Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahg

Dear Goddamn Diary;

Let’s have, as my friend Becca says about her knitting sometimes, a “come to Jesus” moment. We need to talk about your future.

I don’t want to be one of those bloggers who posts every couple of months and the first paragraph is all, “whoa, what’s happened to the time?!” but seriously, the only three posts in December were about knitting, and those are FO posts that I actually wrote months ago during a bout of insomnia and set to auto-post weeks apart.

I have been blogging pretty regularly for work, but I don’t necessarily just want to copy work posts over here all the time. Even though this blog has more of a following than my work blog. And shhhh don’t tell my other blog child but I like this one best.

I originally blogged about HaldeCraft here on this blog, when first starting out, but started to separate work from life blog for … I don’t even remember why now. To make it difficult for myself? Or more so I’d have some place – here – I could drop the F-bomb and not worry too much about offending customers….? To have a reasonably private place to muse shit out for work before making it official……..? To be able to have a place to blog (there) about work things without boring my friends and family………………? Not like y’all couldn’t just… not read a post, if the title didn’t look interesting. I try not to do that clickbaity shit.

But in looking at your categories now, little blog… I haven’t written an “Adventures in Dog Walking” post in almost three years, because we moved out here and I don’t walk the dogs any more. I post about birthdays on Facebook, when it’s the birthday of the friend. I never write book reviews any more because one of two things happens – I either read books way too fast to stop and review them or I don’t read anything for weeks at a time. I haven’t written a spinning post since 2013.

Most of my posts are either random small shit about my day (that if I took the word “shit” out of would probably even be work-appropriate) or they’re about big health drama things (I’m looking at you, Lefty) that I wind up posting about at work as well just because it’s affecting 100% of my life. Or it’s musings about work, and… I like reading other one-person shows about how they navigate work/life. Am I denying people that by having two blogs?

Should I maybe … combine the blogs back? Right now I have this blog, my work blog, and a work blog hosted by my shop that I just copy and paste my work blog posts into. So if I combined, and had one blog I write in (Snarkland? Or HaldeBlog? Here or there? Near or…. faaaaaaaaaaaaar?) then I could still just copy/paste the posts into the Shopify blog (which I don’t really use on its own because (a) ANOTHER blog?! and (b) there’s a lot that Shopify does right and I am here to tell you that the blogging platform is NOT one of those things. WORDPRESS4LIFE.

I’m also – and I’ve talked to a few people about this in person but I’m not ready to put it out on the Internets yet – but I’m looking into doing a small Patreon campaign. Details before April, pinky swear. I was shooting for details in late February but wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition Bronchitis in January. Ugh.

(That’s another thing — I’ve pretty much been sick since August. July? When did I have that abscessed tonsil? Ah; end of June…. which is about when I quit blogging on the regular! They gave me heavy-duty anti-biotics for that and I swear they must have killed off everything in my system because I’ve caught every single cold or virus that’s come through Keystone Heights since then. Including Shingles, in October through December, where I was also put on some nerve-pain blocking medication and it made it unbelievably difficult to concentrate. I don’t remember much of November and December, just me trying to put one foot in front of the other and get orders out on time. I didn’t even have time to do up Christmas presents for my family!)

ANYWAY.

Patreon campaign. Which will involve… among other things…. writing blog posts for patrons to keep people interested in what I’m doing. Yay, another blog!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE shit fire what am I doing to myself. Although I did just read that WordPress has a Patreon widget; allegedly you can write your post in WP like ya do, use the Patreon widget to assign a patron level to that post, so if someone was on my “whatever” level I could write a post just for them here, and it would show up here and on Patreon automagically but set for their patron level. This will make more sense soon, pinky swear.

So, as I said above, I’ve been sick a lot lately… but instead of doing what I normally do and beating myself up for that and trying to figure out how to do 110% again, I am instead looking at ways to simplify. Perhaps re-combining the blogs is a way to do that….? I love this little blog, even though I’ve completely lost everything I’ve written, like, twice now… I’ve been blogging here since… 2002? 2003? But… should I keep the work blog (HaldeBlog) and maybe repost some of my best posts here, there….? Or keep this blog and just start doing my regularly scheduled work posts here instead of there…..? Or ditch BOTH separate blogs and just use the crappy Shopify back end, and Patreon?

Thank you, Antony, for asking me over Christmas “where is your life happening these days? Because it’s sure not happening on your blog.” That’s been in the back of my mind since then, and I’ve been meaning to write about all this above which has been on my mind since then… but fucking Bronchitis, man. There’s only so many spoons, ya know?!