I’m Ba-ack!: A Report on My Blogging Break

Wow. How long has it been? Ten months or close enough that this blog has been quiescent. Now with the new academic term just around the corner, why am I reckless enough to start my blog back up?

Maybe it will help if I explore a bit about why it dried up. I think there are two reasons: the first is that I’ve been blogging for more than fifteen years on one platform or another. I have blogged about fandom, about parenthood, about history teaching and research, feminism and so much more. I’ve blogged a little bit of everything in my life for a very long time and it’s become a bit unclear where the blogging stops and the living starts.

Steady blogging also takes a steady bit of time out of your life, doesn’t it? So this past year, when I started up a gym membership to accompany our younger daughter during her personal training, I let blogging go out of all of the other things in my life. The upside? My fitness levels have greatly improved and I’ve found several podcasts that I adore to liven the time on the treadmill, the elliptical or the weight machines including Dan Snow’s HISTORY HIT (On which I appeared last December), Smart Podcast, Trashy Books (for the romance reader in me), Ben Franklin’s World (for wide-ranging coverage on American history & historical research topics), and Teaching in Higher Ed (which inspires me to be a better teacher). I’ve also used podcasts to work on my French fluency (aha-aha, but it has improved this year) and to occupy my mind while engaged on daily dog-walks with Xena. But woman cannot live by podcast alone, so here I am.

The second reason is that before I could blog again, I needed to think about what I wanted to blog about here. I don’t think it will become a very fannish blog or a place full of personal introspection, although I probably will share some fun reads from time to time! No, it’s going to be rededicated to my life in history as an educator, researcher and explorer. This doesn’t rule out the personal – far from it! – but expect more history, whether it’s notes from the classroom, my early modern women or something out of the pop culture projects!

I’ll finish this post with the bemused observation that this year we watch younger daughter take up the life of the university undergraduate and that I celebrate my twenty-fifth anniversary in the Laurentian University Department of History. My how time flies! How has yours been bowling along? Leave a comment and let me know.