How embarrassing. Start a blog at the first of the year. Setup, configure, couple of posts. One that’s not half bad. Then … nothing. It’s like stopping for Dairy Queen on your way home from the gym on January 2nd, and then never working out again. But because I am a slacker and not a quitter, here I am. So why start and then disappear? What have I actually been doing with my time instead of writing and blog tending?

1. School happened. Homeschooling is hard, man. Getting school started again after Christmas … well, after the New Year … actually after a round of the January flu … yeah, after all that, getting any school work happening was all I could do. Let alone blog. Or floss.

2. Diagnosis. Nothing too serious, and certainly not life threatening. But early in the year we got confirmation that our sweet Grace is officially “special.” I have a lot more to say about this, but I’m not going to turn on the spigot today. For now, let’s just say “congratulations, it’s Aspergers” and leave it at that. So that sent me for a mental lu-lu ad took time to process.

3. Taxes suck. Don’t want to revisit this, but paying property taxes in January, right after Christmas, just sucks. And then to turn around and prepare income taxes, too? Ugh. It’s hard to be witty and interesting when you’ve got that in the back of your mind. All. The. Time.

4. I got a gig! Oh, yeah – I actually did some fee-for-service legitimate consulting work during the first quarter of the year. That was awesome, being out among adults (virtually) and getting paid to think and work and give opinions. Awesome. Paycheck? Awesome squared!

5. House of Cards. Goodbye, February.

6. Game of Thrones and HBO Now. Goodbye, April. And May. This is a seriously guilty pleasure, and there are some things I will NOT watch on HBO. Game of Thrones tests my limits as to what I will allow myself to watch, but there is also some pretty decent, non-prurient viewing on HBO. And apparently I feel compelled to watch it all.

7. Blogging is easy – writing perfectionism is hard. I threw this page up thinking once I got the mechanics of the blog worked out, it would be easy to keep it primed with content. I have a lot to say, I write pretty fast, type even faster. No problem. What I learned through my list of partially composed posts is that I have a lot to say, but no idea how I want to say it. Audience, tone, the level of vulnerability I felt comfortable sharing … I quickly realized did not have those thing figured out and it let it paralyze me. Still haven’t figured it out, but as they say perfection is the enemy of gettin-stuff-done, so I’m just going to dig in.

So there it is, a list of excuses.

More awesome quick takes at This Ain’t the Lycum