For the last few months, much of my brain space has been dedicated to the launch of this blog. Much, much brain space. Byte space on my computer – not so much.

Oh sure, I’ve been writing. But I haven’t been writing enough and I haven’t organized myself enough for this writing life. You know, the one I actually want to live. Not the one in my head. And so, three weeks into it, I find myself behind and I don’t like it.

It was with glee that I figured out how to schedule posts for the future. But not just schedule them – I could backdate them, too. So, in a sense, my quiet resolution (now, written – oy!) to start by posting twice a week can be fudged. That post for September 26? Just posted today – on October 1.

But really, that’s not the way I want to roll. A better plan would be to have posts WRITTEN and READY to go – not WISHY-WASHY and UNFINISHED. Because you know what? Life (and another four-letter word) happens.

Last weekend I fulfilled a commitment to cook for 50+ teenagers and the adults that were supervising them for a weekend youth retreat. It was something I had done before, so it wasn’t anything new on the learning curve. But even though I basically kept the menu the same as last year and made really good notes, the last week was all about shopping, prepping, and packing – not to mention an unexpected 6-hour round trip to Costco.

I packed my laptop for the weekend. I had a room to myself. But I was starting to feel a tickle in my throat and knew that in order to get through the weekend, more than writing, I would need to sleep when I could.

And then that’s when life (or insert other four-letter word here) started to happen. We arrived to a cold, beeping lodge. The beeping was actual, not a euphemism for an expletive. No one had arrived 24 hours earlier to turn on the boiler for heat – so we were cold – for the next 24 hours. And no one knew how to replace the battery for a dying smoke detector, the source of the intermittent beeping. Luckily (really?) I couldn’t hear the beeping downstairs in my room, cold as it was. Instead, I was graced with the constant rushing sound of a dripping toilet directly above me, which was supernaturally amplified by the myriad of pipes in my room. So let’s just say, sleep did not come easy that night, sore throat, stuffy head and all.

But I get ahead of myself. While I did not worry about the furnace, it did concern me that repeated checks on the industrial oven I needed to use to heat up some chicken fingers for late night snack was also not producing any heat. Further investigations yielded this information: the gas was out of commission and for the rest of the weekend, I would have no oven and no stove. To cook. For 70 people.

Cue the hotdogs and the bonfire. Except that I didn’t have hotdogs and the budget was already blown on ingredients for soup and biscuits and Bagel Bites. Which needed stove-tops and very large ovens.

Now given that it was a church camp, I know that besides mine, there were plenty of prayers (and other words) being raised up for me but mostly for their hungry tummies. And God, who is the Original MacGyver, came through. He reminded me that plans could change (taco-in-a-bag could happen for Saturday lunch not as-it-had-always-been-and-don’t-mess-with-it on Sunday), people were mostly just happy to be fed (no one even missed the biscuits – well, except Chris who did go into town and buy buns instead) and a lot of things could happen with electricity and a couple turkey roasters. And with excellent helpers, of which I had two. (Thank you Sheri and Sarah, even though I probably chose the wrong spellings of your names.)

Suffice to say, my weekend was encompassed with the cooking, which pretty much happened non-stop from 6:00 in the morning when I plugged in the crock pots (thank God I brought the crock pots) till midnight on Saturday when the mayhem of the teenage girls washing dishes finally subsided. And I usually have trouble staying up past 9:30. That second night, I was blissfully unaware of dripping and beeping for at least a few hours of solid sleep. But by the time I got through Sunday (yes, you can make chicken noodle soup in a turkey roaster), I knew that when I got home, I was gonna be sick. Like final-exams-are-over sick.

And so my laptop and my blog got ignored for at least another day as I took Monday to recover from the worst of it. But it got me thinking: what do I need to do to post to this blog twice a week like I would like to do?

And then it hit me. I gotta feed my blog. No matter what it takes, no matter what cooking/writing challenges come up, I have to figure out how to keep the crowd – and the blog – happy and fed.

When my boys were still at home, I always made sure they were fed or, at the very least, that there were some mini-pizzas in the freezer and ramen noodles in the cupboard. Somehow, at least the five people in this family always ate, usually three meals, sometimes continuous snacks. And that involved shopping and prepping and a helluvalot of cooking. And time.

My blog needs to become my hungry child. Sometimes it’s gonna get the Kraft Dinner treatment, sometimes it will be a Thanksgiving dinner extravaganza. The proper care and feeding of this blog is the only thing that will make it grow. It’s October 1 and I’m posting this today.

(Whilst learning about blogging and even more, how to be consistent in and around real life, today I’m resorting to re-posting my not-so-famous first – and only – post from my also not-famous one-post-blog that I started over two years ago – on June 9, 2017. )

(Also – could there be more dashes in an intro?)

          I’ve always been one for good beginnings, for auspicious dates. I like to start projects on meaningful days. And this blog, my newest project, I hope to be both meaningful and auspicious.

          Today I am forty-nine and 9. Nine is my favorite number. I was born on the ninth day of the ninth month. So I am three months from the Big 5-Oh. It is a good day to start my blog, my blog that has existed in my head for oh, probably more than nine years.

          I’m not even sure if blogs are cool anymore. But I’m about to be fifty and cool might be a moot thing at this point.  I set June 9 as my expiry date, the day I NEEDED to finally get this baby off the ground. And so, without further ado, I begin with:

NINE REASONS WHY I’M STARTING THIS BLOG

1. I have always wanted to be a writer. I have memories from my childhood of swinging back and forth dreaming about being an author. I’m not sure whether I care anymore about being an author. It’s not really about getting published now. I just want to write. I write, therefore I AM a writer. Ta-dahhhhh! Magic.

