Tuesday, December 31, 2013

This Has Not Been a Good Year for Blogging


Scaly Distractions will only have 25 posts on the books for 2013, as opposed to 30 in 2012, 26 in 2011, and 55 in 2010.  That might not seem too bad, but the summer was abnormally low, redeemed only by high posts counts for January and October, and for the first time I had a month where I didn't post at all (June). On the positive side, I did start my new blog, The Wandering Archives, but that's kind of like running in place, because it only reposts blog entries that I wrote in 2006 through 2008.  

Blogging didn't work out too well this year because I decided to concentrate on doing some other things instead.  Unfortunately, most of those other things didn't work out either. 

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

I Don't Know What Happened Here, but It Involved Christmas and Motorcars


I get very tired this time of year.  I am, as anyone who knows me can attest, tired in every season, but the tiredness gets to its worst around Christmas.  I attribute the phenomenon to the fact that the last week of December occurs between the darkest day of the year (December 21) and the coldest day of the year (on average around January 15) in the Northern Hemisphere.  And that's why I see December's end as a good time to try to get a nice long rest.  

At work on Friday I was feeling this tiredness, and somehow my mind drifted toward upper-class England in the Twenties. First I considered Downton Abbey.  (Although I probably have a fairly high genetic tolerance for Britishness, I can only watch Downtown Abbey for about ten minutes at a time, because it consists mostly of people disapproving of one another.)  Then for some reason I started thinking about a similar show, Brideshead Revisited, which I never watched, but saw advertised on PBS when I was younger, and checked the show out on Wikipedia.  

As the afternoon wore on, I began to more and more seriously consider the option of traveling back in time to become an aristocrat in England in the Twenties, where I would live in a vast country house and spend my days disapproving of people and driving around in a motorcar.  As far as I could reason, the biggest barrier to this plan would be operating the motorcar, which at that time would likely have been controlled via an odd assemblage of levers and cranks.