Well, I'm back.

That was rather embarrassing...I got a new laptop and desktop and didn't transfer the link to my blog editor, so I just now dug it off my old laptop and bookmarked it on my new computers.

I've been neglecting this poor blog for some time now. Twitter and Facebook have taken its place, for the most part. But I miss blogging. I miss being able to type out what I really want to say without being cut off after 140 characters. Even on Facebook the length of an allowable comment is ridiculously short.

But the nice thing about Facebook and Twitter is that people actually *read* what I write there, so the discussions are much more interesting. I actually get comments, sometimes quite a lot, and of course, being able to comment on other people's postings is great too. Here I'm a voice in the wilderness. No one ever comments, and it's just me talking. Pretty lonely.

However, one thing that I realized is that everything I write on Twitter and Facebook disappears into a black hole after a certain length of time. I was trying to go back to a conversation that I had with a friend on Facebook just a few months ago, and it was GONE. I went back as far as I could, and then I was told, "You don't have any older posts".

Who knew? I was thinking that I could look back on my archive of Facebook posts and use that as a journal of sorts as time went on. But nope, I've been writing into the wind. It's not searchable, it disappears...what a drag.

When I went camping recently I kept having "status" moments. Nowhere near a computer, no cell reception, and yet every few hours something would trigger a "status message" in my brain. I'd form a little 140 character message describing some interesting little event or emotion, without even trying! Pretty weird.

It kept happening, so I did an experiment. I took out a notebook and wrote down my "status messages" as they popped into my head. Well what do you know, it was pretty cool going old-school and writing down posts on paper. But the words lay dead in my book. No comments, no conversation. It was nice not being limited to a certain number of characters, but I was pondering whether there was any value in my writing, since I was the only one who would ever see it. If a tree falls in the forest...