That was refreshing! Taking a month off from blogging (or at least from daily blogging) was a great break and I’m feeling all bubbly and tingly — or maybe that’s just because I used my wife’s shampoo this morning.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to getting back in my rhythm and I’ve got a few story ideas and links that I’ve stashed while I was away that I’ll probably be getting into in the next few days. Of course, I noted that I wasn’t the only blogger taking time off and I laughed outloud last week when I got my copy of the Wall Street Journal and saw an article about bloggers on vacation (subscription required to read the link, sorry). The story talked about how the big name bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and Andrew Sullivan handled their vacations and the overall drop in readership despite lining up distinguished guest bloggers to keep the blog lamps lit. It appears that many readers have a distinct affinity for the person who’s name is on the blog and they may tend to visit less often when that person isn’t writing.

This interesting information leaves me feeling a bit odd, considering my experience. Of course, I have little in common with Malkin, Reynolds, Sullivan, Hewitt, Jarvis, et al, when it comes to the blogosphere. We all blog, but I’m a grunion to their whales even though we swim in the same sea. For example, their readership dropped by tens of thousands of visitors per day while they were gone; I can just barely say I’ve had tens of thousands of visitors stop by here in total in the 18 months since I put out my electronic “welcome” sign. Perhaps some of the uber-bloggers’ wayward readers were coming over here in August because my average daily visitors actually went — er, uh — up while I was on vacation. When I kicked back, I was averaging close to 80 visitors a day. That was great, and a heady change from the days when breaking into the 30s was cause for a celebration. Now, a month after leaving this blog largely in the hands of my daughters the Mall Diva and Tiger Lilly, the daily average is nearly 100 visitors (and now the Reverend Mother is about to make her much anticipated debut as well)!

Ooooo-kay. This is good news, right? But how long before they start lobbying for a change in the name of this blog? This makes for an interesting problem for me, and hopefully, more interesting reading for you.

Oh well, the family that blogs together … uh, fights over the computer.

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One more week of blogging vacation for me, but I thought I better get my summary of last Friday night’s Trivia Challenge up and on display.

As you can tell from the photo below, Team “Three Weddings and Funeral” showed up at the Friday night trivia event ready to play and with fire in our eyes. That’s Jeff and Leo in the front (left to right) and myself and Ben on the opposite side of the table.

We were in the thick of it, but we had trouble with names, losing a point because we could only come up with half of the name of the Irish president, and missing an easy lay-up on the name of the proprietor of Keegan’s due to an epic brain-fart (to be fair, the Twins had runners in scoring position against the White Sox on the TV over our heads at the time). Those are points you just can’t let get away in rarefied air of such a heady competition. We did know, however, that Damascus is the longest continually inhabited capital in the world (for a few more months, anyway).

Congratulations to Terry Keegan (see, we know the name) for coming up with some truly worthy questions (unlike the People magazine trolling that has characterized more recent Thursday night contests) and to our local Fraters Libertas team (fortified with Atomizer’s mother) for keeping Hugh Hewitt and his All Stars from coming into our house and making off with the hardware. Best of all, the event raised a couple of grand for Soldier’s Angels, the MOB’s official favorite charity (next to Keegan’s, that is).

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Ok, the real reason I’ve been on blogging vacation is that I’ve been cramming for this Friday night’s All-Star Triva Throwdown and fund-raiser for Soldier’s Angels. Our team of Jeff Kouba , Leo Pusateri, Uncle Ben and myself will mix it up with national talk-show host and Blog-father Hugh Hewitt, the Fraters and many other minutiae-minded precontenders. We’ll be “managed” by the Mall Diva who, if this devolves into the expected Wrestlemania brawl, will leap into action, squirting hair-spray into the eyes of our opponents (either that or traitorously turning on Ben).

Our captain entered our team name as “Three Weddings and a Funeral”, but since there’s usually a Hewitt-inspired Ralphie-Christmas Story theme to this competition I’ve suggested we call ourselves “The Bumpus Brothers.” I can just hear Chad the Elder cursing “those %$#@* Bumpuses” as we hound the competition and run off with the prize!

Anyway, the event starts at 9:00 p.m. so come on down and cheer (or heckle) your chosen squad. While you’re at it, please make a contribution to Soldier’s Angels, a great organization dedicated to supporting our troops and their families. Hope to see you there!

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“Vacation” is sweet. So far I’ve been able to resist the temptation to let fly on the busted terrorists, the missing Egyptian “students”, the use of samurai swords for home defense, capital punishment for auto-insurance scofflaws and the mystery of how Chrysler went from Lee Iacocca to Dr. Z.

I’ll be getting back to the routine soon enough, but as this video proves, even if you’re on a treadmill it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.

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Frankly, I’m not much of a Francophile, but there is one French custom that has a certain appeal to me: the month-long August vacation.

I like blogging and I’ve had more fun and gotten a lot more satisfaction from doing this than I ever expected when I started nearly 18 months ago. Therefore I’m not planning on quitting anytime soon. I am, however, going to take the rest of this month off to try and remember what I did with all my free time before I started blogging.

I’ve got some chewy books I’ve been wanting to read, a couple of new Xbox games I’ve barely touched, a fantasy football campaign to plot and a desire to spend some of the remaining summer evenings out of my basement. There’s also an element of personal development to this exercise: I want to see if I can get through a day without looking at it as blog-fodder; I want to see if I can get to bed earlier at night; and I want to see if I really can stop, anytime I want to.