2. That not-caring-about-being-an-author-crap being said, I’d like to give it a shot. Some of my best friends are authors. Not actually, just that I have discovered sooooo many writers that get me. I’d like to try be that for someone else.

3. Therefore, this blog will be great practice. Because the only way you get good at something is by doing it. And I’m hoping for accountability here. I’m a good finisher, so if I start something, I will probably finish it. And because blogs aren’t meant to be finished, I hope to keep writing till I’m dead. Did that make any sense?

Four. I need a dang place to dump all the stuff going on in my head. I don’t just think about things, I am constantly writing about them in my head. In that sense, I feel like I’ve had a lot of practice. Buuuuuuuut… without actually writing things down, I’ve lost a lot of thoughts. And I have a sneaking suspicion some of them were good.

Cinquo. I love the feeling of my fingertips on a keyboard. Is that weird? Can I get an amen here from anyone? So sometimes I don’t write on my computer for awhile and then I have to bang out an email or something and my fingers say YESSSSSSSS!!!!! So I owe it to my fingers. They’ve been good to me all these years, pointing and scratching my head and scooping up cookie batter. They complete me.

Le Six. I love words. Let me say it again: I LOVE WORDS. I would be dead (in my soul) without words, without The Word, without reading and ‘riting. This will be my homage to all things encased in random arrangements of the letters of the alphabet.

7. It is good to be known. I’m an introvert – surprise! No, seriously, some of you who actually know me may not believe this because you think I’m all outgoing and stuff. Which I can be. But given the chance I will choose the quiet company of myself (or my husband, the one person in the world I can be alone together with). This does not always serve me well. People are important. Relationship is important. But you only get there if you share, if you GET KNOWN. And the written word is the most manageable (read: controllable!) way I feel comfortable with disclosure to the world at large.

8. Because I have an expiry date. At least, here on earth, which is my only chance to impact eternity. And turning fifty feels like expiry is all the more looming. I mean even if I live to be 100, that’s only 50 more years to do all the things I want to do and write about them!

Niner. (Rhymes with finer, diner, opiner, miner, whiner…I could go on….) Because this could be fun. Playing with words and ideas. Bouncing them outta my head and onto the page.

I have read a lot of books about writing. A lot.

Case in point: in the center of the above image is the stack of books about writing and creativity that I own, have read (sometimes twice) and have marked up all the brilliant bits. On the left, the smaller stack represents a few of those I have yet to read or finish. And on the right, those are the books I have written.

OH YEAH. THERE ARE NONE OF THOSE.

The writing process is very easy to read about. It’s also easy to enjoy the perfect fruit of someone else’s labors when you sit down at the table with an Agatha Christie mystery, a Mary Karr memoir or even a Calvin and Hobbes Treasury. The actual writing? That seems to be the alchemy of some other gifted, bewitching and lucky person.

I have discovered, it’s not really that magical, after all. When the books tell you to sit your butt in the chair every day, to show up at the laptop without fail, that the muse arrives when you do, there’s something so obvious there that they don’t say it for fear of sounding redundant.

If you don’t write, nothing gets written.

In other words, sit down and write. (Unless you’re Thomas Wolfe. At 6’6″, he wrote on top of the refrigerator. You get the point.)

Okay, okay, so writing a bunch of words on the page does not a book make. There’s re-writing, editing, submitting, crying, conditional acceptance, re-editing, re-re-writing. And even after all that, it’s a crap shoot – well, so I’ve been told.

Because I haven’t really done all that other stuff. Oh, I have started to write a lot more, but it’s all just a words and words and words in a Word file, right now.

So I started this blog because it’s part of the advice that many seasoned writers give. 1. Write the words. 2. Put them out there. However, whenever.

(This is where I insert the apropos Wayne Gretzky quote about missing 100% of the shots you don’t take.)

The NHL ain’t taking me – at my age and, let’s face it, with this (female) bod, there is no hope. But I can still work with the metaphor. There are many things that age does not preclude me starting: knitting, sky-diving, travelling, moving…and writing.

My new mantra that I’ve been whispering to myself lately is: It’s not too late. All I need is my laptop, a Wayne Gretzky bobble-head and a very short refrigerator.

No, seriously. Butt in chair, write the words. It’s not too late.

Okay, so…this blog.

I have been blogging in my head forever. It takes me a million years to feel comfortable enough to actually do something that is so steep on the learning curve. But I want to do this more than anything…hmm, let’s see…are there any other hyperbolic generalizations I can add?

But really, what am I doing here and what do I intend to add to the blogosphere?

I intend to write about the things that are important to me. I want to write about writing and journal-keeping, about reading – and especially reading about writing or even reading about reading. Stories about stories, reading, writing – these things make me happy.

I want to write about life, memory, faith & family and about how they interweave in my head and in the physical world that I occupy.

No doubt stuff about getting older and our empty nest will make its way onto the page. Because that’s where I am. And to my surprise, though I’ve grown up and changed and (hopefully) matured, what I love and think about most of the time is still the same. Books, journals, family, memories, stories. And humor. Hopefully, I can make you smile. Smiling is my favorite.

Writing is my proof of life and my saving grace.

So, yeah…this blog.