Thanks to all who inquired about Benzene's fate. I used Steve's letter here, but many others would have done as well ("an attendant lord"). I think nearly every member of my small readership sent a note or two before giving up.

Mom asked if the new day job has made me too busy to continue blogging. Well, sort of. But when you put it like that, it sounds like the job has kept me so busy that I don't have any free time to spare for anything else, which certainly isn't the case. Although it's the nearest thing to a regular full-time job that I've had in seven years, I still average only about 25 hours a week.

It's not a matter of time which is "free" or unfree; it's a matter of priorities. There are always a zillion things I'd like to be doing, and that includes such unfree activities as going to work to make money (which, after years as a bohemian, I still think of as a choice to be abandoned as soon as it's no longer fun) as well as pleasant inactivities like sitting around the house all day doing nothing or simply taking the time to do things slowly rather than quickly.

But there's never enough time to do all of them. So when my priorities are rearranged to devote time to something new, something old is going to get bumped off the schedule at the other end. It's not a coincidence that Benzene went on hiatus at almost exactly the same time I started working. Even as a part-time job, that's still 25 hours per week less I have to do something else.

Although the job was the biggest one, there've been plenty of other rearrangements in my time this year. As Ericka and I continue to infiltrate one another's lives more and more, it changes the habits of both of us (which is rather the point, after all). Many of the things we do together are things I used to do on my own anyway, but many others aren't. Also, at times during the year I've spent huge chunks of time playing various board games online -- mostly Scrabble (first at Quadplex and then, when Quadplex started charging a fee, at ISC) and then Settlers of Catan (AsoBrain is prettier and has all the variants, but JSettlers has more real-live opponents). I've also discovered an implementation of Titan, but so far I haven't been able to get it to work. Another idle pastime has been following the Oakland A's. I haven't spent nearly as much time watching them this season as I did the past two, but it's still more than I did during the off-season. (Curiously, the period of Benzene's hiatus almost exactly matches MLB's regular season.)

Benzene isn't the only thing that got bumped off the to-do list, of course. I used to spend quite a bit of time online reading other people's blogs, but that dropped down to zero some time around March. Since then I occasionally checked Pete's RaptorMagic, but nothing else until just last week when I took a quick peek at a few of the political ones I used to read. Time spent reading books was also way way down, though it's coming back up again in the past month. Time spent watching television steadily declined to near zero, so that when I moved last month, I decided not to start a cable subscription. I haven't set up an antenna either, so I have no TV at all here except what I have on tape. I was curious to see how much I'll miss it. (So far, a little but not much.)

I'm not sure if the return today means Benzene will be back for a while or if it's just a blip. Mostly, I want to continue recording all the books I've read. I've got about ten of them backlogged now, and even if I don't have much to write about them -- I'd have to go back and look at what sort of notes I took -- I like to at least make note of them here. Other than that, we'll see.

2:06:45 AM  [permalink]  comment []