It’s easier to pound away at your blog on a more or less daily basis in the winter-time when it gets dark right after lunch, the wind-chill chaps your face and you might as well be indoors anyway, even if it’s in your basement. When the summer breezes carry the smells of barbeques, softball games and well-manicured golf courses (I love the smell of sprinklers in the evening), however, it is harder to maintain your focus. Whatever outrage at the worldly injustices and political dunderheadedness may have met you with the morning paper or drive-time radio on your way to work, it can’t help but be tempered by the time you meander home from the office with so many comely alternatives to occupy your mind.

Frankly, there’s always been kind of a summer-school feel to blogging in the hot months for me anyway. Lately some excellent blogs have heard summer’s siren call (or was that the tornado siren?) and have, like a favorite tv-show, gone on hiatus. Ladies first, of course, as Kathy at Cake Eater Chronicles and Sandy, the stalwart of the MAWB Squad, beat feet, no doubt in their flip-flops. Kathy has arranged for a Llama to keep her place warm in her absence, though. Then Noodles limped off.

More recently, Ben has gone deep-sea diving and only comes up for air now and then, and Scott the Pinkmonkeybird abandoned his solo nest in order to join a group blog and run with the Freedom Dogs, where he seems to be a tough one to keep on the porch. Yesterday, Doug at Bogus Gold first left a note as cryptic and foreboding as an empty pair of shorts and pair of sandals sitting by edge of the water before coming back and offering a more detailed “gone fishing”. It looks as if he’ll be back, and we can hold out hope for the others as well (just as Jo has returned).

This is not a preamble for my own, “hasta la vista, chili con carne”, by the way. I’m still enjoying doing this, and the Mall Diva and Tiger Lilly joining makes it even more fun (proving the adage that “if you raise a child up in the way she is to go, when she is older she will blog about it.”) One thing that my recent three week vacation did accomplish, however, was to show me that I could walk away from the blog for a day or two at a time and it would still be there when I got back. I think I always suspected that, but I was afraid to test it (or I was afraid of my own laziness if I cut myself any slack). It is as freeing and invigorating a feeling as putting on a new pair of sneakers the first day of summer vacation (an old Ray Bradbury reference for you well-read types).

I’m liable to take a day or two off here from time to time through the summer, though, and when I write it is likely to be just playing with words and images rather than to trying to make a point; not that I’ve made that many anyway. I might even slip some more poetry in on you.

Now, if I can just figure out how to position this laptop comfortably while I’m in the hammock, I’ll be set.

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