Looking back-- and forth

I doesn't take a genius to see that I have been in what might be called a "creative doldrums", and I seriously began to wonder if I was meant to be a blogger.  

In preparation for what I thought might be a withdrawal  from the system I decided to try to build an archive of the stuff that I have written since I began with the blog thing back in 2005.  I know that blogger has an archive and I have looked back into it a couple of times, but Patrick has bemoaned losing a bunch of stuff once as have others.  I don't know how you computer wizards  would build an archive, but I tried several things, including just clicking on a post, hitting "save as" and going from there.  I found this pretty unsatisfactory and ended up just bringing up all the posts from one month, copying them and pasting them into a Word document, which I then saved.  (I can see the computer literate shaking their heads in wonder about me taking six steps to do what could be done in one, but I am old and the old brain works that way.)  The advantage of this process is that I have had to go back and read my own stuff.  The disadvantage is that I have had to go back and read my own stuff.   (The other disadvantage is that I didn't get all the comments saved ---even though I seem to have preserved links to them; so I will probably go back and save the comments in the same way and insert them into the word documents.)

Reading my old stuff has made me aware of: 1. How much of what I have written lately is a sort of whining soliloquy.  2. How many documents I have promised (and started) but never posted.  I promised the story of a high school production of Rebel Without a Cause which never got here.  I promised a post on ethic humor, the draft for which seems to have been eaten by my computer.  I promised to show some samples of what I would call "my art" which would have to include some pictures of plays, puppets, dolls, etc.

(sidebar) I was taken, today with the content of Davo's blog, which I haven't been able to reach for awhile, but in which he shows a lot of painting and computer design and stuff like that that is really impressive.  (I really enjoy Davo--Wombats Waffles because though I probably don't agree with him on anything political, our backgrounds seem to mesh in a way that provides a mystic link to him, and he has had the idea of showing his art.)

Anyway, I am going to go back to my past and see if I can find any interesting tidbits that I haven't talked about yet, and try to deal with the onset of age without all the whining.

A semi political comment.  I watched about an hour of the Democratic convention last evening and Hillary's speech this evening and reflected that I am grateful that I am no longer teaching public speaking or persuasion.  Back in those days, I required my students to watch at least two complete evening sessions and to write critiques of the speeches.  That always require me to watch the whole dang thing (or both whole dang things) so that I could evaluate their critiques.  I came to the conclusion tonight that if I had to watch the entire convention now (and I suspect that I will feel the same way about the Republican convention) the result would be me shooting the TV or going totally bonkers.  Yuck.