Retrospection, and Happy New Year

Forty-six minutes until 2012. It's astounding that I am up this late, considering I can rarely make it past 9:20 PM. I was playing Backgammon with E. at around 9:30, and making some foolhardy moves, revealing my lack of sharpness at the 'late' hour...but other than that, I've been holding out pretty well.

To entertain myself as the family has been watching a movie I'm not interested in ("The Watchmen", I believe), I've been updating the look of my blog. In switching over to the new look, I lost all the links to the blogs I follow. (I actually switched over a couple of weeks ago, but this evening's work has been on fixing up some issues with layout and colours and the sidebar turning into the 'bottom bar'.) I was originally quite peeved at losing all my links, but then switched my perspective to one of the opportunity for a fresh start. I have done some research on finding the address of blogs I really enjoy (ones I used to follow starting five or six years ago, when I first started blogging, as well as ones more recently discovered), and have added them to my sidebar. I know other ones will pop into my head as time goes on, at which point I'll add them to my list again. But it's been a good opportunity to clean things up, and to remind me that it's good to let things go, and have a clean start - a particularly good message for New Year's Eve.

As I've been looking at my old posts and reading the comments to remind me of 'old friends', I have also been reminded of how much I enjoy writing, and how I've gotten away from it. I had made a conscious decision to stop writing about my life and that of my family's for privacy issues...as well as the fact that blogging was taking up a disproportionate amount of my time (time taken away from family). I was also expending too much energy and focus on living my life for my blog and what I would post next, instead of just LIVING, and posting naturally. I've decided I'd like to blog more regularly again, but in a healthy way (for me), and to enjoy the writing process.

So here's to 2012, and to introspection, retrospection, and enjoying one's life in a meaningful, pleasurable, healthy way. Happy New Year, friends!