Fandango’s Provocative Question #107: HIATUS

For all practical purposes, I am on hiatus. There is just so much stuff that I have time for. I don’t have the time to deal with running up posts every day and still managing my life. Not that I wouldn’t like to do it, but I think my ability to push myself has ended. Will it affect my stats? Probably. Do I care? Not as much as I thought I would. Once I passed the million hit marker, stats began to seem irrelevant.

I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to get Garry a COVID vaccination. I think we did it today. It’s ONLY an hour and a bit away. Practically next door. I’m also on an all points search for my 2018 and 2019 IRS returns which I had, but which have disappeared. I can find every one since 2002 but the ones I need have vanished. Did I toss them away in a fit of wild-eyed cleanliness? And the people who usually do our taxes, namely the AARP, are also missing in action. They have copies of our taxes, but I can’t get in touch with them and the IRS says our phone numbers don’t exist. Honestly, they do exist — both of them. Really.

The only time I was really on hiatus was when I was on vacation and the Wi-Fi went kaput. The woman at the desk didn’t know how to reboot the router and wouldn’t let me do it. So we spent 8 days with no Wi-Fi and it dropped my stats to near zero by the end of the week. Everyone came back and recently stats have gotten surprisingly high, I don’t worry about stats. More important, I need those IRS forms. I need to get the house in order and do some other stuff — and I need sleep. As far as my endless search goes, I know where those papers used to be, but I don’t know where they are. Owen says I probably “put them somewhere safe” which is the same as putting them somewhere so obscure, I won’t find them until years after I needed them. I don’t even have someone to blame. It was absolutely me and I’m at a complete loss how I could do something like this.

I’ve been trying to take a break for a while. I’m pretty burned out and between one thing and another, I’m exhausted too. Mostly mentally. I think I’m as normal as I ever am physically. But my brain is fried and I finally have to admit, I just can’t keep doing this and everything else. World, you win. There may yet come a day when something like normal settles on my life, but for now, this IS hiatus. I’m trying to make sure I post something everyday, even if it’s just photographs, but I can’t keep pushing myself indefinitely. The only other times I haven’t been online was when I was in the hospital or too sick to even type on the computer. Garry and Rich took over for those periods, so the blog stayed alive.

Now, I don’t know. I’m tired. I’ve been doing this nonstop for 9 years, with interruptions because sites kept closing down for maybe five years before that. I think we weren’t even calling it blogging back then. But it was.

I’m sure this will affect my stats and I apologize, but I’ve pushed as hard as I can and now, I need time off. I need to do nothing. Play stupid games on the computer. Try to get some sleep. I wish I was going to get younger. I think if I got younger — and healthier — that would be a big help. So maybe this post is exactly on time for me. Here’s my chance to explain what I’m doing and hope I won’t be too harshly judged.

I promise to keep posting bird pictures and should the garden bloom, flowers.

I wanted to add something to this post. If getting big numbers — high stats — are an issue for you, hiatus is going to hurt. When I was posting four or five pieces a day, I was getting really great numbers. When I cut down to three, the number still bobbed back up there. But now, posting one or two pieces, there’s a gigantic drop. Which I expected. Every now and again, all of us write or post something that hits big and we get a lot of response to one post, but most of the time, we got between 30 and 50 hits per post and over the following days, maybe other 10 or 20. Sometimes, a post rolls along for  years, coming up sometimes and getting a bunch of hits. But mostly, things stay in the 30 to 50 range for most of us, but sometimes bounce up higher. It’s hard to keep your number up if you don’t post a couple of things daily. I think the secret really is to post a variety of things so that there is something for everyone. This worked very well for me for a long time, but sometimes, you just need some mental space. Some EMPTY mental space. A place for new idea to flow.

Also, when life gets complicated and you realize that you really aren’t getting important stuff done, you have to stop, breathe deeply, and do what needs doing. After that, you will probably come back with lots of new ideas about which to write. Or not. Sometimes, people just fade away. Whatever their goal was, they run out of gas (so to speak). It’s one of the reasons I never wanted a very focused blog. It’s easy to just get tired of writing about the same stuff — or very similar stuff — year after year.

It’s why I’m pretty sure I’ll come back. But right now and for the next month, I have a lot of stuff to deal with. Money stuff, organizational stuff. It’s tax time and it’s vaccination time and it’s the middle of winter to boot. I’m not out of things to say, but I’m distracted and I feel I’ve neglected a lot of things that need my attention.

Maybe that’s the real hiatus. Not the ones you want to take, but the ones you really need to take. Life is like that sometimes. And in the end, if you have an audience, they’ll come back when you are ready for them. Anyway, right now, I’m not along in feeling like I need to get things functioning again. I sense that the real world is coming back — any month now!

Categories: #FPQ, Daily Prompt, Fandango's One Word Challenge, Provocative Questions, Statistics

Tags: #FPQ, Fandango's Provocative Question, hiatus, Marilyn Armstrong, statistics, taking a break