Planning for the New Year

I spent a couple days this week filling in the pages of my new 2017 calendar with activities scheduled for the new year. There are a lot of them, and I hope I got all my commitments down and can avoid some of the conflicts--and more importantly, forgotten appointments--that I experienced in 2016.

This necessary exercise made me realize how much my life has changed in the past two years, since we moved from Spain. Petánque, Spanish classes, and the next tapas run no longer are the most important dates noted in my calendar. This week I wrote in dates for my monthly writing group and two reading groups, quarterly and monthly musical performance events, monthly "senior" luncheons, church committee and service dates, a few upcoming medical appointments, and a whole slew of courses and presentations for which I registered in the winter OLLI trimester. I also wrote in the dates for two trips that are already scheduled, and checked for the optimum dates for a third trip in the "definitely-going but not sure when" category.

Notably absent were two trips that I have been making yearly for a couple decades or more. These would be the semiannual conferences of the American Library Association. Although I am still working part-time and would still benefit from this regular immersion into education, networking, and entertainment, I have decided this year that my priorities are shifting and I would rather allot my money, time, and energy to newer areas of interest--one of which presents a conference opportunity at the exact same time as one of the ALA meetings. I still pencilled them in on the calendar, so I would be aware of when they were happening, but I'll be participating only from my desktop.

There is a posting going round and round on Facebook suggesting that each week of 2017 you put a piece of paper into a jar with a few words noting something good that happened to you that week, and then at the end of the year, you would be able to look back and see that you had had a good year.  I "liked" this when I first saw it and said to myself, "After all, that's what SundaysinSpain, the predecessor blog to this one, was all about." I wrote it to concentrate once a week on something good, funny, or thoughtful about the experiences I was having while living in Spain, and then sharing it with family and friends at a distance, and the occasional unknown person from the public who stumbled across it by chance or a Google search. I had been pondering why it was relatively easy for me to post in that blog religiously, as it were, almost every Sunday, whereas it is obviously difficult for me to do so with Sundays in Cincinnati.

One reason for the difference was that I was less busy in Spain than I am here; I had fewer things to do and therefore it was easier to pick an event or a thought to write about Here I have far more that I do, and I am enjoying it, and therefore it is harder to pick one thing and concentrate on it. And of course, since I am doing more, there is less time to write. Another reason is that I no longer have the need to communicate with my family through the distance, because they are here. I don't imagine that my Spain friends make it a point to look at Sundays in Cincinnati for a post each week, while my family in Cincinnati did let me know if I failed to write in Sundays in Spain.

The compelling reason for posting less often in a blog, though, is undoubtedly that I am posting more often on Facebook. That is something that many of the Spain friends do see, as well as more-distant family and friends from Denmark, Argentina, and other parts of the U.S. Actually, I don't post on Facebook as often as I "share" a post, and even though I never share a post that I haven't read completely (going to the source link and waiting for it to load, then reading it, and then going back to Facebook) I have to say that the effort that goes into the Facebook post or share is less than what goes into a blog post.

But my FB posts and shares are almost always more substantive than what's in a 140-character tweet. I tweeted briefly, by the way, from December 2007 through some time in 2012, generating fewer tweets in five years than Donald Trump does in a month. And even a tweet is longer than a few words  on a piece of paper stuck in a jar for a year.

So I know I'm not doing the jar thing in 2017. I do use, and keep, my yearly calendars as a sort of diary, but the entries there would be little more than the words-in-a-jar approach. And I have no intention of joining the president on Twitter, though I would do that it it would keep the mainstream media from using their airtime to tell me over and over again what he had posted. I would like to say that I will return to blog posting "religiously" every Sunday, but it is in fact my new-found "religion" that is one of the reasons I find it difficult to do that. So it is a toss-up as to whether the best chronicle of my year will be here or on Facebook. Facebook, of course, will remind me 365 days or fewer from now of what it thinks is significant of what I posted this year. But that's their evaluation. So I'm going to make greater efforts to return to a chronicle here.