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[Update again: My email address has changed. The new one has been updated to my profile.]
[Update: Okay, now my email address really is in my profile (View My Complete Profile). Thanks to DL Sly for letting me know it wasn't there before - and for figuring out how to let me know without the address being there.]
Perhaps permanently; I don’t know at this point. Comments are also closed but you can always email me; my address is in my profile over there ==> in the right margin.
I’ve enjoyed blogging for most of the time I’ve been doing it - almost six years now, wow! I’ve been looking back over some of my old blog posts and I think I’ve done some good work, some good writing, and I like knowing that. Now, however, blogging isn’t enjoyable for me and I’m not sure I’m doing particularly good work. Equally important, blogging keeps my focus on what’s wrong with, well, everything and keeps reminding me how little I can do about any of it. At this point, I’d rather focus on what’s right with everything and on what I can do something about.
On top of all that, I find that blogging - and especially the Internet reading I do when I’m blogging - gradually expands to fill the time available and then some. What can I say? I’m addicted to those little starbursts that go off in my brain when I click on a link and to those little starbursts that go off in my mind when something I read feeds one of my indignations.
I do like to write, which is part of why I’m leaving the door open to return to this blog someday. Or maybe down the road I’ll start an alternate blog - perhaps I’ll call it “IngleNook” - and write only about stuff like recipes and my grandparents and whether we lost one of our roses to the brutal winter.
I appreciate everyone who commented here over the years; your participation meant a lot to me. I’d also like to thank Cassandra over at Villainous Company for encouraging me early on: You made a world of difference to me, Cass. And I’d like to thank both Villainous Company and Grim’s Hall for taking me seriously as a blogger and for making me feel welcome as a commenter; I’ll be stopping by from time to time.
I wanted to close with a perfect quote or poem or epigraph or something and had fun running through some candidates. In the end, though, I always come back to this:
In the year 1652 when throughout England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, Bart., Whose special praise it is to have done the best things in the worst times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous.
Ciao.
I’m stepping away from the Internet for the next six weeks. I hope everyone survives the rest of Winter and that Spring is well on its way by the time I check back in.
We drove home last week, coming up from Lower Alabama where it was supposed to be warm (hah!) to New Jersey, where it was not supposed to be exactly warm but was supposed to be warmer than it has been. Despite the miserable weather that swept through much of the Southeast during January, we didn’t see any significant snow cover until we drove into Pennsylvania. Who knew snowstorms - or perhaps warm spells - recognized State lines?
In Pennsylvania the snow cover was solid: roadsides, yards, and fields all white. Instead of the lovely drifts and curves of a simple snowstorm, though, the ground was a solid, level, shiny sheet of white: a thick layer of ice over an even thicker layer of snow. Beautiful but oddly frightening, like driving through a cross between Antarctica and a glacier.
Once we turned east toward New Jersey we started seeing some trees still sheathed in ice. Since it was a gorgeous, cloudless day, they sparkled in the sun like crystal sculptures. Once over the Delaware River and into the home stretch, we saw whole groves of ice trees - breathtakingly beautiful. And where the mountains had been cut through for the road, rock walls were covered in icefalls. In one pass, the water had run over the graffiti that tags the rock and taken some of the paint with it so the icefalls had streaks of pink and blue and orange and green. Winter can make almost anything a work of art.
When we got home, we discovered that our neighbors had not only shoveled the sidewalk in front of our house, they had also shoveled our walkway up to the front door and enough of the driveway so we could get the gate open and pull the car off the street. I gifted them with home-made vegetable soup as a wholly inadequate thank-you and plan to go on so gifting them through the winter. The debt to them is so deep I may have to continue through the summer; I hope they like gazpacho.
I’m going to have very limited access to the Internet for the next six weeks so I won’t be blogging and comments are shut down.
I thought I’d leave you with a video (Via Ace of Spades). Someone set a camera up in front of his fireplace and let it run for about three hours. Every so often he pokes the fire or puts a new long on it. The fire burns nicely and the snaps and crackles are almost enough to make it feel warm. There are a couple of “click here” banners at the beginning of the video but they disappear by a minute in.
