December 22nd

For two years, I blogged every single day.  I may have written every day too, but I can't quite remember.  It was irritating, to you as well as to me, and took up time I could've been doing everything from self-publishing to exercising in, but it was hard to stop.  When I went to Europe, no matter how tired I was, I wanted to write down my experiences (or feelings about my experiences) each day, regardless of whether other folks found it interesting or not.

This month, I've been pretty spare when it came to blogging, mostly intentionally.  But I discovered that there's a downside to not blogging (for me, rather than for you): I've had absolutely no pressure about fulfilling my December goals without it.

One of my goals was to publish two things (downsized from my goal of publishing three things), and without typing the words "I haven't published anything yet this month, but I will," I haven't found the strength within myself to do it, even though it would probably take less than ten minutes to get a story out there.  I have no one to blame by myself.

Also, I worked for several days on a TV show, which I enjoyed (close to) every minute of,* watching likeable, talented, or extremely beautiful people performing over and over in front of me, and being in the exciting world of entertainment once again.  But I didn't write about it, and I started podcasting about it, but Big Anklevich called me about three minutes in, and I never went back to it.  And that's disappointing, because working on this show was probably in the Top Five (maybe Top Three) projects I've been a part of.

I also wanted to complain that I was picked to write a story for our family Christmas party again, and couldn't come up with a good idea this year.  I struggled with it, and then discovered that it was just last year, December of 2021, that I wrote the last one.  When I found that out, I just decided to re-run the first one I wrote, back in 2017.  That was nice.

I played Whamageddon this month, competing against my fellow humans to see who could hold out the longest without crapping themselves, and sadly, failed a couple of days ago when I thought I could walk to the toilet rather than run.  Oh wait, that's not what Whamageddon is: Whamageddon is a competition where you see who can go the longest without hearing "Last Christmas" by Wham!  It was a somewhat-fun game, but would be a heck of a lot better if I were doing it with a bunch of coworkers in an office, or at least blogging my progress each day.  Sigh.

And I wanted to talk about a bad eBay experience I had, where a guy wanted to return an item for a refund after he'd made it valueless, and so I asked eBay to step in, and they said, "Okay, you have to give him a refund AND he gets to keep the item."  It was such an unjust decision that I appealed it for the first time in my decades on eBay . . . and they came back with an immediate "We have found in favor of the buyer and our decision stands" in such short proximity that I knew they hadn't even considered what I'd told them.

But I didn't.

Now I'm at the library again, typing this instead of finishing my Christmas story (which is actually pretty close to finished, with only an hour or so more I need to commit to it to get to those most joyous two words).  Not sure what's wrong with me, but it's something.

*Close to, because I have never been a morning person, and I had to get up early, starting at 5:30, to get there on time.  Which I never managed.  Not once.  Came close on the last day, though.