First Post in over Two Years!

I haven't abandoned my Write to Say It blog, though it's been many moons since my last post.  Rather than make excuses, let me show you what has been my consuming interest:  my own website called Pagemonth.com.

Through www.pagemonth.com I offer a free home budget download worldwide for anyone interested in one, and I use a fantastic Bulgarian company called www.webhostface.com to market it from Plovdiv, Bulgaria.  Its staff treats me as one of them. and I couldn't ask for more friendly, patient, helpful service and support from these young, savvy,  multilingual hosts--many of whom I enjoy on first name basis.  Anyone not currently happy dealing with their Internet Service Provider should visit webhostface.com 24/7.  Their setup and communications are free, their fees are modest, they speak perfect English, and they will make you feel right at home.  Moreover, they have sites in the U.S. as well as worldwide, and their connections are so clear you'll think you're on a local call.

That's what I've been doing all this while; building my Pagemonth Home Budget and growing its distribution.  It's been a labor of love, and most recently we have become an Amazon affiliate, adding a whole new dimension of budgeting products and services available through our website.  We've been very busy.

So I haven't abandoned Writetosayit.  I just have neglected to post regularly, and I hope to change that.

Once again nearly a year has elapsed since my last post here--hardly a journal frequency of posts.  Yet I came to Blogspot again in order to find a familiar interface.  Silly me.  Little did I expect to find that Google has taken over Blogspot and Blogger along with an alarming amount of internet things and I now need to learn yet another set of rules that make little sense or have little appeal to me.  I had sought to escape the byzantine frustrations of trying to use Facebook.  Which I will use more in future I don't know, but I suppose I have little right to complain about either since they're free.

Is it May already--again?

I thought I'd better post something now to let people know I'm still "among the quick"; it's been a year since my last post, and that's too long. I'm not sure why I stopped exactly, but I feel like starting up again now. So who knows? maybe I won't wait another year to post the next one.

Is it May already? or Shakespeare was right

"Growing old ain't what it's cracked up to be," Barb's mom used to say, rest her soul. "But it is, that's the problem," Barb and I sometimes say today.

At this point we can appreciate what she meant, though--especially me. I've got ten years seniority on Barb. Our grown sons have their busy lives, families and careers to keep them getting up quickly when they get knocked down.. Our grandchildren probably have the most going for them and bounce back from elemenetary and middle school pressures and upheavals the fastest of our family generations. They also tend to "get over it" the fastest, forgive, forget, and move on with amazing resiliency.

But I am the oldest of us by about ten years, and retired, and my moxie isn't always so quick to come back. Barb is still a working elementary school media specialist and keeps up her fitness most of the time with diets, workouts, and the daily bustle of her job. but this year has put "new wrinkles on my brow", figuratively and maybe literally. I can't tell that my wife, my children, or my grandchildren seem any worse for wear, but any of them might feel otherwise; they're living in their "ages" as I am in mine. We've all dealt with our situations with what we had to work with.

Robert Herrick said of life, "the best age is the first, when youth and blood are warmer/not the last, when "worse and worst times still succeed the former." He had his own motives, of course, in "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may'", remember?) But Shakespeare said of life's stages we are left upon life's seventh stage, "...sans teeth, sans hair, sans eyes, sans everything...." I haven't reached that stage yet, thank Goodness, but I can certainly relate to those who have.

What Is A New Year?

What's new about a new year? And why do we stay up till midnight to count down to it and celebrate its arrival so giddily? It's only time, artificially segmented, after all. It's not any part of nature, except as it's named and measured by man, the same way we name an eagle or a grasshopper, for there's nothing inherent in the thing we name, or period of time we name, which suggests very much about it by its naming.

A new year isn't about the world; it's about people. It's about how we see the world, and how we see each other, and how we see ourselves. It gives us a timeframe for our experiences and our memories, hopes and dreams. We can put them into the timeframe together, at any particular longitude or time zone we are on December 31 at the witching hour each year. The new year is the essence of the clean slate in our lives, the new chance to embrace living , working, striving, planning, coping and pursuing what goals we set for ourselves and call our new year's resolutions. A new year is a new period time we have agreed to name and perceive together and live together, as individuals, families, communities and cultures, nations and peoples, for better or worse, on our planet Earth.

In looking back upon the previous year as the new one approaches, we evaluate and codify it and in many instances make our peace with it, for often many things have happened we need to remember and deal with so we can move on afresh. Many other things. conversely, we will carry forward with us gladly and with a renewed sense of appreciation and adventure, gratefully.

New Year's Eve isn't only about Auld Lang Syne and memories of the past. It is above all about expectation and hope, the expiring of the former order of things and the birth of the new. It is the time above all other moments in our 365 days when we sense the future opportunities most keenly as we stand on a threshold and step forward into our destinies together.