one year mark

Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog. I set a target of posting at least once a week for a year, and here we are. A year. There was a flurry of posts at the beginning with the presidential election last fall, and now I've had another run in the past month about health care. This is Post 204.

The political world certainly isn't getting more calm. Just in the next 5 days, President Obama is giving two major speeches - one to schools on Tuesday about succeeding in school (noon Eastern and broadcast live on the internet) and one to Congress on Wednesday about health care. Congress has a whole lot more going on than just health care - it's budget season. The Supreme Court is potentially going to overturn corporate donation limits to political campaigns in the next few weeks. Our military is still spinning its wheels in the Middle East and who really knows what the heck is going on over there. The national debt is starting to reach levels of being imaginary, because numbers don't go that high. The list could go on for awhile ...

So now what, for this blog? My intention was to contribute to the public discourse by making politics and government more understandable to the average citizen. I hope I've done that, and not merely perpetuated the cacophany that is the 24-hour "news" cycle on the internet.

It takes quite a bit of work to keep up with, what with all the reading for any kind of verification and analysis, plus I edit posts multiple times before I release them. If this were some kind of money-making venture, that would make the work a bit more worth it. But it's not. (I wouldn't even know how to get something like that started.) I have a number of other writing projects that I'd like to spend some time on. And then there's, ya know, that whole stay-home mom thing ... my preschoolers are getting to a phase where they need more total attention instead of me simply being in the same room but doing something else. I'm not the world's greatest at managing my time.

Unless something really stirs my soul and must be written about (like health care, but I think I've beaten that to death for now), or unless I suddenly have hundreds of people reading (as evidenced by, let's say, subscribers to the blog on Google Reader - there are currently 22) and asking me to keep going ... I'm going to let this blog go for awhile.

It's been an interesting year. Thanks for joining me in this little adventure!