Virtual Pragmatics

The Blogging Deficit

When I was at UF in the 1980's, just when 'deficit' was entering the vocabulary, a friend of mine introduced me to the concept of the 'study deficit': all the hours that all we students should have studied but didn't. I laughed, because I immediately recognized that I'd contributed to the deficit!

I feel the same way about this blog... while I've been busy with other things while the fields this blog should cover remain fallow, the other things do deserve blogging. To name three things, we've bought a house, become landlords, and rafted the Grand Canyon. These things aren't for everyone, but if they are for you, you should, and our experiences might be useful to you. It's outside my original charter for this blog, so I wrestle with creating categories or starting a new blog. I like Dave Winer's definition of a blog as 'the undedited voice of a person'... but I heavily edit this blog down to very narrow channels within my purview. If you're reading this, your opinions are welcome.

I have a tendency to wait until I've collected my thoughts, pictures, links before I say anything... which too often leads to saying nothing. So I'm writing this post to get myself rolling again.

Doing better than thinking about doing

The sleep of a laborer is sweet, whether he eats little or much, but the abundance of a rich man permits him no sleep. -- Ecclesiastes 5:12

I spent the weekend in near constant motion. Friday night we helped someone move, two large trucks full of belongings, into the wee hours. Saturday morning we drove up to Jonathan Dickinson state park to help chaperone a teen ministry campout for the weekend. The people organizing the campout were doing so for the first time, and so there were a number of loose ends and tasks that my wife and I rapidly became involved in. We came home late Sunday afternoon, and were dozing by early in the evening. Tired, but happy.

I need to look up the authorship of an expression I like, 'the song of friends at work', but it expresses the mood I felt over the course of the weekend. There's something about combining doing with togetherness that amplifies both.