Christmas Greetings to Whoever is Reading This, Known to Me or Otherwise

 It has been a long since I wrote in this blog. Months have gone by.  This does not mean I have abandoned it. In fact just the opposite. I find myself, in bed at night, composing a blog entry and thinking I will write it down. Then during the day I forget, and another day goes by, and at night I am composing again.

I know of none of my old friends who read it anymore, who once read it. So I have no one to whom I can direct the open letter. At Christmastime I pretend I can write to them once again. 

In the time since I wrote, life has seemed amazingly constant. My day job has been demanding, with long hours and putting in extra time to keep ahead of things. Only in the last couple weeks has it felt like things are leveling off. Yet there are still long days, which mostly means I get up as early as 2 AM, when I first awake, in order to get a jump on things, and to work during the hours when I can work in peace without demands or distractions.

My weekends are taken up entirely with preparing for my weekly show on Wednesday. Lately this has morphed into not only preparing a Keynote slide presentation but also a short intro movie using iMovie on my mac. I have become an amateur film maker. Having a short intro film helps me calm my nerves as the broadcast begins. 

Between these two activities---my day job and preparing for my show---almost all of my time is taken up.  The idea of fitting anything else into that schedule seems impossible.

Somehow in October we managed to squeeze in two weekend road trips. Over my birthday, we went up to the top of Mount Lemmon, the "sky island" near Tucson with pines at the top. Like last year, we stayed in the small community of Summerhaven, this time at the new lodge which has opened this year. The next weekend we went up to Gallup, New Mexico to see the annular eclipse on October 13. To see the actual event, we drove out ot the visitor's center of the El Malpais National Monument. 

Other than these two events, it has felt mostly the same week to week. My show, Spellbreakers, is still on the air on the  Badlands Media Channel on Wednesday evenings, and of course the broadcasts are available after that.  Here is the playlist for my show. I take it as serrously as if it were a show on a major radiio network. I love doing the sponsors. I have come to love interacting with my audience. I feel so much stress leading up to the show, mostly out of perfectionism---something technical always goes wrong. Then afterwards I am on such a high and can't wait for the next time.

I don't know how long I'll get to keep my show. I often wonder. I am not exactly one of the favorites of the guy who runs the network. I'm lucky if he even reads my emails. My view numbers are low compared to the other shows, especially the number of "likes" I get. I tell myself I do not have the "touch". Were this a real network, I would probably be canceled by now. That's show business, I tell myself. I have given it my best shot.  However long I get to do this will be a gift.

I once craved variety in my life, like people do when they are young. Now I take it as a blessing if I just keep doing what I'm doing--working my job, paying the bills, and doing my little show with it's itsby bitsy audience.