all we are, is dust in the wind, dude

First day of school holidays today. The wee one is knackered after a really busy term and I’m also looking forward to getting out of the school routine a bit (especially school lunches…oh man). Yes, I’m having to squeeze in my own stuff around our hang-out time, but that’s pretty much the at-home parent job description, I guess.

Today though she was invited to go to junglerama with a buddy, and won’t be back until 4pm apparently. So I have all afternoon to potter around and do my thing, which has been nice so far. I went for a run (I told myself I could just cruise it, the whole point was to just get out, but I wound up having my strongest run since I started running again about three weeks ago). Had a shower. Ate soup. Feel human. It’s amazing how little we really need to get back into a good space. If only we (ok, when I say “we”, I’m talking about me here) didn’t come up with quite so many excuses to do the work. It feels so good when it’s done (and I confess the run actually felt really good today).

It’s a dismal grey day today, and we had a huge downpour last night. The neighbour’s creek burst its banks and Steve and one of our neighbours were running around on the road creating stop banks to keep the other neighbours (several of whom were away) from having their yards flooded. An internal gutter got blocked on our back patio and water started spraying all over our back door through the patio roof. Steve climbed up and cleared that all out in the pouring rain. He was a total hero, yeah!

And now I am sitting here with my Noisili set to “rain/thunder.” WTF.

I am thinking a lot more about my blog, especially now I have ported it from Wordpress, and what I want it to be. I realise completely that it is no longer as slick as it once was, and I wonder if that is off-putting?

I’m also still trying to get my domain stuff properly set up; the people who host me say either I can have cloaking set up so every page just displays as “discombobulated.co.nz” or just have a redirect in place, so that if someone types in the above, they get taken to the blot.im blog. I’m no expert here but I’m pretty sure there should be an option to replace my blot domain name with my registered domain name. The conversations so far though have been slow going so I may just leave that issue until I have more energy to get into it. I know I should just be able to create an alias record to point to the new blog, but for some reason the interface won’t let me do it. BAH.

I am still also trying to figure out what I might put in here. I do so much on paper these days: I have a giant journal that I paste stuff in, and write in, and do Artist’s Way ponderings in. I have another notebook that I write Morning Pages in. I have a bullet journal. Notebooks for writing drafts. I don’t really want to duplicate any of that here. So the “dear diary”-style posts of the past (I’ve just realised I’ve been blogging for seventeen years) may stay things of the past.

I do enjoy reading about writing process. So there will be some of that in here, no doubt. And I would like to move into writing more about what I read, as well. So: some of that too. Maybe some thoughts on diary-writing and journaling in general. Some tech. Despite my fluffing about with domains I am reasonably techy (twenty years in IT). I use windows and a mac, and I often struggle with getting them to work together in a useful way. I’ll write about that too.

Other things I enjoy: photography (film photography in particular), cooking, playing the piano, cats, knitting (though my crafty stuff lives on instagram, and I think can stay there for the present), stationery (I am alternately trying to talk myself into/out of getting a blue traveler’s notebook), music, film. I tend to write conversationally, rather than authoritatively. I don’t much like bossing people around.

But as to why I continue to blog: I enjoy having a small postage-stamp-sized corner of the internet where I can do something the way I want to. I like having meta conversations with other people, and that reminds me that I need to thank the people whose blogs I enjoy and read reasonably-regularly, for making their corners of the web lovely places too. It’s rare to find spots on the net these days where someone isn’t trying to sell you something, and I’ll try to resist doing that too, although as I’m trying to develop my writing career (aka getting published), there will be some of that too. But I promise not to push it down your throat.

And with that, I feel like I’ve defined things as much as they ever will be. Thanks for reading. :)