Time to try again

For any old friends who might still be out there, no, not that type of trying.

It's time for me to decide, once and for all, whether I am going to continue blogging here or stop once and for all, and at the moment, the former is the preferred option. I've just re-read all my 'pregnancy diaries' on this blog and realised that actually I bloody enjoyed writing about stuff on a regular basis. And today I learned that Bloglines, my RSS reader of choice, is ceasing to exist on 1st October, which has given me a bit of a jolt. Even before I started blogging myself, I used Bloglines to aggregate all my feeds, and have found it the simplest and most user friendly of interfaces ever since. Every new post on this blog plus all the posts and photo albums I've posted on lefthandedmonkey.com have been viewed via Bloglines, so it peeves me mightily to have to use Google Reader or somesuch from now on.

What this news has done though is prompt me to re-read the past few years of postings on good intentions. This year has seen a massive blogging hiatus, wholly due to the demands of a full time job and a full on daughter. One of the reasons I have decided to carry on blogging, even if there are no readers out there any more, is the increasing frustration I'm feeling at the lack of individual time I have to just be myself, do stuff, that isn't job or family related. My family is my life, don't get me wrong, and by gum Gemma is the best achievement I have ever made. But it's time to reclaim a bit of 'me' even if it's simply by writing things down. With no commuting time (except driving in the rush hour singing Baa Baa Black Sheep at the top of my voice to entertain the small child in the back); no early morning time at work; and limited free time at home (sssh I was meant to be ironing tonight) this is going to be a bugger to achieve, but I want to give it a go again.

If it gets to May 2011 before I post again, maybe I'll have a rethink. But I should be able to do better than that, I hope.