It’s been a long time since I’ve sat down to write.  So long, in fact, that I just noticed my 2020 blog notebook is empty, even though it’s already September.  There are a lot of reasons for this, and they all boil down to “I haven’t made time”.  When I look back to when I was writing regularly (not just the scattered posts of last summer) and further back to when I was posting regularly, I have to ask myself what the difference is.  Then, I laugh, because there are a lot of differences.

There is, of course, that the world is different now.

Still, there has been a lot of little things that have contributed to my not writing, much less blogging.  The easiest thing to point to is that I haven’t taken the bus to work in over a year.  The bus was a nice quiet place for me to write – no way to work on other things, but an hour a day where I’ve got my tablet and the space to write.  The fact that I couldn’t do much of anything else was important here – there was no way to prioritize it away.  That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy writing or that it’s forced upon me; no, I enjoy it, but I’ve always had had to ask myself why I would write when I could be doing the thing I’m writing about.

Even still, when I stopped busing to work every day, I made sure my driving time was productive by listening to audio short stories.  These were something else that I enjoy and helped me get my daily dose of science fiction.  It was a step back from writing, but I still ensured I was utilizing that transition state between work and home, and it felt good.

Now, I work from my home office – my transition between work and home is the push of my KVM switch; which is hardly enough time to really adjust between the two.  I tried to put various time-wasters between signing off at work and starting thinking about my home life – taking a walk, playing a short computer game, reading a book – but the time I took got shorter and shorter as work filled more time and my home responsibilities (cooking or taking care of other household tasks) encroached on the other end.

So, what’s this about?  Well, today is labor day, and I woke up an hour earlier than I usually do for work, and dedicated some time to write.  It’s hard, having all these distractions – I have disassembled titan bits on my desk; notes of tasks from work and hobbies around my computer area; Steam, FreeCAD, PrusaSlicer, VLC, and Firefox all running in the background – so we’ll see how long this lasts.  Maybe just today.