Yes, Average Jane Is Still Alive

I know there's nothing lamer than the "why I'm not blogging" blog post, but I've fallen so far off from my four years of daily posts that I figured it was time to try to explain.

The thing is, I don't know what the problem is. Or rather, it's no one thing, it's lots of things.

For starters, since I've been using Twitter regularly, it's absorbed a lot of the trivial observations that would once have been blown out into blog posts. I know I should take advantage of my Twitter stream and cherry-pick interesting tidbits to write about for my non-Twittering blog audience, but for some reason I don't feel inclined to do so. I'll work on it.

Then there's the upcoming election and the fact that the economy is in the crapper. Both of those things are absorbing a lot of my attention right now, but I've been hesitating to write about them in any detail lest I begin ranting.

However, now that I've gotten started, I'll at least sum up my feelings. In a nutshell, I firmly believe that this is the most important election in my lifetime. However, I have extremely grave doubts about the integrity of our electoral system and my biggest worry is that we'll never know the true outcome of a major election again. I'll keep annoying my local poll workers by requesting a paper ballot, but unless everyone else does the same, well, I don't know that we can truly believe that our votes are being accurately recorded and tallied anymore.

The economic problems are more abstract to me so far, but I've put off the remodeling work we were going to have done because I didn't want to spend the cash in case I end up needing it. I have a limited amount of money directly invested anywhere – other than my 401(k) – and I have no reason to think that the NCUA won't protect my credit union deposits. Still, it's an unsettling time.

Other than that, everything's fine. Work is great, the band is going
well, all of the people and cats in the household are relatively
healthy. I'm enjoying the fall weather and looking forward to being
outside a bit more.

I'm hoping that this post is the turning point where I pull out of my blogging funk and manage to get back to real writing again. If so, I guess I'll see you back here tomorrow.