Two critical months

I've found that in past years, I always seem to write plenty of blog entries in January. But when I have a bad year, as the last three years have been, it's in February or March that the number of posts drops off. Here's a table of post totals since 2012. I list the total for the year and the total for the first three months of each of those years.

Total type	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
Year	106	35	26	22	??
January	9	10	8	7	9
February	5	9	10	4	??
March	8	6	4	4	??

I really had high hopes in 2013 that my dropping to 106 posts in 2012 was going to be an anomaly. After all, I wrote 10 posts in January 2013 and 9 posts in February 2013. But then the bottom dropped out in March (only 6 posts). Likewise in 2014. I was going to turn it around that year and wrote 8 posts in January 2014 and 10 posts in February 2014. Then March hit and I only wrote 4 posts. Last year was the worst. Only 7 posts in January 2015 and then 4 posts in February and 4 posts in March! Last year was my worst year since the beginning of my blog.

So, I've made it through January. Let's see if I can keep going this month and again in March. Then I think I'll be able to relax. Or maybe I'll just create a new pattern for failure! But I have a lot of ideas for blog posts. Some are already outlined and some are just a sentence or two of an idea. But they are started. As a matter of fact I have about 250 draft posts saved up over the years. Even if I have no more ideas this year, I have enough material to have a record year. We'll see.

Some of the things I hope to write more about this year:

- I'm learning a new programming language and I intend to write a few posts about it. Python, the programming language, has been around for about 25 years but I'm just now getting around to learning it. I'll be writing about why I chose this language and how I went about learning it. I'll recommend at least one book and a number of websites. I may even teach you a little about it.

- The minister of our church continues to give terrific sermons that I want to highlight here. Doing that helps me dig deeper and get even more out of the sermons. So, writing about them here serves two purposes.

- I want to write more about what it was like to move my mother from her home in a tiny town south of Pittsburgh to small town on Cape Cod. This will also be about her heath challenges, about being an only child, about having some wonderful cousins and about the state of health care, telephone service and road repairs in this country. Yes, they are all related.

- I continue to work for the same company I have for the last 28 years. I can't talk too much about what I am working on now but I certainly should be able to write about things I've done in the past for products that have been released. There are a lot of interesting stories that could be written about a company that has distributors all over the world and whose product has been used in an amazing number of places from Antarctica to the bottom of the sea. From mountains to deserts to the insides of crocodiles. They've been in the Space Shuttle and on ice flows. They've been used in cranberry bogs and have survived hurricanes.

I'll leave you with a quote I think I wrote this week-end. I hope I'm not just remembering quote someone else quote:

There are two ways to keep your hands clean. One is to do nothing with them and the other is to work hard, get them dirty and wash them afterwards. jed