Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me… “Well, you say it’s your birthday, well it’s my birthday, too, yeah…” “A very merry un-birthday to you… to you!”
I think I may give myself something material as well… like an iPhone on a Cricket plan, but while I’d love to take a walk in the Wildflower Woods of Gene Stratton-Porter’s northern Indiana, and reminisce along purple-infused, lilac-scented paths, what I am really giving myself is the gift of permission to redo everything I have that is online, again…
Do I do this every year? Well… yes I do. My favorite quote is àpropos here, it is one by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
I’ve only teared up a couple of times today. Pretty good for me on a special day. I always get sad on such days. No reason to go into why… but I am learning, even at this advanced age, that I do not have to explain myself or my actions to anyone. This may be the biggest thing I have learned for a long, long time; it is right up there with how to filter out idiots, apart from idiotic things said by friends, as a separate items on my Facebook stream. (That dear friends is a post in and of itself! There are so many wonderful people I like to follow but even they post really stupid things!)
I think it was three years ago that I started to put everything on nfhill.com. Then two years ago I decided to create donenesting.com, then last year it was boomher.net… and somewhere along in there I decided reasoncreek.com had to exist. Perhaps you see a pattern?
So, at least for the moment, I am giving myself permission to mix it up again even though I’ve sworn a thousand times that I would not do it again. I’m keeping Reason Creek, this site, and will keep it live. I like my little imaginary spot under a tree by a stream where I can read while naked and converse with other reasonable people. (Sort of like working from home in your pajamas.) What else I will keep live is questionable. I started building a business site that I need to finish and update at Hill Research Services.
Those are the two places I will focus my online writing energies while I finish up the book that I have been working on for the last 10 years, started writing in earnest a couple of years ago, and started the (please Goddess!) penultimate draft a few weeks ago. No more sites. I have this little virtual hording problem that I will post about in the next month or so. My name is Nancy and I horde domain names. So that makes two more posts, Domain Hording and Facebook Idiocy, that I have just thought of while writing this post. Geesh, this writing thing is a vicious circle, cycle, or something, no?
I hear that there are people who are not constantly assaulted by ideas, but I am certainly not one of them. Anyway, this year I am giving myself permission to focus on my book, blog and business site. Damn all those other great ideas I’ve had like Late Boomers, Build Peace, BoomHer, Done Nesting, Things in the Attic, Triple Bottom Lines, Blogging Cooperative, Tucson Ghosts, Massage Therapy Tucson, Casita Gaia… they can just hang out in cyberspace, like the neglected orphans they are, until I figure out what to do with them. Unless you want to make me an offer! Seriously, there is the third blog post topic I’ve generated while writing this one – Domains for Sale!
So now I’m off to work on something else other than this post! What do you horde, virtually? Have you ever given yourself permission to do something for your birthday? What was it?