I've been screwing around with this blog for about nine years now. It's been a great outlet from time to time; this movable feast has served as screed, journal and family bulletin board for almost a quarter of my life.
I haven't written much for a long while, partially because of personal issues and cursed laziness, but also for the past month or so because I've been thinking about how to save the blog. Blogger is changing services and eliminating key elements for those who use separate servers for content. I'm one of those people, and have been for about seven of those nine years.
To tell the truth, I can't really figure out how to get Blogger to behave in such a way as to preserve the format and content of my blog and then migrate it to some other mechanism to keep things going with continuity and the same addressing and archives. I haven't the time or, really, the gol durn energy to wade through all of the technical crap involved.
So what will I do in the next eleven days to fix the problem?
I don't know. As with so many aspects of my life these days, I might just ignore it and let it slip into the obscurity it probably deeply deserves. I have complete backups of the writings and thumbnails up until last summer, and I might be able to cobble something together to preserve the remaining bit for the family in some form.
I'm still not happy, though. I've put a tremendous amount of energy into this weblog, both in photos and in verbiage, over the years. I've provided a bit of information and quite a few photos for the web and Google results pages for the better part of a decade. Now, unless I happen upon a miracle or a bunch of time off to the side of the road, my seven hundred some odd entries will become broken links and then disappear from the intarwebs.
It might be for the best of all that this odd little sand painting becomes dust in the wind before I had planned. It doesn't matter much when cast against the walls of ruined temples. Nevertheless, It is my current public contribution. I'll try to do something about it, but if nothing else, these last few posts before Mayday might become the muffled squeaking swansong of Bloggenpucky...

Please, let someone look at this and have some sort of 'aha' moment. Not a life-changing or God forbid, a philosophical conundrum, but at least a moment of clear hesitation and self-reflection...
Tea Party Jesus
Nothing's perfect; nor is this site in its wide-ranging satire of 'Tea Party' brand conservatism. It is a bit sickeningly funny, to me, though.
(Warning: Some offensive Christian-spoken language.)

Happy Easter, y'all.

Some of the kids out this evening as the sun set; north wind at about five to ten miles an hour, temperature about 45 degs. Man, but they were having fun.
I told them they'd better split some wood because winter hasn't relinquished the nights here yet.

Another stormy Central Utah weekend. Did some going over of student's papers, ran to the post and back, and today I'm milling about and puttering over this and that. The visual stim is getting old and gray, kinda like the winter's influence over my brain and perception. I know things are fine, but I'm just a little worn out with making old things new.

The 'lympics didn't always bother me like they do now. I loved to watch them and hear the stories of athletes who passionately sacrificed in often very humble circumstances in order to compete in the games "just for the sake of the Olympic experience." Of course, many were going for the 'gold', but more often the spotlight was on the overall human experience.
These days, I see more fashion and Hollywood-style glamor than a bunch of young people getting along and competing for the joy of it all. More often than not, I see rich people exercising entitlement in order to get what they want. It's always been a political forum where certain people vie for superiority and more power on the world stage, but it seems that the games are almost completely taken over by the elites.
That's more than just no fun, but fairly distasteful when compared to the original and still professed ethos of the games. It's doesn't have much to do with amateurs doing their damnedest to be the best they can be, but almost entirely about how to become rich and famous.
Big surprise, I know.

Creative acts don't always have to be spontaneous.
I read a book once called 'Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing'. One of the points I remember most poignantly was the importance of pushing through stasis to a flow of creativity. I'm not much of an artist if compared to people with spontaneous and passionate talent, I reckon, but that doesn't matter if I am true to a spirit of self-actualization. I do enjoy the process of creation, drawing, sculpting, painting, making or whatever else I can get myself to do, but I also love the realization that I've been able to lift myself from stagnancy to a semblance of hope that I can commune with the world at large and perhaps even another person through my works.
My work is very draining. I spend from ten to twelve hours a day pushing myself to help people who don't want to be helped and students who want make someone else more miserable than they feel, so the dynamics of hope and energy for making can be daunting. It works itself out spontaneously sometimes, but most of the time, it's like I described. I have to push it until I feel like I want to do it. It's not easy; like I said, I don't feel like I'm a natural at this point in my life.
Each day is a fight to remain authentic, to be connected to what I feel is the fount of humanity. I think most people have lost knowledge of that connection, let alone the connection because of the ubiquity of struggle for money and comfort. I think it's important for some to go against the grain on this one, no matter how much crap we get from society-at-large.