man's around, hint hint:
(Website is gone, along with the photo, sorry!)
If you're seeing this post on New Year's day, you had a cool box pop up with a message for you; if you missed it, don't fret, because I'll do it again, probably for Valentine's Day next. Also, I've been altering the message in the script in my sidebar that's customized for your city to match the holidays, did you notice?
So; it's been 2 years since I made the leap into something I thought I'd never do... post my thoughts online to see if anyone would care enough to read them. If I'd known how many people would eventually be visiting this blog, and from how many countries (147 so far), I think I'd have been too overwhelmed to do it; all I ever expected to have was a handful of oddballs like me hanging around here. I'm proud and thrilled every day to see how many people take time out of their busy lives to check out my ramblings, especially after 2 years; I'm gladder than ever that I took the plunge. To all my regulars, especially those who've been here from the beginning; THANKS!!
My blog looked very different 2 years ago; I didn't have any links, and the counter was the only doodad on the whole site... now, I've got just about every doodad ever made for blogs, and a lengthy link list of blog buddies. I remember when my "archive" was just one little link; now, my archive is so big that I've switched from weekly to monthly to keep it from being a nuisance to scroll through (it'll be easier for search engines to handle, too).
Here's the BIG change; after 2 years of sitting at the keyboard every single day to compose a post, I'm... I'm... I can hardly bear to think it, much less say it... I'm going to switch to blogging on alternate days.
:-(
I hate to do it, folks, but I have to; I figured I should tell you about it in advance, because if a blog *I* read suddenly had half as many posts, I'd be concerned, and want to know what was going on. Here's the deal: I've never been so exhausted in my entire life. I've never been so far behind in my reading, my projects, my EVERYTHING. I've given up pretty much all the other stuff I'd been doing with my "me time," including some of my exercising (BAD) and WAY too much of my sleep, but I'm a slow typist writing long, complicated posts, and the 2-4 HOURS that I needed every day to compose an essay was crushing me. I've been telling myself all year long that I was going to turn it around, and I've TRIED; some of you may have noticed an increasing # of shorter posts, and posts about things like movies rather than substantive topics, but it wasn't anywhere near enough... I'm just too busy, and I finally have to accept that I can't do daily posts anymore. I love blogging, but it's silly to have it ruling my existence; I'm sure that not even my most devoted readers expect me to have the other areas of my life suffer to provide daily posts, and, although I still believe that having the discipline to write every day is a good thing, I think I've given ample proof of my ability to do it at this point... and now I have to start reading, listening to music, posting on my link-buddies' blogs, watching TV without having half of my attention on the compose screen, playing games, looking around online to see what's out there, calling friends when it's not their birthday, and getting a full night of sleep more than once a month, again.
My current plan is to write on alternating days, but I'm not going to be rigid about it; if I have a huge spiritual epiphany, or some other burning issue to share, I'm not going to delay it a day because I blogged the day before, and if I don't have anything much to say I'm not going to sit at the keyboard until 3AM trying to come up with something just because I didn't blog the day before. I'm also not going to push myself to write posts of a certain length anymore; if there's only one little thing that's on my mind, that's what I'll write, without spending an hour trying to come up with other interesting things to pad the post out.
I've gotten enormous satisfaction from the many revelations I've had from the focused thought required to write coherently, and my spirituality has taken gigantic leaps forward because of it, and... I'm USED to it. I can barely imagine what it's going to feel like when my "blogging time" comes tomorrow night and I don't do it.
I'll let you know in a couple of days.
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