A Quiet Return

Because we cannot repair the loss of years away, homecomings are almost always conflicted. We are no longer at "home" in our former familiar place. And we do not live between two or more cultures, but rather in both. We are neither fully away, nor fully home. 
-- Charles Ringma

The entire blogger interface has changed.  I'm not sure what to make of that, but it sure doesn't feel like home.

Like many former bloggers, I fell under the spell of Facebook, with its simple-to-use interface that did not require you to sit for an hour or more each night composing a masterpiece or (in that case of weather observations), shooting 5 minutes of video, then spending an hour editing and mixing and rendering it.  I slowly stopped blogging.  But, of course, FB has now run its course and devolved into a platform designed to divide us and rile us up and to spread really, really old memes.  Ones that were already old before they showed up on iFunny months before making it to FB.  But I digress...

Because I became quite enamored with video back in the day of "CherkyB, Weather or Not," I'll be staring out with some posts that also include video.  I've taken up the hobby of tobacco pipe carving, so I'm sure I'll have a few on that (I've made four pipes so far, and three more blocks of briar burl were delivered today).  Right now, I am uploading a video on how to (kinda) make a handbell tree.  The Mrs. plays in a couple handbell choirs and asked me to make one for her, which I did with somewhat limited success.  It's a 27 minute-long video that took me hours to splice together.  I had to beg time off MaxieC to use his 22-core Xeon(tm) processor server to render it, as it was going to take around 50 hours to render on my 2-core laptop.  It will take around an hour just to upload that video to Youtube.

It's not clear to me that this blog will ever return to its glory days.  I'm just not that funny anymore, it seems.  I'm not sure why.  I assume it's due to having my magazines limited to 15 rounds.  I'm gong to give it a shot, though.  I could use a little catharsis.  And, of course, I plan to follow the old rule: never blog sober.  L'Chaim.