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"Pace is all. Rhythm is master. Consistency is your friend."

Friday, June 15, 2007

I'm Still Here

Yes, I know. I haven't been blogging. Haven't been in the mood, I guess. Been busy with other things - Work mainly, but I've managed to squeeze in some good stuff, too. You know, real life. Like Thursday . . .

Thursday was my older son's last day of school. It was exciting (even at four years old he knows enough to look forward to summer vacation) and a little sad, too. I tend to get attached. I'm going to miss his teacher. (I will admit to having one of those sad smiles on my face when he hugged his preschool teacher goodbye.) She was great with him. She really got to know him and our whole family. She even gave him what I consider to be one of the best compliments someone can give when she told me that he reminded her of her own son :)

I won't miss having to split my day in half to go pick him up for lunch. I'll enjoy being able to take a few highly anticipated day trips to the zoo and such. It will be nice for my younger son to have his playmate back in the A.M. And it will be fun to experience that back-to-school excitement again in the fall. (Kind of brings me back to when I was a kid . . . going school shopping, picking out my first day of school outfit, not being able to sleep the night before the big first day . . .)

So that was Thursday. I've also been reading a lot instead of writing. Really I should be doing both, but haven't quite found that balance yet. I'm reading "American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work" by Susan Cheever. (Yes I'm on that transcendentalism kick again :) It's pretty good. A good portion of it I'd read in other books, but I'm learning a lot about Alcott and Hawthorne that I didn't know before. It really was a kind of magical time in the mid-1800's in Concord, MA. I think I would have enjoyed the atmosphere - all that talk of literature and philosophy. The idea that there was more to life than just work . . . That God could be found in nature and not just in a church . . . That it was important to experience life, to live it, to not rush from one task to another in order to get everything done . . . I just think I would have liked it.

What else? Oh, I was listening to one of my favorite shows on NPR the other day, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, and they were doing one of my favorite topics of the year - summer reading lists. Ashbrook had several guests on sharing what they thought would be great summer reads this year. There were quite a few that sounded interesting and I've already suggested Boomsday by Christopher Buckley to my husband. (Buckley wrote Thank You for Smoking which I haven't read but the movie was darkly hilarious.) It seems right up his alley. If you're looking for something to pick up at the bookstore, be sure and check out their list.

Another topic that was covered this week on the show was titled "The End of the Private Life." It talked about how people are willing to share everything from their most embarrassing moment to stories about their children and bosses with complete strangers via the Internet. And it got me thinking. I've always tried to be somewhat conscious of revealing too much (because you never know who might be reading :) but I know that I have also written things on here that I don't have the courage to say out loud anywhere else.

At the same time, I started to think about how this blog has changed over the last year or so. It started out as something that was somewhat impersonal where I mainly talked about issues that were important to me or thoughts I had about random things I saw or read about, but now it seems I spend more time talking about my personal life than anything else. And I'm not sure that's how I want it to be. I need to reevaluate what it is I want my writing to represent. I think I need to refocus on some of the issues that are important to me and share my ideas with all of you so that maybe you'll begin to do some thinking of your own.

Maybe I just haven't been thinking that much lately about anything other than my personal stuff . . . That's certainly a possibility and if that's the case, I definitely need to switch gears.

All right. My mind has pretty much shut down at this point. Getting up at 5 a.m. makes for a long day by four in the afternoon. I could really use a nap. Or maybe I should go clean my house. It could use it. But I'll probably go try and catch up on my magazine reading instead. Give me something to write about ;)


***Just to illustrate how unmotivated I've been - I started this entry Friday morning at 7:30 a.m. and didn't get around to finishing/posting it until 4 p.m. on Saturday. Oh well.

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2 Comments:

At 6/17/2007 01:53:00 AM, Blogger cherylann said...

I like reading about all your personal stuff. hahaha. Give me the dirt, Nanc! Oh, and your page takes FOREVA to load... it's killer- you should check that out. I'll give you a call next week... just email and let me know when you are available for comment... hahaha. xoxo

 
At 6/19/2007 11:19:00 PM, Blogger Alex Elliot said...

Glad you're back! I feel like my blog has gone through a bunch of changes as well. It just depends on my mood.

 

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