Uh, hello?

My lord, has it really been a week since I posted anything? It has been an odd week, featuring re-connecting with an old friend (who I thought I'd lost) on Monday and meeting fellow blogger Tgirsch of Lean Left on Tuesday. There were also other things afire in real life, but still it didn't seem I had been away that long. Yet I have.

Part of the cause is that in another sense I haven't been away: I've just been spending my online time commenting at other blogs rather than posting here. I realized some time ago that I'm a better counter-puncher than a puncher; I find it much easier to get up a good head of steam in response to something idiotic or blundering some winger nutjob has said rather than in striking the first blow. A good way to produce comments but not necessarily one to produce a lot of blog posts.

I've also become aware that I tend to write both in spurts (for example, days of nothing followed by a half-dozen posts in two days) and clusters (for example, the previous four posts were all about global warming and six of the seven that preceded those were on some aspect of civil liberties or privacy). I also tend to have more ideas of what I want to or think I should write about than time to do it all and too often I don't just choose one and drop the others, with the unhappy result that I write nothing since I can't write about all of it. That latter habit is one I really have to break along with the sense that there's no point in writing about something if someone else has already said generally what I would have: Just because my contribution may not be unique in the true sense of the word doesn't mean it might not have value, especially considering that just maybe someone reading here might not have seen that other post.

So my apologies for my silence, especially because this time it wasn't driven by the dark clouds that never totally disappear from my sky, this time it was just that time got away from me. And I'll repeat the advice I've given other times: Check here a couple of times a week. There's really no need to make it a daily thing both because I generally don't post every day and because what I do post is in most cases commentary and analysis rather than anything time critical so if you don't see it for a couple of days after it was posted it really won't matter.