12 years of blogging.

When I first started this blog (2006!) I was anything but circumspect. I didn't think the truth could hurt me. Linda was somewhat worried, but there didn't seem to be much consequence to my babblings.

I figured I just wasn't that important.

Oh, occasionally I'd say something I probably shouldn't have said. There were a couple of times I talked about local businesses and their prospects, only to learn to my alarm that they'd read my posts and took offense.

So I stopped doing that.

I'm mostly curious about how businesses survive or don't survive. There is no rooting for downfall, or envy over success, just curiosity about how they did it. I speculate based on my knowledge of overhead and profit margins and what I know about the local economy. I'm pretty good at it, but I can't expose my spculations out loud.

I have to keep it to myself.

When it comes to my own business, I don't mind being forthright. I don't give out specific figures but general trends. I don't see any harm in it. However, sometimes the industries I'm involved in have some troubles that I'd love to talk about, but I've learned the customers sometimes draw the wrong conclusions and so it's better to deal with the problems myself instead of airing them.

So I deal with the situation myself.

I'm not working at the store much these days--which keeps me apart from the daily store experiences, which interesting or not, at least filled my days. Everything is a little bit at a remove nowadays. Sabrina is the one dealing with that.

So you're not hearing about the stuff of day to day retail.

Since I've started writing, I've also decided to keep my blog neutral about politics and religion and such. I don't think it does much good, and besides, everyone expresses their opinion about such things--to no avail. There is a whole industry of outrage out there, and my blog doesn't need to add to that.

That takes away a whole lot of subjects.

In other words, slowly but surely I've whittled down the list of appropriate subjects for this blog.

I know that non-writers (and probably writers too) have limited interest in my process of writing. One thing I do is obsess over whatever my interests are. I go over the same topics again and again, gleaning little insights each time (or not.) 

So, even there, I've decided to quit constantly going over the same ground, at least publicly.

All this is to apologize for not posting as often as I used to--and for being so bland about everything. Or maybe I'm just in a lull. I'm actually dying to talk about lots of things, but the very things I want to talk about are the things I shouldn't talk about.

Or I could throw caution to the wind. But the problem here isn't that I'm worried about what will happen to me but whether I hurt someone else.

And that I don't want.