I’m listing this post under the category “blog housekeeping.” It will be the 67th post in the category which began back in March of 2007. I add a post to it every so often so that my visitors can get a glimpse into my Method of Operation.
Editing is a pain in the butt but also a, once accomplished, a joy. The preceding post “Looking back to see the future” about my trip down the Minnesota River Valley is a good example. I like posts of a couple hundred words. I can quickly scan them for mistakes. They usually only address a single idea or two thus require little attention AND they are short. I catch many, maybe even most, of my easily corrected mistakes. But when a post gets into several hundreds of words let alone a thousand I know there will be mistakes galore. I also know that however many mistakes they contain the general idea I want to convey will be relatively obvious. But to spruce it up? That can take as much or more time than simply typing up the “rough draft.” When I have other things to do it can be such a pain. Writing dozens of such posts daily during my fight against the Red Plan is probably what caused me to get so little sleep for a sustained couple of years. AND TOO LITTLE SLEEP PROMOTES ALZHEIMERS!!!!! That has been a concern of mine ever since my family had to put Mom in a memory care unit a couple years before this blog made its debut.
Its also a prime motivation for my learning French about which I’ll have a few more words to share in my next post.
SEE, So far this is a simple post to go through and correct…..If I stop here I’ll be OK.
Above this post you can see an example of my need to proof read the preceding post. I updated the post in two sections. The first was the long written description of my travels. The second was a series of a dozen images pulled out of a hundred I took along our route. When I dropped them in I also added a brief description of what they depicted.
Later I knew I had to attack the preceding paragraphs on the travels. I did this and it required longer than the first draft took to write. But I didn’t have the drive to fix mistakes in the picture description phase. Before adding this blog housekeeping post I took a look to see how many mistakes were in this part of the blog. I saw “outh” where I meant to write “South”. Only a kindergartner a foreign speaker or a cretin would have failed to see what I meant to write. I made no corrections. However I also saw that I had forgotten a couple steps in dropping in the sandstone bison found a Reconciliation Park. All a visitor could see was the URL from my Flickr page. So I did correct that.
In the three weeks leading up to the primary I slowed down knowing I didn’t have the heart to work my butt off to fight against a foregone conclusion of my losing. But even as I slacked off I was busy thinking about my mission in planning this campaign for the past several years. It was to neuter Trump mania by removing the menace that has invaded the body of a “nice guy” who is a Congressman. I will be explaining my latest plans to continue working on that project……maybe even before the day is out. Whenever I do it I will do it here on the blog.
I still haven’t tidied up my paperwork for the Federal Elections Commission. That’s partly because I’ve hinted at a second run. The easiest thing for me to do is close my bank account and end this campaign here and now. I lost the primary and the prospect of maintaining my electioneering paperwork is a total drag. BUT I can keep my campaign alive a little longer and still inflict some injury on a threat to our Democracy.
I’m still thinking out to proceed on this front.
BTW: The issue of editing came to mind as I thought about the first Reader Column I’ve submitted since I filed for Congress. It too is about my travels with Claudia down the Minnesota River Valley. I cranked it out last Friday and it was very unsatisfactory. Over Saturday I added more text until it got up to about 1,300 words about 500 more than I aim for in my columns. Through the day as I kept coming back to it I knitted ideas together, altered direction and then in the late hours of Saturday night realized I didn’t have the steam to finish it that night. I sent in an apology to the editor of the Reader explaining I was back to my old bad habits but promising to send him a completed column by morning, hopefully before I had to leave for Church.
I got a little over three insufficient hours of sleep (insufficient for staving of Alzheimer’s) that were sufficient for putting some vim and vigor in my editing. I managed to send out my column on time after another four hours of fussing around with it. It felt good seeing a piece I could be reasonably proud of finished without any major typographical errors. I’ll read it again when its in print and hope nothing I wrote sticks in my eye or my craw.
IF THERE ARE ANY MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THIS POST, TOUGH! NO MORE EDITING FOR ME.
