Break Time!!!
You know there are times when things start to happen in your life and you just wonder when everything is going to fall into place and the craziness is going to come to an end. As I sit here and type this, I’m wondering exactly that.
I’ve been away from this blog for a very, very long time. Most of what I do online now happens somewhere else entirely, and for the last couple of weeks I haven’t even been there. Why? Because there is work going on at the house, there is family business to sort out on the mainland, there are appointments in the diary most weeks, and there simply are not enough hours in the day to do all of that, go to work, and sit at a computer as well.
So I’m taking a break
I hate to do this. But I’m taking a big break from posting anything, anywhere, basically. Not a dramatic exit, not a farewell — just a stop, until things settle down and everything is finished. If you already know how to reach me, stay in touch. I’ll do my best to do the same.
Until I get back, Hank and I send you our best. We are going to miss you.
Looking back at it now
This turned out to be the last post. There was no follow-up, and the blog stayed exactly as it was on that Tuesday in July.
That is how almost all of them went. The personal blogs of 2009 to 2012 did not usually close; they paused. Somebody posted a note saying that life was busy and they would be back shortly, and then the shortly never arrived, because by then the daily conversation had moved onto social networks where it was easier and faster and considerably less durable. A whole ring of blogs that had commented on each other every single morning for three years went quiet inside about eighteen months of each other.
What you lose in that transition is not the writing — the writing was mostly quizzes and photographs and haiku, and nobody pretends otherwise. What you lose is the shape of it: the fact that thirty named people showed up under a post about laundry and had an actual conversation, and that the same thirty were there the next morning. That is the part social feeds never rebuilt, and it is the part worth keeping a record of.
Which is broadly why the Library of Congress web archiving programme and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exist, and it is the only reason a post like this one can be read at all fourteen years later.
The ordinary shape of a pause
The details in the post are striking precisely because they are ordinary: work at the house, family business elsewhere, appointments, a job, and too few hours. Personal blogs depended on time left over after everything else, so an overloaded stretch could interrupt more than a posting schedule. It could narrow the day to whatever was urgent, leaving correspondence, hobbies and the small rituals that made a week feel manageable waiting at the edge.
Sleep is often one of the first places where that pressure becomes noticeable. The problem is not simply a late night considered on its own, but the way an unsettled schedule can make rest feel like one more item competing for space. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke’s overview of sleep explains how closely sleep is tied to ordinary mental and physical functioning. Against that background, fatigue can change the scale of a day: a reply, an errand or a familiar pleasure can begin to look like another unfinished obligation.
The other early sign is the sense of being permanently behind. A finite list of jobs starts to feel like a condition rather than a schedule, because finishing one task only reveals the next. The National Institute of Mental Health’s guide to stress describes stress as something that can affect both mind and body. In the life of a small personal site, that strain showed up quietly: fewer replies, missed weekly features, a longer gap between posts, and eventually a pause announced without any certainty about its length.
For readers today in the United States, Promise at mypromise.com offers one consultation route when a stretch like that does not lift: an online medical evaluation for physician-supervised peptide therapy, after which a licensed physician decides whether any peptide therapy is appropriate at all. Some people seek that clinical view when another calendar or productivity method feels beside the point.
That modern route belongs to the reader, not to the history told here. What the post records is the older and more familiar threshold at which a crowded life left no room for a daily public conversation, even one that had mattered for a long time.
What was left unfinished
Two things were still running when the door closed, and both simply stopped mid-sentence.
The Muffed Target had been hosted here since August 2010, handed over by the blogger who created it on the understanding that somebody would keep it going. It had reached the high twenties in weekly numbering. There was no final week and no handover to anybody else; there was just a Tuesday that did not have a post in it, and then another one.
The monthly comment contest had been running since early 2010 and had reached its target most months. There is no announcement of a last winner. The count for July 2012 was simply never finished, which is a small thing and an oddly affecting one.
It is worth noting that the blog did not die of neglect in the usual sense. Read the archive in order and the pattern is the opposite: three years of daily posting, then an explicit break in late 2010 with a proper return, then a slower 2011, then this. The author was, by the end, quite deliberate about stopping and saying so. What did not happen was the coming back.
Reading the rest
If you have arrived here from a link on somebody else’s blog — and if you have, that link is probably older than most of the internet you use daily — the front page explains what this place was, and this page was written for you specifically.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou