There are days – sometimes weeks – when I just don’t know what to write. I don’t even really feel like writing. Other times, I feel like I “ought” to write something in the blog, but nothing that’s happening in my life seems to be something appropriate for this blog.

Spinning and fiber aren’t my only interests. I’m also interested in energy – conservation and alternatives, birds, books, gardens, and some other things. In this blog, I try to keep the scope limited to fiber.

When we had our alpacas on the farm, I included alpacas as part of the animal husbandry side of spinning. We no longer keep our alpacas on our property, so one of my major alternate blog topics is not nearly so readily available.

Gardening and cooking seem to be fair game for knitting blogs, so I include some in my blog. However, this is a fiber blog, and there is only so much one can write about a three-pot garden on an apartment deck.

I spend a bit of time watching and looking for birds. There are some open fields and two small retaining ponds between here and work, plus there’s a horse pasture and hedgerow near the apartment complex. I walk to work over half the time and I watch for birds on the way. So far, I have identified 39 species in Madison County, AL since moving here at the end of January and I’ve seen 32 species in the vicinity of the apartment and work. (As opposed to the 81 species observed on or from our property in Oregon in the years 2000-2006.) I do occasionally include birds in my blog, but they’re not a particularly popular topic for fiber blogs, so I try to keep the content minimal.

Then there are the topics I simply don’t want to write about in public, or feel the need to keep separate from this blog. My employment in the retail sector, for example, provides plenty of blog fodder, but so long as I need that paycheck, very little of the negative or quirky content will end up in this blog. Similarly, I have lots of thoughts on energy, food safety, food quality, agriculture, and related topics – all have little to do with spinning. Hints of these will show up in this blog, but I’ll force myself to keep that content minimal.

So, what have I been doing since that last post? I’ve gone to work five days a week, added two inches of ribbing to the sock, read one and a half books, done some family stuff, identified ten new (to me in Alabama) species of birds, picked up the first two deliveries from our CSA, cleaned, cooked, and a bunch of other things.

Yeah, I’m still here. I’ve been doing some interesting activities and many mundane chores. It’s just that none of them fit this blog.