New Year, Now What? Taking Time to Figure Out My Next Steps for this Blog

Photo by Kostiantyn Li on Unsplash

Happy New Year! Time for an update.

As you might have noticed, my formerly feverish pace of blogging has slowed to a glacial crawl lately. There are a number of reasons for that, among them the fact that I am extremely busy with my full-time paying job as an academic librarian, where among many other projects I am juggling, I am working on a project to set up a virtual reality lab in one of my university’s libraries.

But another reason is that I am tired. Bone tired, after almost three years of pandemic living. I also turn 59 this month, and I have had my fair share of health issues (Type II diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, obesity, etc.). Because I have these underlying health issues which would put me at risk of a severe case of COVID-19 if I were to become infected, I have basically upended my former life in an effort to stay safe and healthy.

I am quintuple-vaccinated, I still practice elaborate social distancing wherever possible, and I wear a facemask when I am indoors in public spaces. I have a rule I have not broken in almost three years now: no indoor restaurant dining! (I do meet up with friends during the summer to enjoy some outdoor patio dining, however. Obviously, that’s not an option the rest of the year, up here in wintry Winnipeg!)

Thankfully, my employer (the University of Manitoba) is listening to the scientists, and still has imposed an indoor facemask mandate on both its campuses for this Winter term—a lone island of sanity in my city, I fear (of course, healthcare settings like hospitals and my doctor’s and dentist’s offices still require masks).

I really only leave my apartment to go to work, visit my parents at their life lease condo across town, and pick up my prescriptions at my local pharmacy (where tomorrow I will be getting my Pfizer bivalent booster shot!).

I have also gotten into the habit of ordering my groceries online via Walmart, then picking them up Sunday mornings between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., when it is not busy. They load up my car, while I stand and watch (masked of course), and I drive away; it works well, and I see no reason to change it. During the last three years, I have set foot into a grocery store exactly once.

Anyway, long story short, I’m not sure where I’m going right now, and how this blog fits into everything else that I’m doing. So I am going to take some time to figure things out. In the meantime, there won’t be very much blogging, I’m afraid.

When I do have something to announce, I will let you know! Thank you all for your patience.

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8 thoughts on “New Year, Now What? Taking Time to Figure Out My Next Steps for this Blog”

  1. Ryan, please don’t feel that you’re compelled to post regularly to this blog. Real life must ALWAYS come first. I lost my Second Life blogging mojo early in 2022, I’m in the process of restarting my site with a new look and will need to think about how blogging will fit into that. I’m in an at-risk group here in the UK, and I’m still taking precautions when venturing out, no matter what others may think.

  2. The thing I love about blogging is that it doesn’t have to be any specific thing. Sometimes your blog is the infrequent drip of a leaky tap; sometimes it’s a firehose. And it’s all good.

    When I discover a great blog that hasn’t had a new post in 5 or 10 years I feel a little bit sad. That this wonderful author with thoughtful and interesting content has gone offline. After I finish feeling sad, I feel happy! Honestly, just because someone wrote 1, 10, 100, or 1,000 great posts doesn’t mean that they have to keep doing it for all eternity. I’ve found blogs where someone put out 24 great posts during a 6 month period 8 years ago and not a word since. Is that sad? It shouldn’t be! They wrote 24 great posts, or call it one great book if you like, and then they moved on to other things. Or, who knows, maybe after the 24th post they walked out their front door and got run over by a truck. More likely though, they are alive and well and just moved on to other things.

    I hope you’ll make more than 1 post this year. But even if this should turn out to be your only post for 2023, it doesn’t mean that you can’t come back in 2024 or 2025 or whenever and post a little or a lot. Maybe your Physical World (PW) life has changes. Maybe SL actually fixes chat lag and it’s so unbelievable you’re compelled to dive in-world and document things. It’s all good!

    Thanks for all the great posts of the past, Ryan. And good luck with the pandemic and life itself going forward. I’m personally planning on 1 more year of pandemic lifestyle. At 4 years, on 13 March 2024, I’ll have some decisions to make. By then I think, for me, it will be time to not put things off any longer. But I also don’t expect to 100% return to 2019 living either.

    Thank you for this update, Ryan. The great thing about a blog is that it’s happy to wait for you. It is patient. It does not have to be fed. But it loves treats if you have the opportunity to give them.

    Good luck, Ryan!

  3. Totally understand. The pandemic years have – and continue to – change ‘reality’ as we once blithely assumed it. It has affected everything, and shown how molecularly thin the world’s veneer of order and balance was. That includes people’s minds and their perception of what is right, wrong, acceptable or justifiable. I am exhaused too, bodily, emotionally and mentally. The pandemic is the red pill that revealed how fake and broken the world is, but unfortunately there is no blue pill. Make whatever decision you need to make to get your life right for you again. All the best.

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