I have not given up on blogging

It's been 18 days since my last post. There is no one reason for it. It just sort of happened. I have a lot of posts in the draft stage but I haven't been able to work on them long enough to be ready for publishing. I've always been torn between the idea of just getting thoughts down or spending the time to make sure a piece is thought out and well written. I seem to have a hard time finding the middle ground. And no matter what I do, I'm never quite happy with the result.

In the past, I've said, "This is just a diary. I should get things down quickly so I don't miss events that happen in my life. The important thing is to be able to go back over these posts and remember what was going on. I want to recall my thoughts - not create the great American novel."

But I've also said, "The idea of this blog is to help me to learn to write better. Just writing down my thoughts could be done in a paper diary. The idea of doing it in a blog is to allow for the possibility of other people reading it, too." That means I may need to explain things that I understand but other readers wouldn't. That means it needs to be written well enough to be understood. It should make sense. Also, I'd like other readers to be moved by my writing. We all have some knowledge that other people don't. One of the reasons God put us all together here on the Earth is to share what we know and to help each other.

The idea that other people might read this blog is both scary and exciting. It's scary because it opens me up to criticism. It exposes things I wouldn't normally share. But with criticism comes improvement and that's the exciting part. Is it better to have an idea that is wrong and hold onto it no matter what or is it better to find out that ideas you think are true and important that turn out to be false or useless? I'd rather try to correct the things that are wrong. I guess that's the engineer in me. And maybe that's how my title Adventures in Engineering is really about my adventure in correcting my own mistakes. Not to create a great piece of software or a product for sale but to create a better me. To extend my knowledge by coming up with an idea, getting it down on paper and then finding the problems with it and correcting those problems. Engineering isn't always about creating things. It can also be about improving yourself. So, I'm left with the difficult balance of trying to write as often as possible but to write as clearly and thoughtfully as I can. Bear with me. It's going to be a bumpy ride.