Rebooting

Don't you just hate it when you're following a blog and it suddenly goes dead on you -- no updates, no new posts, not a word of warning?  Did the author die or is he/she going through some sort of crisis that precludes posting inconsequential stuff on the Internet?

In my case, it was the latter.  I'm still alive and kicking but have been trying to work through some things lately.  To quote Genesis (the band, not the book of the Bible), "I wish that I could really tell you all the things that happened to me and all that I have seen."

My life became somewhat akin to a train wreck  But I feel like I've turned a corner and can now see a tiny bit of daylight at the end of the tunnel.  I'm slowly working my way out of the rut toward that big, bright, beautiful tomorrow.  Hopefully, my next unexpected absence is way off in the future.

When I left you, I was working on resurrecting and restructuring my blogs.  Once upon a time, I had several different blogs, each devoted to totally different topics, namely the diverse things I was interested in -- sports and photography and the Civil War.  One day I had the bright idea to close them all down and consolidate everything here at the old Meanwhile... blog.  The result, as you could probably guess, was a jumbled mess.  Somewhere along the line I got particularly interested in writing about NASCAR, which only added to the jumble. 

I finally bit the bullet, reopened the old blogs and started moving everything back where it belongs.  Now, if you're interested in the Civil War, you can go to my Civil War blog and not have to wade through photos or NASCAR results.  Incidentally, I'm was working on a series of posts there -- the Civil War Calendar.  This was a "This Day in History"-type of series exploring the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of the Civil War.  When last I left you, I had just posted about the election of Abraham Lincoln.  The series will resume and I've got a lot of blanks to fill in before the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the true start of the war, which is fast approaching.

My recently renamed photo blog, Visualizations, is also back.  I'm hoping to pull out the camera more often and update it more frequently.  I also have a big backlog of photos I haven't shown you yet.  I'm going to try to post something daily, but I'm not going to be religious about it.  I'd rather have quality over quantity.

I've also started a new sports blog.  I'm still toying around with the name.  (I'm really not too good at naming these things.)  For now, I've settled on "NASCAR, etc." because it'll generally be about NASCAR and whatever other sports story crosses my radar screen. 

I'm not sure what direction this blog will take.  I'm not very interested in writing about politics much anymore.  It's all been done before.  But this is sorta the mothership of my own personal blogosphere, so at least I can write about what's going on on the other blogs while I try to think of something fresh and interesting.  Stay tuned.