That doesn’t mean “The Night Writer” is going dark the next few weeks, however. The Mall Diva and Tiger Lilly can post anytime, and I’m pretty sure there’ll be more updates leading to MD’s big golden birthday bash (not to mention the big unveil she’s been promising of her birthday dress). Furthermore, I may pop in if something timely comes up or occurs to me that I can’t let pass without comment.

I’ll be back the week after Labor Day, and I hope you will be, too.

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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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I don’t know what is going on, but this blog has already had around 250 visitors today (about 3x what I get in a full day), and almost all of them are going to the Mall Diva’s category archive.

The other common denominator is that the visitors are coming from different radio stations via something called listenernetwork.com; e.g., “kzst.listenernetwork.com/SearchWeb.asp.” Clicking on the incoming reference doesn’t show anything helpful. The only thing I can think of is some mention or reference from a network-syndicated show or quiz is driving this, but I can’t find any useful information about why this is happening from SiteMeter, Technorati or TTLB (or maybe I just don’t know how to ask the question).

If anyone can explain this sudden rush of interest (not that I’m shocked, given it is the Mall Diva, after all), I’m all ears.

Update:

For those searching the Mall Diva archives, only the last 17 appear on the main page under this category heading. You can browse previous entries by selecting her category, then clicking on the monthly archives on the right hand side of the page. Her very first post (about having her wisdom teeth pulled) can be found under March, 2005, but she didn’t appear again until September (the thrill of being shot at) and then began writing more regularly in October of 2005 (with an account of a former classmate being charged with murder). NW.

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“I don’t care if Ned Flanders is the nicest guy in the world. He’s a jerk — end of story.”

— Homer Simpson

Marty Andrade has been offering one paragraph “Who are these people?” descriptions of the blogs on his blogroll (actually, Marty calls this feature something else, but I try not to use that kind of language here). Yesterday the spotlight turned to me:

I think John is the least evil man ever. A family man, a right honorable person who just isn’t evil. He does a good blog, he’s almost the Ned Flanders of the blogosphere. That’s all I could think of. It’s weird, whenever I read his blog (which again, is excellent) all I can think about is how completely not evil the man is. I don’t know if that’s an endorsement or not…

Hey, I can be evil! I can! Just this morning I left some stray beard hairs in the bathroom sink. Bwa-ha-ha! My wife told me to clean them up, and you know what I said? Huh? Well, I didn’t really say anything. I just went in there and cleaned them up — but I didn’t say I was sorry, either! Ha! Also, I mock our cat mercilessly. Mercilessly, I tell you, until I make him cry! And Jeff Kouba at Peace Like a River is always saying I’m evil! I’ve even waved bloody knives at the Mall Diva’s prospective suitors! And next week I’m … oops, mustn’t say too much … the world will just have to wait and see!

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Kathy at the Cake Eater Chronicles blog is going on hiatus. As Doug notes, she’s not the only one to fall away or at least take a step back lately:

We had Mr. Sponge closing down his previous blog to start Minvolved.com, only to quit Minvolved.com when creepy stalkers made it less fun than he’d anticipated.

We have Gerry Daly who’s Daly Thoughts blog had been promising his imminent return since last December 13.

We’re about to put Swiftee from Pair O’ Dice on a milk bottle.

The MAWB Squad has been out of action for weeks.

And we STILL have no word from Whiskey at Captain’s Quarters.

Let’s face it, the bitch-goddess of the blogosphere is an angry mistress. She chews you up and spits you out on a daily basis offering only enough tantalizing promise of reward to draw you close enough for her to take the next bite. People who get into blogging because they think they’ll become successful in monetary or popularity are doomed to crash and burn.

I share Doug’s regret at Kathy’s decision as well as his understanding of why she’s doing it. And I most certainly understand Doug’s confession of his own thoughts about backing away from the keyboard. I think the “How much longer can I do this?” question keeps a suite in the back of your mind whether you’ve been blogging for three years or for a week. As he noted, money and fame are scant and I’ll add that the hours can be long and notoriety capricious: you can work hours or even days in perfecting a post that reflects your passion and best powers of persuasion and not even draw a flame in your comment box, and then the next day the toss-off piece of drivel or fluff that you put out because you had to write something gets ‘lanched around the world.

I’ll disagree with Doug about the bitch-goddess of the blogosphere, though; I think she’s simply oblivious, not angry. She endlessly repeats the Tralfamadorean greeting, “Hello. Goodbye. Hello. Goodbye,” while keeping the merry-go-round rotating as we jump on and off. (As those on Tralfamadore also say, “And so it goes.”)

So, why do we continue? What benefits have I gained from the last 13 months of amateur punditry? They are surprisingly tangible.

Friends.

My wife and I were talking the other day about how many people we’d have likely never met and come to know if not for blogging; people who have added things into our lives and also given us the opportunity to add into others. (It has also given me the unexpected benefit of re-connecting with friends from long ago, and the Mall Diva has picked up a couple of big brothers – a foreign experience she otherwise would have missed out on.)

I suppose the same thing happens if you join a quilting club or take up any new hobby or sport, but the very nature of blogging means we get to know others on a more profound level than most casual acquaintances. I also suppose these people would continue to be my friends if I quit blogging (and some day we will find out), but I hope it’s not too soon.

I also enjoy the mental exercise, the chance to test and challenge my own thinking and ability to articulate, and to wake up in the morning without a clue of what I will write about that day and then seeing what has turned up by the time I log off that night. Still, it is wearing and would grind my bones but for the “cartilage” provided by the new relationships I’ve made.

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