Balance

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It’s now approaching two months since my last post and several friends have asked me what happened to Living in Kellie’s World. Let’s just say that I’ve been a bit distracted. I’ve been spending so much time learning the alphabet soup of technologies necessary to become a web developer (PHP, HTML, CSS, MYSQL, JAVA, APACHE, JASON, JQUERY, AJAX,  OAUTH, CURL and whatever else I find required) that I’ve neglected my blog. Whenever I embark upon a new enterprise, I tend to pursue it to the exclusion of almost everything else. This is an easy trap for someone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and I succumb to it frequently. During the first year following my retirement I dedicated myself to getting a teaching credential. After completing all the necessary coursework with 4.0 GPA, I decided to forgo the teaching and began blogging. I then proceeded to drive my family and friends nuts with incessant entreaties to read and share my posts. Eventually, the blogging was displaced by my latest obsession: web development. 

Just before Christmas, a friend told me that life is about  achieving balance and that I was clearly off kilter. It was an assessment I couldn’t refute. We kicked off the new year with a Caribbean cruise, which forced me to take a break from programming. It was our fifth cruise in past twelve months, obviously another balance issue, but one I don’t think Kellie has any interest solving. While ringing in the new year at sea, I resolved to achieve a more harmonious approach to my endeavors. The obsessive-compulsive thing is not about go away anytime soon, but I can use it to my advantage. All I need is a schedule; obsessive-compulsive types are very good at making plans and sticking to schedules. I’ll save technical projects like programming and other left-brained tasks for the afternoon. My mornings will be devoted to right-brained activities that don’t require extensive analysis or reasoning, such as writing posts for Living in Kellie’s World. These skills are actually counterproductive to my blogging efforts since any attempt to reconcile Kellie’s World with logic can induce instant insanity and other psychoses. 

So, I’m back to blogging again and my goal is to publish at least two posts per week. I’ll have another post on Friday about a funny episode during our latest cruise. It involves grandmothers and marital aids.