Mountains Made Low

“The battery’s currently on recharge.”
–Mike Noonan, Bag of Bones (Stephen King)

What can I say? I may have been a little bit blogged out there for a week or so. And the quote above from a fictitious novelist probably reflects the sentiments of the real novelist who created him in terms of the downtime that writers need. But I think I’m back now. I’ve got books to write about (but no movies — I’ve had pointed out to me, recently, both by circumstances and by and extremely pragmatic friend, that my 50-movie goal for 2009 may have been a touch unrealistic. I probably would have been better to shoot for 50 books and 30 movies, rather than vicing them versa as I did. At least, those seem to be the numbers that I’m more likely to hit by the end of December at this point (though, honestly, when the winter kicks in, I might be more prone to watching movies again — after all, I was ahead on the movie count through March); maybe I’ll make it to 50/50. Hmmmm….

But I’ve now got four book posts stuck in the draft folder (and, okay, probably one movie — I’ve been convinced that a TV-tie-in, direct-to-dvd probably does still count as a movie, so I’ll write about it, too). And and idea regarding media, particularly digital media, struck me this morning, so look for that in the near future, too, plus an update on the mundanities of life, as much as those issues deserve updating at this point, which — honestly — ain’t much.

So, yeah, I’m back. And probably back with a vengeance. But we’ll see, I suppose.

I started this blog at the end of June 2007. It was then all about the mountains (Mike in the Mountains, remember?), because I was moving to the mountains and I was convinced that this would be my lot in life.

The best laid plans, right?

When I left the mountains for the flat grasslands and woodlands of northwestern Ohio in the summer of 2008, I decided to “rebrand” the blog. Mike was no longer in the mountains, you see, and so I knew it was time for a change. I wanted to keep the url for the blog, though, so I decided that I’d rebrand to something else involving mountains. Hence the blog’s current incarnation as Mountains Made Low.

But as I’ve thought about it, recently, I’ve discovered that I’m not really making any mountains any lower in my life — the blog title just seems wrong. So I’m thinking of rebranding again for the beginning of July 2009. It might involve a new url, too, but if it does, I’ll make sure the old one redirects to the new one.

Or I may not. It’s just a thought I’ve had in the past couple of days.

My experiment with multiple blogs was a failure. There came a point where even a pithy one-liner of experiential learning and a bare-bones record of my food and fitness regime became too much to keep up with on a daily basis, in addition to this blog, and—y’know—the actual real world of everyday life. Let alone trying to blog about classes every day. So the other three blogs are gone. Here, you get all (of) Mike, all the time.

Well, WordPress has upgraded to version 2.7; I’ve upgraded to WP2.7, too. And this one pretty much took a full install of the new version, not just looking at the change log and changing one or two files.

This is the third upgrade in as many months. Now I know the upgrades are free, and you don’t have to do them if you don’t want to (if you’re running your own install of the WP blogware—if you’re hosted at wordpress.com, you do have to). But still. It can be a pain in the butt sometimes. But it’s done now.

And I’ll have to see if I can get used to the completely reworked interface.

Yes, I realize this is utterly shameless. But, I assure you, it’s as much for me as for you. That is, I don’t have the time (the papers! the paper!) right this very moment to write any of these impending posts, but I don’t want to forget that I want to write them, so here’s what you can expect from me in the next couple of days, in no particular order, and not necessarily in the order I intend to post them.

• The Truth about Cats and Dogs. No not a movie review; literally about (well, at least touching on) our favorite four-legged critters, and thinking about relationships.
• Review of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Pretty much self-explanatory, except that this will be about the book, not the movie.
• Review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Again, pretty much self-explanatory, and I’ll try to keep from bitching too much about the impending film version of this one (allegedly featuring Angelina Jolie).
• Review of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. What can I say? It’s a novella. And therefore easy to finish quickly.
• As Yet Untitled Thanksgiving Post. You had to see this one coming, didn’t you?
• 500! Yep, we’re getting ever closer to that 500th post in the blog. No one has weighed in on the question of favorite posts, yet, either. Oh well. I’ll come up with something. After this incredibly self-serving post, after all, there are only ten remaining until that milepost!

And that’s it. I’ll write the others soon. As soon as my head’s above water on the grading. Really.

There was a post here on Friday called “Religion and Me.” This particular post may have shown up in your feed readers, and anywhere else you can see my posts based on RSS or Atom technology, but I thought I’d explain that it’s been gone nearly as long as those technologies have said it’s there. And here’s why.

I never meant to post it. I clicked a wrong button in the writing interface on Friday—to be specific, I clicked Publish instead of Save. I meant to save what was published as a draft, because I knew at the time that it needed more work. When I accidentally published, though, I thought I’d leave it because I know that once something’s on the Web, it’s pretty much there forever.

But then I came back and read over it again. I didn’t like it. It didn’t say what I wanted to say, or come off the way I wanted it to come off. So I unpublished it.

It needed more than editing (which was why I originally wanted to save it), and upon rereading, I noticed that it needed more than rewriting, too—it needed rethinking. Not that I think I need to change my thinking on the issues it touched on, just that I need to get the thinking and its expression clearer before I put those thoughts out there for public consumption.

So call it user error, and accept my apologies for the tease, if you saw it in an RSS feed but couldn’t get to the post.

And if you happened to see it in a reader (or on the blog in the time it was up), you’re probably very well aware of what I’m talking about in terms of the need to revisit and revise the expressions of the ideas, so—please!—pay no attention to the post that went away.

Thanks.

Just a couple of things that have struck me about the blog and my blog habits, today. Nothing earth-shaking here (I think, but that’s one of the things I’ll talk about), just some blogging about blogging things.

Thing 1. Have you noticed how I’ve been blogging more on the weekends lately? I’m not sure what that’s about—though I’m inclined to cite the “time of the semester” in terms of my busy-ness during my work week, and the time to sit, relax, think, watch football, and blog on the weekends. Maybe that’s it. We’ll say it is, huh? But beyond that, it’s fun to note that I’m still averaging a post a day or a little better, even if I’m writing six or seven posts per week on the weekend.

Thing 2. My Constant Readers, y’all are weird! But don’t take that personally, because I am, too. But here, specifically, is what I mean. Look at the things you all comment on! I write long and deep posts, that are meaningful to me, about politics, philosophy, religion, and other “big ideas,” and you don’t comment. But let me write about Buckeye Football or—of all things!—sauerkraut, and the commenting goes right off the chart!

And you know that in pointing this out, I’m teasing, right? I love your comments, and on whichever of my ideas catches your attention! Keep ‘em coming, even if they’re about the football and sauerkraut posts (wow!—football and sauerkraut together… it really is starting to look and sound like New Year’s Day around here, isn’t it?)

One more (almost) non-thing. This is post 485. We’re getting to 500! (And I felt compelled to make this a non-thing because, of course, there’s no Thing 3 in The Cat in the Hat.)