Another Frequency

It seems the great intermission is over at last.. It's back to work next week for me, although I'm still waiting for someone to tell me exactly when I start. 

It also means something of a return to normality for the blog or at least so I'm expecting. It's been so long since I had a regular, stable work pattern it's quite hard to remember what normality here used to be. 

I think the way it used to go was that I'd only post on days when I wasn't working... although that can't be right, now I come to think about it. For some of the life of the blog I was working five days a week. For most of it I was working four. And yet I still managed close to a post every other day and more than that, some years.

Last year broke all records and this year, so far, has already seen one hundred and sixty-six posts, four more than in 2017, the lowest posting year in Inventory Full's history. Until June I'd only missed one or two days each month, if I missed any at all. 

I do have an excuse for slacking off this month - I've been on holiday. Technically, that is. It would be hard to tell the difference from the rest of the year except that we did in fact sleep away from home for a whole night last week and this week we went to another country. Okay, it was only Wales and we can drive there in less than an hour but it still counts.

Given the choice, I would not be going back to work. Nothing to do with the pandemic per se, just that it's now only three years or so until my retirement date and these last couple of years, what with Covid and cancer, I doubt I've worked more than nine months altogether and never more than three of them in a row. 

It feels as if I've already retired and it very much suits me. It would suit me a lot more if I was free to travel wherever I liked, which is how I always imagined spending my retirement, but I'll take sitting at home playing video games and writing blog posts about it over standing up in a bookshop for eight hours at a stretch any day.

The other thing is, I haven't really felt like I've not been working. Mrs. Bhagpuss sometimes teases me that I have a full-time, unpaid job now and it's this blog. I wouldn't go quite that far but most days it does take me at least two hours, sometimes as much as five or six, thinking up a post then writing, editing, polishing and publishing it. 

It has also occurred to me that, if this were a job, I would at least get weekends off. It's not like anyone's making me do it, though, so I'm not complaining.

As I'm sure must be obvious to all, they're rarely short posts, either. My average word-count is probably around 1200-1500 words, often quite a lot more. I guess I've written not too far short of a quarter of a million words this year. It's a lot.

As regular readers have almost certainly noticed, I rarely run out of things to write about. I have always been able to write (and talk) at inordinate length about almost anything. I could give you five hundred words on the dust on top of my monitor if I had to. 

Not running out of things to write about is not exactly the same as having things worth writing about,  however. I have been sensing of late that my enthusiasm for detailing the minutiae of the way I spend my enforced leisure could possibly be of more interest to me than it is to anyone else. 

That's not a huge concern since a) it's my blog and I like to read about what I've been up to and b) I've always been of the strong opinion that what makes something a pleasure to read is the way it's written rather than the subject itself, but even if that's so, it's also true that an interesting topic gives even the best writing a bit of a push. It was very noticeable, for example, when Valheim was all the rage, how even though everyone was writing about it at once I couldn't read enough about it. 

With that in mind, I'm certain sure I'll be falling over myself to get my thoughts into print when the next Big Thing comes along. Whether I'm working or not isn't going to be the deciding factor on how often I post then, although it might be if I have to choose between posting and playing.

For now, though, it's probably not such a bad thing for me to slow down the posting rate a little. Maybe if I'm running at four posts a week instead of seven I'll find myself having to pick more impactful subjects. Or maybe be more concise.

Yeah, like that's going to happen.

Anyway, I just thought I'd give a bit of background in case posting frequency does drop off somewhat over the next few weeks. It's nothing concerning, just a return to the status quo ante. 

Also I really didn't have anything else to post about today except bloody Dragon Bash, which I've been doing for hour after hour, and no-one needs that again.