Mid Year State Of The Blog: July 2017

Mid-Year State Of The Blog: July 2017

Well it is the halfway mark of this year. Technically a bit past the midway point. With this being only the 10th post of the year I've made then I will be well less than half of my personal yearly quota by years end. 😢 I personally don't like when I'm this low. If my low trend continues this will be the third year in a row and the 5th year total that I've been below my yearly posting goal. My other personal goal with this blog is to try to at the very least make one post each month. 

At least for this blog I have not missed a month. I did a quick check it looks like I've hit each month. Many many months I have had only one post that month the bare minimum. I don't want to accept going more than that without blogging. I feel terrible when I see the low numbers. I have never been so proficient that I would have multiple posts per day. Some people can write that much and do. If they miss just one day of posting they feel even worse than I do just missing one month. On my trading card blogs I have missed a month once or twice each. I have made a personal vow to never do that again. Sometimes the evening of the last day of the month I have had to tweak my posting time slightly if the blogger system has already crossed over to midnight.

Before this post is published I have two posts for this month here. On my Trading card blogs nothing in July yet. I have plenty of posts in draft on them, but for some reason or another I haven't published any. I will even if it is on the 31st at 11:50 pm and I have to fudge the time to 11:59 pm on the 31st instead of 12:03 am 01 Aug.

Maybe I should start showing sexy photos of scantily clad women on a regular basis to up the viewing numbers and to up the posting quota. I probably could, but I would soon bore of it. It doesn't say that "this is MY Blog". I also might be accused of stealing someone Else's material.

I forget the source of that "writer" image. I got it from one of those social media quizzes that show what job/career you should really be doing. There are times I would love to get paid as a writer. However, to quote Douglas Adams "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." I have never been good at meeting deadlines. I have perfected the art of procrastination. In school I used to wait, waiting isn't the right word but whatever, til the night before something was due sometimes before even starting the dang thing. Often with English classes if an essay, book report was supposed to be over 1,000 words or at least 10 pages I would often fail to get even that. My word count even using a ton of "and"s and "the"s along with many other filler words I would still only manage to get only about half of what the requirement was. If I had a professional writing gig I don't know how I would manage to get things in on time. Especially if I had a weekly or monthly deadline. Maybe if there was a loose deadline I might make some of those.

Some books recently bought June Edition

I've got some books that I recently read that I have to sit down and write reviews for, they are making a nice little pile for me to think about. This post is not about that. It is about a few books I recently got, most of them from Quality Paperback Book Club. Two of them were kids books of those two one of them I had as a kid the other one is a recently published one.

So the kids books I got (wow this one I got at the end of April.)

When I Grow Up by Al Yankovic
Yep that book was written by "Weird Al" Yankovic the parody musician. This is his first attempt at kids books and it is pretty good. It has that strange wacky humor of Al's so you know he wrote it, or someone was channeling the spirit of Shel Silverstein (and cleaned it up). Somewhere online there is an interactive version of the book that you can purchase or download. I haven't tried that although I thought about it.

Next a book I had, or rather my family had, when I was a kid. I think it was eventually either handed down to my nephew (who is now 24), given away or donated. But the version I got is a special anniversary edition of the book. I figured "Why Not?". Um it was actually May when I got this one. (So much for this being only books I got in June).

 

The Story of Ferdinand: 75th Anniversary Edition by Munro Leaf
As I said my family had this book when I was growing up. Like many of the books in our family library from my childhood this book was probably a 1950s or 1960s edition. I don't know how many times I read it or had it read to me. I think the original copy we had may have been defaced with crayon by either the 5 year old me or one of my older siblings at that age. Aren't most kids books defaced by the kids at a young age? Who then in their Adult life find the childhood memories in a trunk in mom's attic or basement when they are moving out for the final time or many years later when they are packing up the estate.

Growing up in the suburbs of Washington DC, in the small city/town of Wheaton, MD there was an Italian restaurant that was named "Ferdinand's". They had excellent food, and a fantastic salad bar. The restaurant was family owned and seemed like it would last forever, even though many times there would be barely a soul in the place. Sadly they closed down a few years ago.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

This is the third book in the Robert Langdon series by Dan Brown. I haven't had a chance to read this one yet. I'm sure if they are making a movie of it I will read it before seeing the movie as I did with the previous books from this series. I'm not sure what the full synopsis of this story is at the time of this writing (I plan on starting it soon after composing this post). All I know is with the picture of the Capital on the cover and from the first stirrings I recall from hearing about this book some of it takes place in Washington DC.

And Another Thing... (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
by Eoin Colfer
This book is on my list of books to read (although I haven't added it to my goodreads list yet. So I don't know when I got it exactly.) It is sort of officially unofficially the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, except it's written by Eoin Colfer the author of the Artemis Fowl series. I plan on re-reading the first five books of the H2G2 series before starting this one to get back to wherever it is that Arthur Dent has gotten to since then.