Yesterday, I hit a milestone, of sorts. Over the past couple of months I’ve been on the road to one event or another. I’ve tried to keep up with my blogging, my emails, and my life in general, but things have slowly gotten out of hand. I climbed up to around 1400 unread emails. I haven’t looked at Bloglines in ages. My visits to NewsTrust are cursory at best, rarely resulting in a review. Yesterday, I looked at the pile of unread emails, and found the oldest date back for two months.

As I got through my emails, I try to catch the most important ones on as timely a basis as possible, put others pile up and some slip through the cracks. I can only spend so much time plowing through old emails, so I balance it out with other ways of trying to keep my figures on the digital pulse.

I often rant against those who spend all their time in the progressive blogosphere. I know how easy it is to do. If you make a concerted effort to stay on top of DailyKos, MyDD, and your regional progressive blogging community, there isn’t a lot of time to read much else. But there is so much more to read.

As I try to balancing things out, I sometime check Bloglines for other blogs that I’ve found interesting. I hop over to BlogExplosion to see where it will take me, and recently I’ve been exploring sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. All of this works together to create a complex digital palimpsest.

So, instead of trying to capture a clear picture of what I’ve been reading, I thought I would note random tidbits that have caught my eye. There are a lot of SAHM, and WAHM blogs. For those not up on the mommy blogging culture, that is Stay At Home Moms and Work At Home Blogs. These are all wonderful follow-ons to the fertility blogs and the pregnancy blogs. After delivery, there are the moms trying to keep passion alive, even aspiring to be MILFs.

As much as I love my wife and family, I do not describe myself on my blog in terms of whose spouse and whose parent I am, the way many people do, and I find Offsprung’s perspective particularly refreshing: “Welcome to the perfect online antidote to a parenting culture gone barking mad”.

I’ve always been interested in homeschooling. Learning is a life long activity and schooling should take place at home, whether or not kids are also being schooled elsewhere. Many people think of homeschoolers as the religious conservatives that don’t want their children in schools where evolution is taught. Yet I found a wonderful blog, Homeschooling Evolved. They have a link to a life-sized online whale. Another fun blog in this area is Fish Feet. She has a great graph of Global Tetrapod Diversity

There is more to schooling than just science. I find myself wandering through various blogs of freelance writers. Some are offering ideas to other writers. Some are writing about their own writing, or trying out new things. I remember stumbling across the phrase, “Butterfly effect in reverse”, and “Pinocchio’s now a boy who wants to turn back into a toy”. Then, there are all the discussions about 18,000 nude volunteers in Mexico City. Meanwhile, I read about people playing with the Hasbro Vcam Now 2.0 video camera and whether or not you can use a child’s toy to create art.

All of this, without any sort of social conscience is but vanity, and sites like World without Oil, Our Hearts for Haiti, and the National Human Services Assembly help keep this in perspective.

So, I’m catching up on my emails. I’m keeping my eyes open online, and I’m finding that just like in face to face experiences, I really, don’t know life, at all.