Can we get a do-over on this blog-day?

The first post in the history of Da Blog, written on this date eleven years ago, was written while cowering in a bus shelter. This post is being written under the overhang outside a library. To be sure, this is only because my computer won’t play nice with my mom’s Internet connection for some reason, and I wasn’t able to get to the library before it closed. But it is, in a way, a fitting way to end what might be the most disappointing year in the history of Da Blog.

Very little has changed since my last blog-day post. I spent the entire year following the inauguration much the same way I spent most of the latter half of 2016: lamenting that I couldn’t bring myself to work on the sorts of posts I had planned. This is the 36th post since my last blog-day post, and I actually think that might be a record low that holds up, between my policy of putting up at least one post a month and the Flex Schedule Watch posts towards the end of the year. I did get out some of the posts I wanted to get out about what’s gone wrong with our politics, but they ground to a halt after the inauguration – not because of the madness the Trump regime actually turned out to be, though it is making it that much harder to continue the series, but because the post I was working on at the time, the post I’d been planning since 2008, was made far more difficult and complicated by the election. Honestly I’ve been mentally transitioning to thinking about the projects I want to work on once I’m done with this series, but I keep telling myself I need to finish the series (much of the work on which is actually pretty close to done), but in order to finish the series I need to have some sort of post re-introducing it. Which is something I actually tried to do, but which didn’t end up bearing out in the form of getting any actual posts written before enough time passed to make it not-timely again.

I actually have some optimism that this coming year won’t be quite so much a lost year as the last year was. I’ve actually started the process of taking steps to actually improve my work habits and actually get some of the stuff I want to get done done. The chintziness of how Mom’s connection works with my computer might actually work in my favor on this front; without the distractions from the rest of the Internet I might actually be able to put the finishing touches on one of my posts sufficiently to get it ready to post in the new year, and the work on that might put me enough in the mood that it can help with working on the other posts. Still, I wouldn’t expect any new posts on Da Blog after this until after the new year.

I may also move to a new host at some point in the new year. Some of you may have noticed that Da Blog went down at several points in the latter half of the year. This is because I moved to only renewing my hosting on a monthly basis and had it recommended to me to find a cheaper hosting option for the long term. That has proven not to be as much of a slam dunk as it was when I first signed up with Hostmonster, in part because of a number of hosts, including Hostmonster, being gobbled up by huge impersonal organizations, making it hard to find a host that would actually be a suitable replacement. I have some ideas, but I would need to discuss them with people and reassess how the landscape may have shifted since I did my original round of research, and in any case having to move everything, including the customization I’ve done to my theme, would be a major hassle.

I’d like to think we can just throw away Year Eleven as a lost year in the history of Da Blog, and I’ll be spending Year Twelve doing most of the things I said I would do in Year Eleven in the last blog-day post and firmly and officially moving on to the next phase of my life. Considering what I’m facing in terms of my financial situation (and the fact that I’m turning 30 in the next year!), I don’t have much choice. But who knows what my mental state will be and what it’ll allow me to do in the next year.