We started this running Christmas Eve; lit our seasonal candles; turned on our little, lop-sided ceramic tree; and spent a couple of hours listening to Christmas music courtesy of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:
Fireplace video
Have a very Happy New Year everyone. See you in February.
I’m not going to be posting anything for at least a week; in fact, I won’t be on the Internet at all. Not only have I driven myself crazy trying to figure out which way the country will jump on the ObamaCare debacle,* I’ve clicked and copied and written so much my poor arm is screaming in protest. (Darned pre-existing condition!) Clearly this is a sign from the universe to stop obsessing about this and think about something else for a while.
Over the next month or so, I’ll be doing what I always do when I get near my health insurance plan anniversary date: I’ll be comparing the available policies. This time around, I’ll also compare them to my no longer available current plan. As I get those comparisons done, I’ll post them. I can say right now, without looking at specific copays and deductibles, that the new coverage, at least from Blue Cross Blue Shield, is worse across the board than my current coverage.
How do I know? The new policies have no out-of-network coverage except for emergencies and prescription medicines. My current policy does. I’ve never used enough out-of-network care to hit my deductible but it’s a great comfort to know that if I need or want the kind of care I can’t get in-network, I can still get it without bankrupting myself.
It may be that other New Jersey insurance companies are selling individual policies that do have out-of-network coverage - I’ll have to figure that out as I go along.
*****
Notes:
* This is something fascinating about blogs, both reading and writing them. There seems to be an irresistible drive to predict what’s going to happen, to figure out what the country really thinks, to look for signs that the blogger’s (or reader’s) preferred point of view has been adopted, is being adopted, will be adopted. Yet no one can predict that and, really, all we have to do is wait and see. Very odd.
Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable
I won't be blogging this Summer. Accordingly, I've shut down comments on the blog.
I'll be away from my computer for a while; at least a week, possibly several weeks. Accordingly, I'm shutting down comments for the whole blog until I return.
I'm blogging again and will have a substantive post up later today. I think I have the blog set up so that people can comment but while I was away Blogger redid the entire interface. There are fields in my setup that have no value and I have not touched them for fear of causing a problem I have neither the time nor the inclination to struggle with.
So if you do comment and your writing is transliterated into Armenian or something, drop me an email. My email address is in my profile, over there ---> in the left margin.
Ciao.
The blog is on hiatus until the end of September/beginning of October. I’ve got some non-Internet stuff I want to focus on, starting with sitting on the deck, enjoying Spring and re-reading The Shallows by Nicolas Carr.
I can always be emailed; my email address is in my profile.
I'll have very little access to a computer until around mid-February.
Comments are closed. I can be emailed:
elise dot fb at verizon dot net
I’m blogging again - I have no idea for how long or how frequently. I’ve enabled comments. My comment policy is here. Please read it before commenting.
Metaphorically speaking again.
I haven't blogged in about six weeks and won't be doing so any time soon. If you want to check back, give it at least a month. I'll definitely check in no later than April 30 although I don't know if I'll be blogging again.
Comments are closed. I can be emailed:
elise dot fb at verizon dot net
Comments are open. Some recent posts may not allow comments because comments weren't allowed when they were written. I attempted to reconfigure those but may have missed some.
I said I wasn’t going to be blogging. Apparently, however, all it takes to start me writing again is deciding not to blog. Maybe I should just announce every week or so that I’m not blogging any longer.
I’m going dark - well, darker - for a while. I’ve started a number of posts lately and can’t “close” any of them so I’m going to stop trying. Comments are disabled although you can always reach me via my email address in my profile - look to the right-hand column and down.
I’ll check back on November 3 and let you know if it rained in Poughkeepsie on the 2nd.
Blogger is sorting some comments into the Spam bucket which is fine. It’s sorting some non-spam comments into the Spam bucket which is understandable. However, when it emails me about comments it is not warning me when a comment is sorted into the Spam bucket and that's neither fine nor understandable. This means I’ve been assuming the comments I’m emailed about have been showing up and so I haven’t been keeping up with un-spamming good comments as well as I should. I finally figured out this was going on and will be checking the Spam bucket more often - I’m hoping to remember to do it every day.
