The Loss Leader of Life

Every New Year I vow to attack this blog with great vigor, resolving to update it at least once a week with reports of my adventures and successes which I assure myself are many and sundry. And for a while this goes as planned. Then summer arrives and I am reminded of the projects and endeavors I swore to do as I peered at the yard through rime-laced windows and it all goes out the door. Figuratively. Literally.

Which is how it should be. There are only so many days in a year, only so many of which are warm and pleasant, and I am less grasshopper than ant. Over at UncMo my friend Christina, who is a thousand times more articulate than I am, has recently embraced the freelancer lifestyle in which “every hour has to be accounted for.”

The upshot is, every hour is billable to something. Your livelihood. Your loved ones. Your sanity. Your soul. Remember that’s always true, whether you’re freelance or not: Every hour is billable.

So running and paddleboarding and building and maintaining gardens and manufacturing tiki bars with the sons and performing various minor household upgrades and binge-watching Jessica Jones and working for money and sometimes — sometimes! — actually writing something for submission has not left much time for dear old bloggy. And yet at odd moments I have tightened a few gaskets. I reorganized the Clips page to highlight the good stuff. I truncated my biography on the About page. (True story: more than one venue has identified me as an “archaeologist” even though I haven’t performed practical archaeology in 14 years. I prefer short one- or two-sentence bios to accompany my byline, and always justified my longish About page for those who took the trouble to click over to learn more about me. Alas, this seems to have confused some people who think studying archaeology as an aid to one’s historically themed writing is the same as doing it as a profession — so out went the education along with other superfluous details). I still don’t know what to do with the Genericons in the lower right corner; I don’t like them but haven’t found a substitute.

The garden smells of basil, the arugula is as light and sweet as cotton candy, and the pumpkin vines are already out of control. I PRed a 5K last month. The garage sports a fresh coat of paint. The Sound is warm and perfect for swimming.