In 2005, just before relocating to New Zealand, we started a blog.  It was the thing to do back then and everyone had a blog.  You did too, probably.  For the next couple of years we chronicled the exciting overseas adventure in reasonable detail and happened upon the occasional entertaining comment thread with interested readers.

In 2007, having completed our OE and returned to Peoria, the old NZ blog was decommissioned and a less active blog of Peoria goings-on was set up.  Though it wasn’t filled with photos and tales from a far away land, it provided a log of what we were up to as well as a platform for the occasional op-ed piece.  Even mundane things can be fun to describe.

In 2010 we quit our jobs at CAT and moved to Oregon. This was not to be just the next in an unending series of relocations, but rather, according to our plans, the final landing zone. We’d visited Oregon 10 years ago and had always wanted to live here.

With new jobs, a new adventure in a beautiful and interesting state, surely there would be a healthy series of posts by now, right?  Nope.  One post.  What happened? Facebook happened.  In 2009, we got sucked into the Facebook machine due to its novelty.  (All these old friends… amazing!  I didn’t realize she even knew what a computer was yet she’s on Facebook… exciting!)  And over the past 2 years, as we actually started posting on Facebook, the blog died.  Why bother?  Everyone is on Facebook, it’s easy to post something simple since there isn’t the commitment to write very much, and you’d get all those Likes and “I KNOW!!!!” comments to stroke your ego.

But abandoning the blog was a mistake.  Being a consumer and producer on Facebook is fun and perfectly fine, but I’ve come to realize that what you’re left with at the end of your efforts is:  nothing.  Facebook is merely a stock ticker for life.  It’s random data points from your “social network”.  It’s also a lot of noise, commercials, and time wasting activities.  But most importantly, it has not been the durable diary that our blogs were.  It’s a joke to compare previous blog posts to my timeline on Facebook.  And of course, 95% of the blame goes to me.  Facebook has just been an enabler for lazy behavior.

So I’m here to declare a return to blogging.  I make no promises of frequency, but I suspect I’ll do better than one post in 18 months.  I hope it will be quite a bit better.  The prospect of moving beyond quips and jokes on Facebook to longer more thoughtful contributions on a blog is quite appealing.  I hope it’s interesting to readers too, but it doesn’t matter.  I can derive a lot of pleasure by rereading our old blogs, whereas I get zero pleasure looking at my Facebook timeline.  I hope to continue the former.

(Note: in most cases “I” means “we”.  Angela and I are of similar opinion on this and she’s keen to get back to blogging too.)

(Content note: in this iteration of the blog, there may be some technical articles.  I mean really technical that will appeal to almost no one. Ignore them. I’ve considered many times the idea of creating a tech blog, but I don’t want to deal with the overhead and don’t really have enough material for one.  So instead they will stick out like a sore thumb on our personal blog.)