In attempting to make a positive-minded effort toward combating the general atmosphere of malaise I’ve suffered for most of the last couple of years, I’ve been taking stock and rethinking some aspects of my life. Some parts of my life I simply can’t change, and I find myself reciting the so-called Serenity Prayer on occasion. I find this amusing because, one, I don’t pray anymore and, two, every time it comes to mind I think back on the bad old days of youth when Mom was in and out of 12-step rehab programs.

But I digress. I enjoy digression, mind you.

On the personal front, Kyla and I have agreed to take another shot at the “relationship thing.” Over the last couple of months we’ve had some of the most open and effective communication out of our entire time together, and I think we might be able to function as a healthy pairing once again. Time will tell, of course, but the last couple of weeks have been consistently positive in that regard.

On another personal front, Lil’ and I continue our struggle against the vagaries of work schedules and other conflicts to maintain something resembling a healthy, ongoing relationship. Text messaging is our friend, for good or ill. Yesterday she received the welcome news that starting in mid-December she’ll be working a nice, normal Monday-to-Friday daytime shift. The gods rejoice! This won’t solve all of our scheduling problems, but it certainly won’t hurt.

On the family side of things, my kids are awesome. Not that this is really news, but it bears mentioning when both of ’em come home with excellent report cards and are getting high praise from their teachers. Erica, particularly, has shown incredible improvement in attitude and effort this year. Neither of them are “straight A” students, but they’re pulling down better grades than I ever did at their age and they’re on track to become decent adult human beings as well (which is more important). I’m intensely proud of them both.

One of the areas in which I’ve found myself lacking this year is in my writing, here and elsewhere. I run an anime forum and barely write there. I host this journal and barely note the highlights of my existence in it. I belong to several online communities in which I fail to participate. I have story ideas that never make it outside the confines of my skull. My schedule (and all the distractions surrounding it) precludes much in the way of extracurricular activities, but at least one of these complaints can be addressed if I simply start using my journal again more like the way I used to. Well, I might not post so many damned memes. I’ll spare you that much.

In my search for ways to make journal writing a regular event again, I looked into offline editors like BlogJet, BlogDesk and Windows Live Writer. They’re all decent products, even the Microsoft product, but none of them support WordPress 2.3’s tags yet so that idea’s right out for the time being. Instead I’m going to go back to a simple idea that might just work: I’m going to set my browser start page back to this journal. I don’t remember when I got away from that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the day I changed that setting (first to Yahoo’s then to Google’s portal page) coincides with the major decline in posting here. We’ll find out over the next few weeks if my crazy idea pans out, won’t we?