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So it’s a Monday and I’ve had all weekend to prepare something worthy of getting published. Let me tell you right up front that this isn’t it….I’m not sure what this is yet. It’s Sunday night and I have been putting this post off for days. It isn’t because I don’t have any ideas, it’s because deep down … when push comes to shove … I shut down am typically even more motivated but this weekend, meh. For those of you who write your own blog, I know that you will be the first people to support me when I say that preparing these posts is a grind and takes quite a bit of time – that some part of you is always thinking about the “next post”. I feel a sense of obligation to continue writing at my current pace and I have a lot of people who tell I am “a machine” for writing as often as I do – but I love doing it and have found a nice warm spot to tuck the panic and fear I feel daily when it comes time to create and write about something. Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be the “funny architect” (but no pressure Mr. Funny Man – theme: asphalt shingles and mailboxes – ENTERTAIN ME!!)
Since I am my technically my own master in ‘Life of an Architect’ world, I can write about whatever I want – I”m not selling anything and I don’t have an agenda to push. I have lots of ideas and plenty of topics – turns out I am incredibly full of shit – more than even I realized. When I first starting writing this blog 8 months ago, my biggest fear was trying to figure out what I was going to write about. Okay, maybe that was my second biggest fear behind nobody ever reading my blog. You may not believe me when I tell you that I am a terrible writer and that every post I write comes straight out of my head and into the computer with little editing. (Okay, so if you do read this blog you probably did know that.) I might change a word here and there for comedic impact – but actually go back and edit for content? No way, I’m not writing foreign policy white papers here.
For every post I publish, it takes me approximately 90 minutes to 2 hours start to finish. Most of that time is setting up all the behind the scenes crap or editing pictures so they are the correct size on your screen. That’s the part of this whole blog thing that is starting to become a grind. I need blog goblins to come wrap up the dirty work so I can focus on blog direction, critical thinking, and potty humor. If you know where those bastards are at, please let me know.
I spent a good part of my Saturday working on the yard – mowing, edging, weed-whacking, bush-trimming, tree pruning and on and on. It was like 473 degrees here on Saturday and I am pretty sure I almost died but the yard had been looking like the house of a OCD shut-in and I needed to step it up and handle up on my yard business. As I was working, I was thinking about the blog post – any blog post … all blog posts. It needed to get done, they don’t write themselves (not unless you have one of the goblins I mentioned earlier). When I finished, my wife and daughter were out running errands and it was the perfect guilt free time to write this post…
but I didn’t.
I grabbed a cold beer, and rather than turning on the sprinkler system, I set up an old school whirly style sprinkler and pulled a chair into the yard so my feet would get wet. It felt great … it was great … and made me think about the many wonderful things in life and to try and get back to being a glass-half-full kind of person.
(The impact of this picture had I actually been in the chair enjoying the moment would have been sweet right?)
I have made a decision (I think) to write less. Maybe. I don’t know but it will be something. That might mean fewer posts or at least – shorter posts. School for my daughter starts tomorrow, residential architecture practices like mine will start to pick up and I just don’t want to spend so much time writing this blog anymore. I still enjoy it, in fact I like it more now then when I started. When people ask how I can write as much as I do I think of something a friend of mine told me when I asked him about lifting weights. He told me that the weights were still heavy for him, he could just lift them.
He could just do it … that sort of what this blog is or has become for me – I can just do it. Of course it’s only been 8 months and there are people that write almost every day and have done so for years. Oh well … I have a unique sense of pride and ownership with this blog and it is by far my longest lasting hobby so who knows what will really happen. Maybe in terms of free-hobby-blogs this one is in it’s formative teenage years, complete with acne, big feet and has lost itself a little of itself during a period of metamorphosis …
I don’t know but so far, so good. I think.
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