You may have noticed that I’ve been around very little over the past several months. Actually, it’s more likely that you haven’t noticed – there are, after all, plenty of excellent blogs on this site and a regular stream of posts from all directions – but it’s still something I feel guilty about.

The reason for my near-absence is that, on top of all the other stuff involved in being a mother and part-time GP, as of this school year I’ve also had to start part-time homeschooling my son. (The other part of the time he’s with tutors.) This certainly has its benefits and has been an interesting experience, but it’s also a huge suck of time and energy that I didn’t really have to spare. So, at any time when I could potentially be sitting down to blog, invariably either I have stuff that genuinely is more important to do right then (getting son’s lessons ready for the next day, getting work letters done), or I’m just plain too exhausted to face getting my brain to string sentences together, or both. On top of that, there’s the whole thing where my brain keeps going “But.. terrible political situation in the US… I should be helping out by making incisive posts! But I have no incisive posts to make! So how can I post about anything less important when so much important stuff is going on!”. Which doesn’t help.

Anyway… all of that is still going on, so this isn’t exactly the ‘and now my problems are solved and I can return to normal blogging’ post. It’s just the ‘sod it, I’m fed up of working my way through endless to-do lists and want to do something for me for a change’ post. Yeah, maybe the stuff I blog about isn’t going to be terribly interesting or important. But I still have things I want to write about, and I think that taking a break from everything else to write about them is something I need to do right now.

By the way, if anyone wants to throw out a word of encouraging interest in any of my currently planned topics, that would be great. They are, in no particular order of priority:

• Homeschooling
• Whatever I happen to have been reading lately
• A description of the first episode of 11.22.63. (That one may have to wait… writing a detailed description of something like that is a big time-consuming project that probably isn’t ideal to take on when I’m just trying to get back to blogging anything, but it’s still something I’d like to do eventually.)
• Actually finishing the detailed breakdown I promised nine months ago of the many errors in Lenny Esposito’s ‘but we should stop transgender people transitioning because science!’ of which I have so far managed only two posts out of a planned four.
• Counter-apologetics, including short series of posts on a) why I became an unbeliever and b) why, specifically, I concluded Christianity’s claims not to be true.

Obviously, you may not care as long as I write something/not care anyway, which is fine. But any of those did make you gasp in glee and say “Wow, that’s exactly what it’s always been my dream to read about!” or even just think “Hmm, that sounds kind of interesting”, then, y’know, leave a comment and tell me so.