It has been exactly two months since I've last written on this little blog of mine, though I can honestly say I've thought about writing on several occasions, but partially out of stubbornness, I haven't.

One of the reasons I've been so silent is because I have been staging my own personal protest of blogging. You see, back in November when I started chronicling our Pacific Northwest Adventure, I had actually written TWO detailed posts about the first couple of destinations of our trip, Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier National Park. My approach to blogging has always been to write as I go; when you see a new post, you can usually guarantee it is fresh from my brain to my fingertips, having just been written that same day. So I was feeling pretty proud of myself for penning two posts at once, getting ahead of schedule and knowing that sharing the second installment of our vacation was going to be as simple as loading the draft and hitting "Publish."

Except, it wasn't.

I pulled up the draft on the day I wanted to post it, but I decided to give it another quick read, just to make sure there weren't any typos or other glaring errors that needed fixed (this need to give the post a once-over before publication is also why I opted not to automatically schedule its publication to begin with). Typical perfectionist, right? I made it a paragraph in when I decided I didn't like how I had worded something, so I changed it. Then I decided I liked the original version better, so I started backspacing.

Backspace... backspace... backspace... And the whole damn draft disappeared.

I panicked, and I immediately defaulted to my trusty move: Ctrl + Z. Working as a graphic designer, I feel like I spend most of my days alternating between Ctrl + S and Ctrl + Z.

But Ctrl + Z couldn't save me this time. Being out of my element when it comes to blogging, I rather dumbly relied on Blogger's default of auto-saving post drafts every few seconds. So guess what? Before I could undo everything, Blogger saved my newly blank post about Mount Rainier National Park. And as you can gather from the few posts currently published, I don't know how to keep my writing short and sweet. My posts tend to be behemoths, and maybe someday I'll write cute little succinct posts, but probably not because this is my blog and I like my monstrous, exhausting posts. (So there.) But man, writing those things is painstaking labor sometimes.

All that to say I was mad. Sure, the whole thing was user error, but I decided to boycott blogging for a while. At the time, holiday craziness was looming in the future, so avoiding writing made sense anyway because there were going to be enough demands on my time. But I'm in a better place now (meaning I don't mentally curse Blogger every time I think of that erased post) so I think I'm ready to call a truce and pick up my pen keyboard again.

Of course, a lot has happened in the past two months, both in terms of events and to-do's that filled the calendar and in terms of intangible intrapersonal conversations I've been having as I figure out how to make improvements in myself and my life. I'm sure I'll attempt to tackle some of those things in my writing eventually, but today is definitely not that day.

And I do plan on resuming my posts about our September vacation, too. Again, today is not that day. But soon, otherwise it'll be this September before they're finished!

Kimberly