This pretty planet

It has not been a quite week at Orient Lodge. On Friday the 13th, Kim, Fiona and I drove up to Reading, Massachusetts. I was going to Lowell to cover the Massachusetts Democratic State Platform Convention. Kim was leaving for a Mommies’ Meeting. (More on this later).

I had press credentials to cover the convention and put up a few posts about what went on. Subsequently, there has been a great discussion over at Blue Mass Group. I wish I had time to join in the discussion in more detail, but time has been pretty cramped.

On Monday, I attended Personal Democracy Forum. Two good writeups can be found here and here. I participated in the book launch of Extreme Democracy, which has a chapter by me in it.

Tuesday was the CivicSpace conference. I led a panel on setting up your first CivicSpace site. I think the panel went well. Part of the goal was for people to set up their own sites, which they could customize, and keep playing with after the conference. Unfortunately, my hosting service has crashed so those sites are unavailable for the time being.

In the evening, I attended the Bridgeport Democratic Town Committee’s Gubernatorial Debate. It was a great event and you can read my comments on it over on the DeStefano Blog.

On Wednesday, I received an email pointing to an article in a local paper about the former treasurer of an organization I am active in being charged with larceny in the alleged theft of $13,000 from the organization. I had agreed to become vice president of the organization, in charge of membership last fall, and had spent a lot of time trying to find ways of keeping the members together through this rough time. There was much dissent about how best to handle the issue and the latest developments simply poured fuel on an old smoldering issue.

With Kim off at her Mommies’ Meeting, I spent a bit of time driving Fiona around to gymnastics and birthday parties. I spent an hour on my cell phone sitting outside of gymnastics being interviewed about the economics of blogging.

One of the questions coming out of BlogNashville was how people could find time to blog and how they could support themselves while blogging. I was hoping to have something useful to say about this, but as will be noted by my recent posts, I haven’t found time to blog much this week.

A quick thought on the subject: Blogging is, after all, a form of writing. So perhaps looking at blogging in terms of how do people find time to write is useful. Some people write in their personal diaries every day. It is just something they make time for. Some people take jobs doing publicity and marketing. In a limited manner, you can look at political blogs, including the DeStefano Blog, which I’m paid to write for, as being paid as a publicist or marketing person. Some people get by as freelance writers, trying to get outlets to pick up their stories. Of course there is the other aspect of why people write; because they must. There is something that drives me to write, and I probably would be writing pretty much the same sort of stuff I have been, even there wasn’t a little money coming in from it.

I host some websites through a resellers’ agreement that I have. The first that I am using for my webspace has been problematic and at the end of the week we parted ways. So, many of my websites, including the ones I used for my training session on Tuesday, are now offline. I’ve got a bunch of work to do to clean up the mess. It affects not only my literary interests but also a company I am working hard to help get going. I was supposed to spend some time at the company’s new office this week, but there just wasn’t any time.

All of this, together with an argument with an editor for one of my writing projects put me in one of the worst funks I’ve been in, in ages. Friday morning, I went to Grandparents’ day at The Long Ridge School.

Up on the stage, Fiona and her class sang, This Pretty Planet by Tom Chapin. Twelve years ago, Mairead learned that song in that same nursery school class. She and Miranda often sang it as a round and it was great to hear Fiona and her classmates sing it as a round.

The final song that Fiona’s class sang was ‘Favorite things’. When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I am nearly a thousand emails behind, my hosting service isn’t working and I haven’t had a chance to write in days, I simply remember a few of my favorite things, such as hearing my children sing, and then I don’t feel so bad.