Indecisiveness

Today I received an invitation to attend a day-long big corporation design meeting at the end of March in Washington, DC, for a volunteer project that I’m passionate about. Flight, hotel, transportation, and most food paid for by the big corporation.

I know. That should be an easy decision, and that decision should be “Hell, yeah!”

But attending means taking one, perhaps even two, days off work (and no work means no pay for a contractor). That would be about 1/7 of my monthly pay I’d be giving up, which is a particularly big deal because of lingering financial issues related to my lengthy underemployment over the last year.

I don’t have a passport. I’ve never had a passport. I’d have to get photos taken, find a guarantor to vouch for me, and then apply for (and more importantly pay for) express passport processing. The fees are an issue right at this very moment, but more of an issue is the time — I’m in the middle of two fairly intensive freelance jobs at the moment (not to mention my “day” job) and just trying to figure out where to squeeze getting a passport in there stresses me even more than I’m already stressed out.

And there is the issue of leaving my cat alone. He’s old. He’s still unwell. Leaving him alone for a day wouldn’t be too bad (he’s already alone for half a day on days I’m working), but if I end up trying to mitigate the payment losses by going directly from the airport to work, then he’d be alone for almost two days.

I have to decide by end of day on Friday and I just don’t know. I’m truly torn, though I admit I’m leaning towards declining the invitation as that’s the option that eases my stress the most. But it would be a huge shame to miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — the company isn’t likely to extend the offer again in the future, especially since it looks like almost no one who has been invited to attend in person will actually be able to go.

So…I just don’t know.

And I have less than two days to change that.

Word!

The NaBloPoMo theme for daily blogging this month is “In a Word”, wherein you’re supposed to choose a word and build a blog post around that word, whether it’s just a word that strikes your fancy at the time or one that describes your overall day. It’s up to each blogger to decide what exactly it means. (And you’re by no means required to stay within that theme — the point of NaBloPoMo is really to just blog every day, and the theme is a tool you can use to inspire you to do that.)

I’ve been AWOL from this blog for months now, posting only occasionally. So I thought I might try (once again — I haven’t succeeded yet, though that doesn’t stop me attempting it) taking part in NaBloPoMo this month. I like the idea of picking a word a day to blog about. It’s likely to mostly be a word describing my day or state of mind that day, but who knows.

I seem to have misplaced April somewhere

Still free-floating in a weird place.

I’ve been here so long I should call it home, though I hate it here. Except when I don’t care.

My days have become a tangled mess of sleeping, introspection, procrastinating, avoidance, talking to my father on the phone, and taking care of Internet tasks that alternately make me sad and really very angry. My insides are being wound up to breaking point.

Last month was a blog washout because of where I was.

This month might be a blog washout because of where I need to go.

My May Jonathan Cainer horoscope says it all: “You can fix the one source of trouble that’s more daunting than all the rest. Focus on it. Don’t be distracted. Once that is sorted out (as it WILL be!) all else will fall into place.” It’s like he read my mind. I know what I have to do, and it’s time I actually did it.

Stick with me, though. I *will* be back, but it might be June. (Then again, it might turn out that I get really chatty during May. 😉 Look up, look waaaaay up.)

Call me crazy…

…but I’ve decided to try to tackle NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) again. If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, you know that, for a couple of months in late 2008 and early 2009, I tried to blog every day. It can be tough to do, but it’s good for improving your discipline if, like me, you frequently just don’t get around to writing.

So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be attempting to write at least one post every day for the 31 days of March. I can’t guarantee that all (or even any) of them will be brilliant, but I plan to pick through the many, many, MANY half-written posts sitting in my Drafts folder. That’s a win-win for everyone.  🙂

End-of-year blogging stats

This blog certainly isn’t in the same league with the more popular blogs. My view stats are probably quite humourous when compared with them. But the growth is more important to me than the numbers.

You can see that I really didn’t do much with the blog until early 2008. (Views prior to that were primarily just friends dropping by.)

Stats by year:

• 2006 = 28 views, 27 posts
• 2007 = 626 views, 61 posts
• 2008 = 11,437 views (1/2 that just in last three months), 234 posts

Total: 12,215 views, 322 posts, 188 comments, 490 tags (I didn’t start tagging consistently until late April 2008 so I’ve been going back through the old posts over the last couple of days adding the missing tags — it’s going to take me awhile to get them all updated. You can see that the view counts started going up when I started tagging — that wasn’t the only reason for the growth but it certainly helped. Let that be a lesson to you.)

Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep up the momentum. NaBloPoMo is helping in that it’s making me more conscious of keeping up with posting. By the way, the NaBloPoMo theme for January is CHANGE.

Struggling with NaBloPoMo

Writing a post every day is difficult. I’ve written 34 posts so far this month (including this one) — more than the 31 posts promised but I’ll have failed at the task if I don’t manage to keep up the posting each and every day for the rest of the month. There’s a pressure to having to come up with something worth writing about every day. Sometimes I can postdate a post or two, if I’ve already gone on at length about something else that day, but sometimes the posts are time-sensitive and waiting a day or two to post makes it all rather pointless.

On the plus side, it’s making me pay more attention to this blog. I should end the year with over 12,000 views total, over half that just in the last three months. (Most posts only get a couple views, but a several have gotten hundreds.) Which should tell you that blogging regularly really does help. So does tagging your posts properly.

Nada NaNo

Never managed to get around to actually writing as part of this year’s NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Mind you, I didn’t get around to doing much of anything else either so welcome to my life, NaNoWriMo. Think I can write 49,000 words in 21 hours?

While surfing around tonight, which I’m doing since I am still overstimulated by an excess of caffeine and Pink’s “Sober” on autorepeat, I came across NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month. The idea is to post at least once a day, every day, for the whole month. It’s way too late for me to take part in the official November prizapalooza — I’ll have made 30+ posts but not at least one every day — but I’ve signed up to take part in December. So that’s a promise of 31 posts at least in December. The suggested monthly theme is “THANKS!”. Maybe I’ll take it as a sign to start that gratitude journal that I’ve been promising to start.