I’m not kidding, I have around 100 websites, some of which I’ve mentioned here, and some of which I may never admit to!  I have experimental sites, sites I love, sites I once nurtured and loved but have left hanging in the stratosphere, sites that I pay other people to write for because they actually bring in a half decent income but aren’t things I’d want to write over often because they’re sometimes about household appliances and other utilitarian topics but not necessarily always exciting things to write about, and even a choose your own adventure site which I have to finish because I’ve already told my daughter about it and she’s getting excited!

And then I started blogs over things I like to do personally, rather than just posting about them here and assigning them to categories.  You know what happens then?  I end up with all of these sad blogs with like one or two posts on them, and then that makes me sad.

Why, WHY, do I do this??  Do I really think I can maintain 100 awesome sites??  There is something seriously wrong with me!

So, what this comes down to, is that I need to start paring things down, and start writing about personal things, things I really love to do, here.  This is why I will not be starting a piano project blog as previously mentioned, because I love to play the piano, it’s a major part of me, and thus should be in my personal blog!

Another sucky thing about my project is that I chose a really bad time to start it, today we bought a new house and for the better part of the last month have been busy with house-buying bureaucracy out the wazoo, new furniture shopping, and pre-moving cleaning that’s involved with buying a new house.

Today we closed, so that means that we now need to move in, and the piano project will be moved to a future time TBD.

Now if I see one topic growing too big for this blog, THEN I can see making a new site for it, but in the mean time, maybe I will move a few of my other secret, personal bloggy things into this one and stop this madness!

Next I’d like to start writing here again…

What I’ve (re)found today is that if you get up very early, you can get pretty much whatever you want done while the world around you is silent and sleeping.  So I’m committing myself to getting up early every day; and now I’m going to decide what to fill those mornings with.  My website work has to be the first priority, no doubt, with the way our finances are going.  And if I can get a lot lot of that done, there will be some morning music mastery going on as well.

This redux, much like the blur of this year, is on the heals on an utterly bittersweet waking:  I was having a rare fantastic dream, but was awoke by a bug crawling on me (which, with my fear of bugs, was by far the creepiest thing that’s happened to me in a long time).

So on that note, I think I will now linger in the memory of that fantastic dream that was so vilely interrupted.  And likewse, hopefully I will find something fantastic to write about in the near future.

First, even though this is a personal blog, I tend to refrain from posting personal thoughts and tend to only post things that I think other people may find useful… for instance posting about my family tree would be useful to others working on the same genealogical line, mentioning a tasty new iced coffee drink may be useful to others who like iced coffee, and offering free WP themes may be useful; whereas posting about my personal plans or thoughts may not be so useful.

And then that brings me to the second point:  reading personal thoughts is great if they are well written and offer something on a universal level, in other words, if they are of literary value.  But I seriously doubt that many of the thoughts I’ve contemplated posting are of much literary value… that would take more writing practice…

Writing practice… that’s another thing – I like Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing approach to writing – which theorizes that it takes lots of practice writing to write things of literary stature.  It would be so easy for me to log in and post it here… but do I want a public place like this to be my practice area – probably not, talk about cluttering up a blog.  Also, I doubt that I want every single thought of mine floating through the interweb.

So what combination of thoughts and information makes a good personal blog?  That’s part of what I’ll be trying to figure out here, and hopefully I’ll be able to offer some useful information as well as some insightful thoughts.

Feel free to leave me your thoughts on the nature of the personal blog, as well.

On the other hand – they could be tags or even sub-categories.

On the other hand – it’s such a beast that it could very well be it’s own blog.

Maybe I will just make a subdomain of this blog and post it there?

It looks like wherever I post it, it will have to be the old-fashioned way because I cannot find a genealogy WordPress plugin, and I don’t have the time to try to create one right now.  If you know of one – please let me know!

In the past few weeks I’ve visited relatives and gathered a wealth of photos and information about my family (and I still have more people to contact and visit).  On top of that, I’ve spent many a late night researching details through Ancestry.com and through a lot of Googling.

So I wanted to have a public place to share all of this information and I figured, what better place than my own personal blog?  So stay tuned – I’m going to be figuring out how best to publish family trees with information on here and I’ll let you know how I go about it in case you’d like to do the same.