My friend WM is trying to get me to do this NoBloPoMo or whatever it is, with her. For the uninitiated (both of you), that means you post every day in the month of November. Every single day.
You’ll be happy to know I’m not even going to try, and not just because it‘s already the 3rd. I have a hard enough time posting regularly. Me feeling I had to post something every single day would lead to a lot of mind-numbingly-dull posts, I’m sure. And you would all take me off bloglines, and my stats would plummet, and I would be foul-mooded (I invent words with wild abandon on this blog) and darken with the darkening days, and my family would suffer.
Unless you really do care what I had for lunch. (Spicy African Peanut-Chicken Soup and bread; followed by slices of apple and pear…just in case)
But I defy the internet to run my life. Some days are just too busy to even read other’s blogs, much less create something to put on my own.
This week, for example, was pleasantly busy, but not the sort of thing of which fascinating posts are made. We were very social, hanging out with others over a meal 3 out of 5 evenings, plus 2 lunches. Today we drove out into the wilderness, stopping by a working mill (it grinds grist. Hence the expression) and driving on to glorious views of Mt. St. Helens, busy rebuilding itself, one small eruption at a time, after blowing its top nearly 30 years ago.  On top of that, we’re homeschoolers now. It’s a whole ‘nother world.
For those of you who have never tried home schooling, I don’t recommend it. It takes your life.
I’ll tell you how I imagined it. Every morning, in a quiet house, the only sound the light whisper of pen moving across paper, the kids would do school. I would make more coffee and work on my book. (it’s my goal this year to write a book about our time in Mauritania. I want to finish it before we go to Morocco, where I’ll start a whole new set of cross-cultural impressions and adventures.) When I’d put in a solid two hours work on my book, I imagined, I’d blog lightly, then go out for coffee with my friends. All the time in the world would be at my disposal.
Well, mornings chez nous don’t exactly look like that. The coffee part is right. But the rest of it is rather like a 3-ring circus. Make that 4 rings.
In one ring is Elliot, working away at the computer. His course is all online, so he hogs–I mean works diligently–at the computer. The twins work upstairs in their own rooms, which although they are right next door to each other means that I can get all the way back downstairs before the call of “Mom! I need you!” comes again.
Which has got to be good for my thighs, all that running up and down stairs. My own personal StairMaster. Too bad it’s not 3 stories instead of one.
But they have to do Spanish downstairs, on the computer’s CD player, and then they have to take turns recording audio cassettes for their oral exams. Plus they are all sharing a dictionary.
The 4th ring would be the phone and my husband, wanting my opinion on various things. These things are fine, but not exactly conducive to book-writing. Not to mention the fact that Elliot is on my computer.
The good news is that CNED seems like a great system. It’s laid out beautifully, and the kids are learning how to work independently.
The bad news is that I’ve only written one-and-a-half pages of the book so far, not counting the stuff I wrote while still in Mauritania. And I haven’t even started looking for an agent.
So no, there’s no way I’m going to try to post every day.