Sunday, January 31, 2010

unfinished business:
blog not as dormant as predicted

I had said, earlier, that the previous post was to be the next-to-last post for this blog, because I would be writing an epilogue and then leaving it at that. However, I began to realize that doing so would have meant breaking several promises. One promise, from early in this blog's existence, stands out: the promised transcription of several recorded dialogues that occurred during my 600-mile trek across the Pacific Northwest in 2008. For one reason or another, I've been unable to sit down for a straight block of time to work on transcription. During the first few months I was back home from the walk, the main reason was renovation: the house was being torn up and rebuilt, which made lengthy sessions on the computer difficult. From the spring of 2009 onward, I was more preoccupied by Mom's cancer than by any need to finish those transcriptions, and while I did write some lengthy blog posts during that time, they were all, in some way, about Mom.

But now I'm at a point that I foresaw during Mom's illness: Mom is gone and I suddenly find myself with plenty of free time. Here's the plan, then: I'll write my epilogue, but at the end of the epilogue, I'll append updates that pertain only to transcribed dialogues. The dialogues themselves will be backdated so as to be filed away in the murky depths of the blog archives, i.e., the epilogue will remain the blog's final post. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, I strongly recommend that you peruse my sidebar (many folks who visit blogs never bother looking at sidebars, which is a shame). Near the top is a section titled "Interactions," which contains links to records of some of the encounters I had during my walk. Those exchanges ought to give you, Dear Reader, an idea of what's coming.

So the basic imperative remains: stop by every once in a while, and check to see whether I've added new links to my epilogue, once it's written. No definite timeline; I don't plan to box myself in with more promises I might not be able to keep.

As always: thank you.


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