I have been remiss in taking pictures lately, and I have not put many of them up on my blog.

I’m sorry.

There are 2 reasons for this:

1. My camera is a bit bulkier than I would like, and as such I find carrying it around to be more of a burden than a blessing. I have requested a new, slimmer, and GREENER (in colour) camera for Yule/Christmas… but my family doesn’t spend more than $50 on me (while spending $500 on my brother) and my mother decided not to help me with this. Serin, as well, has pooh-poohed my desire to get a new camera (big poop!!) since he has been appointed my “Budget Gnome” for 2009. BUT I WANT ONE!!! WAH!!! Maybe for my birthday I will get enough money in Wal-Mart gift cards to buy the camera…

2. I haven’t quite figured out how to get the pictures INTO the blog easily. I mean, I have most on Flikr, so why in heaven’s name would I want to upload them to my server on top of that and fiddle around with HTML links and things? But if I want to use the pictures on Flickr I am limited to only ONE per entry, and I have to blog the picture from Flickr. If anyone knows an easier way to do this (I use WordPress) so I can link mulitiple images into one post from Flickr…

So… basically, I haven’t been taking a lot of pictures because the bulk of my camera has made it less likely I will have the thing with me in my bag, and even when I do have pictures I need a simple way to be able to use more than ONE per entry if I want to share things in my daily life.

I have been reading advice for bloggers from “blog professionals” (um… I’m not sure what constitutes a “professional” in this instance) and from what I have gathered I have broken just about EVERY “rule” of blogging.

To review:

1. Keep it short — Oh, my sides hurt from laughing so hard!! I don’t think I could keep things short if I wanted to! To me, 2000 words is “short”
2. Brief concise points — I’m taking that to mean not paragraphs
3. Use of images — Um… not so much there either

I have a very different view of blogging, I guess, than the “experts” do. I prefer to read blogs that tell me something about the person who writes, the real lives of other people out there. My blog, while it started off as a project designed to help me on my Pagan spiritual path, has very much evolved to be yet another outcropping of my desperate NEED to write.

I am, very muchly, a writer of words. I have come in the last few months to completely embrace this aspect of my identity.

I do not desire to write for a living. Not at this time.

I choose not to devote my time to writing professionally — either by writing fiction or by pursuing journalistic avenues.

I write to communicate. I write to let out all the things that are in my mind — I use words to tease out the knots of troubles I have in my daily life, to ease my fears of my soul, to soothe the aches of a psyche compressed by a world not necessarily designed to be comfortable for the average person….

I write to discover who I am. I am:
a mother of 2
a single mother with a shared custody arrangement
a parent of a child with learning issues
an adult living with a learning disability
a woman
a Pagan trying to discover what her spiritual path is now that the Pagan atmosphere has changed around her
someone struggling with the complications of dating as a single parent
someone struggling with the day to day pressures of a full time job in an office as well as being a mother
someone struggling to define an identity when she doesn’t have her children
someone struggling through the divorce process
a former podcaster who would love to have the time to do it again, but who doesn’t have the expertise of the others out there
a scrapbooker
a journal writer
a collector of pens and blank books
a writer
a diarist
someone struggling to regain her creativity
a questioner
a lover

I’m sure I am many many more things.

The point is that of all the things that I write about, have written about, or will write about, I am not here to sell myself, I am here to communicate about myself. I am here to write my stories, to share my triumphs and hurts.

I know people are reading… or at least LOOKING… but why does no one bother to stop by and say “hi”? The point of writing, here, is to communicate… to start to engage in a dialog with other people who might be similar…

So… “HI out there!!!”…