Weekend Assignment: #278: Time to Blog

Tonight's Weekend Assignment should be relevant to anyone who blogs:

Weekend Assignment: #278: How often do you blog? Do you try to maintain a schedule, or just blog when you're inspired and have the time? How do memes affect your blogging habits?
Extra Credit: Are you blogging more or less often now than you were a year ago?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that my blogging schedule has gone all to heck in recent months. For years I blogged every single day, no matter what. There were at least two occasions when I pulled all-nighters at hotels with bad internet connections, trying desperately to connect long enough to get a blog entry posted. Okay, so I might have gone 30 hours between entries one day, 18 hours the next, but the rule was, I always posted before going to bed. Or if I had connection problems or was just too sleepy, I would take a nap for a couple of hours, and then get up and get the entry done.

But several months ago, between Facebook, CPA review assignments and a suspicion that obsessive daily blogging was not necessary a good thing, I gave myself permission to miss a day. And then another day. Soon I was only blogging three or four times a week! It eased my immediate time pressures, but it didn't make it any easier to blog effectively, to come up with good pictures to post and interesting things to say. And I feel that I've lost a measure of self discipline and good writing practice, without gaining anything substantive in return.

I have never, ever missed a Monday Photo Shoot or a Weekend Assignment, not since John Scalzi started the former and I first discovered the latter, both in his now-defunct AOL journal By the Way. It used to be that I always posted my entries on Monday and Thursday nights, respectively, without fail. Now it may take me several days (in one case almost a week) to get to the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. And even as the current host of the Weekend Assignment, I've often let Thursday night become Friday night. Having written over 250 WA entries as participant or originator, I now find it a little harder each week to come up with a new topic that might entice you to write something. It's much easier to keep up with the Round Robin Photo Challenges, because they're only biweekly, and we have a pool of suggested topics that we periodically manage to refresh. I'm sorry to say that despite my frequent dog-blogging, I haven't managed to participate weekly in Feline and Furball Friday, which Steven may be passing the baton on soon as his elderly cat Pickle is reaching the end of his life. My heart goes out to him; the death of a beloved pet is never easy, even when it means the end of months of worry about your furry friend's prognosis and quality of life. We went through this with Tuffy Toro, exactly a year ago on August 1st.

This blog is not just about the memes, though, nor will it ever be. I still appreciate the opportunity to write a nice cathartic rant, or tell an amusing anecdote, or show off my dogs. I may not be adding to it daily at the moment, but don't expect the Outpost to be deserted any time soon.

So how about you? Is your blog primarily a place to share family news, or keep up with all the photo memes? Do you try to post daily, or on certain days of the week, or just when you feel like it? Please tell us about it in your blog, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below, so that next week I can direct people to your blog, thus:

For Weekend Assignment #277: Running the Gauntlet, I asked you to recount your experiences with government bureaucracy. Here are excerpts from the responses:

Julie wrote...

Most of my dealings with the city and county have been via their web sites, which, amazingly, work fairly well. I can pay my water bill, renew my car registration (except I forgot, so I'll be standing in line later this week), get hold of city and county departments, and so on. It's not perfect, but it beats sitting on hold. Now corporate entities are another issue.

Mike wrote....

This year was a little different. We tried to file our state return electronically ourselves but we needed a PIN number for some reason. Since we have someone else do our taxes usually, we had no PIN. And since I was being the typical me and waiting until the second-to-last day, when I tried to call the number I got the, "We are experiencing and unusually high call rate. Please try again later." Yeah, right. I ended up mailing it in.

Your turn! And please, if you have an idea for a future Weekend Assignment, email me at mavarin2 (at) gmail.com. Thanks!


Karen