Incoherent Rant (via My Life is a Book)

Hi all,

I’m re-blogging this post because I think this young woman has some great points. (Just so you understand the context of the post, she wrote this in response to the recent events in Japan).

Gina, thank you again for saying what many people think, but won’t say out loud.

As I just wrote, I want to help, I want everyone to help. I felt so strongly about this that I wrote a short rant about it and I am now going to post it in all it’s glory for everyone to see. I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do right now, I’m not even sure if I’m posting this for the right reasons. I think I’m posting it because I want people to know how I feel about it but I’m a little uncertain as to whether or not that’s all it is. Ther … Read More

via My Life is a Book

New Look

After a few weeks off (a much-needed mental vacation), Other Side of 40 is back up and posting.

I look back on the past few months as a wonderful learning experience. Maintaining a daily blog requires a large part of one’s free time, and looks far easier than it is in reality. Stress of working full-time vs the wish to create here (as with a lot of bloggers) created quite a bit of conflict in my life, which was beginning to wear me out. I started to feel that I was just writing for the sake of getting a post done for the day. The fun was gone, and it seemed that this blog was just another item in a long list of things to get through before the day was over. Lesson learned! It was time to make some changes.

I’m treating of the first part of this year as “training camp”. It has given me a chance to see what worked and what didn’t, both writing and blog layout wise. Spring cleaning started a bit early this year. The first thing to go, were both my post count and word count tallies on the side bar. These two items were becoming a big distraction to me, and it turns out I have no problem reaching my target of at least 300 words per post. The visit counter has also been removed. People don’t read blogs based on visits, they read because they enjoy what the writer creates. I also have dropped out of the PostaDay challenge in favor of the PostaWeek challenge (I will be posting more than once a week, but less than everyday), and I now write under my name (not bigyellowbus) as well.

Finally, while I liked the old look of the blog, I wanted to make a clean start so I chose to add a new theme as well. This was a very hard decision to make, and it involved trying out several of them over the space of a few days (you might have noticed several of these changes if you stopped by during that time period). What you now see is the result of my mini-makeover.

I hope you enjoy the new look.

Ken