My apologies to anyone whose comments languished unread for too long.
One of my recent posts regarding women’s suffrage received a comment from Kevin D. Williamson regarding the post of his that got me started on all this. I had planned to begin this apology post with, “Assuming this comment is truly from the Kevin D. Williamson who wrote the NRO article I referenced”. Once I thought about it, however, I realized I owed Mr. Williamson an apology whether he was the commenter or not.
First, I assumed that I knew the motivation for Mr. Williamson’s apparent distaste for the Nineteenth Amendment. As a very wise woman recently reminded me, I can’t know someone else’s motivation and should therefore assume the best rather than the worst. So I apologize for tarring Mr. Williamson with motives expressed by those at NRO who clearly advocate overturning women’s suffrage but not by him.
Second, I spoke of Mr. Williamson in terms I would never use to a “real” person. I thought that because my blog was very obscure and therefore Mr. Williamson would never see what I wrote, I could act as if there was not actually a human being behind his keyboard. (One of the things that makes me wonder if the Kevin D. Williamson of the comment is the Kevin D. Williamson who wrote the NRO post is that the commenter is far kinder to me than I would have been if I were the person who wrote the NRO post.) I apologize for insulting Mr. Williamson.
I’m back. Comment moderation is disabled. Which sounds sort of backwards so: Comments are now allowed with no interference from me.
I watched the Sunday talk shows not this past Sunday but the week before. On one of them - maybe “Meet The Press” - the roundtable discussion basically came down to:
ObamaCare Supporter: The American people will love the Democrats’ health care reform.
ObamaCare Opponent: No they won’t.
Supporter: Yes they will.
Opponent: No they won’t.
Supporter: Yes they will.
Opponent: No they won’t.
Supporter: Yes they will. Medicare, Social Security.
Opponent: No they won’t. That Medicare Catastrophe thing that got repealed.
Supporter: Yes they will.
Opponent: No they won’t.
Supporter: Yes they will.
Opponent: No they won’t.
This is like arguing about whether it’s going to rain in Poughkeepsie on November 2. Eventually November 2 will get here and we’ll see if it rains in Poughkeepsie; there’s no point arguing about it now. And eventually November 2 will get here and we’ll see if the American people have come to love health care reform.
Or maybe we won’t. Maybe the American people will have come to love health care reform but the economy will still be in dire straits so they’ll vote a lot of Democrats out of office anyhow. Or maybe the American people will still hate health care reform but the economy will be booming and they’ll hang onto the Democrats because of that. Or maybe the American people will still hate health care reform but the Republicans will have done something so stupid the voters will figure that even the party that passed such a lousy health care bill is better than the Republicans. We don’t know right now but we will on November 2. Well okay, maybe not until November 3 if we've got a lot of slow counters out there.
All of which is by way of saying that I’m pretty much burned out on politics right now. This will become an occasional - very, very occasional - blog. If nothing else, however, I’ll try to remember to post on November 3 and let you know if it rained in Poughkeepsie on Tuesday.
You may have noticed that blogging has been light and it’s going to get lighter. I’ve got three non-bloggy undertakings underway and a fourth I should have underway and if I’m going to do them right there simply isn’t time for me to blog - or even to read what I usually read in order to blog. And honestly, if I were passionate about anything I’m writing about right now I’d find the time somehow but the truth is I’m feeling rather ennui-ish about all the burning issues of the day.
So I’m taking a break. There’s a part of me that says, “No, not now, not during the big final push for health care reform.” Then I remember this is the third (fourth? fifth? tenth? eleventy-leventh?) big final push for health care reform. and I don’t know that I really have anything else to say about it. Maybe that was President Obama’s strategy all along: keep winding everyone up with deadlines and eventually we’d all get Final Push Fatigue, wander off, and let him do whatever he wanted.
Today is March 10th. I’ll stop back by on March 31st. Comments are open and I’ll be checking my email regularly so feel free.
Happy Spring!
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