So I’ve been thinking for awhile about restarting this blog. I miss it.

For all intents and purposes, I stopped working on it around July of 2012, which is when I started working double-time for a brief spell, finishing one gig at the same time I was starting a new one.

My old job had been part-time for a small tech startup in Emeryville, close to my old West Oakland digs… I was working 25-30 hours a week, so I had another 10-15 to spare which I devoted to this blog.

I didn’t realize when I first started how much time I was actually putting in. I had the time so I used it. It was only when I was interviewed by some folks from the Oakland Library for a piece about the blog–I had done a series on independent bookstores, including theirs, so they, in turn, were covering me–that I realized how much time I was putting in.

She asked, “How many hours would you say you put in each week in the production of your blog?”

I started counting… well, there’s the actually going out and experiencing and photographing stuff, there’s the editing and processing of photos, there’s the research to augment what I write, and of course there’s the writing. It all adds up rather quickly.

And so while I thought I’d continue the blog once my brief double-time stint ended, the reality was that my new gig was full-time, and I no longer had the 10-15 hours to spare each week. I kept thinking I’d get back to it, things would slow down at work, I’d post more photos and less writing, etc. But weeks stretched to months and months to beyond a year and the further I got from the last post, the less likely I was to write a new one. It seemed too far gone.

But now with newly acquired time on my hands, I’ve decided it’s not too far gone. It’s never too late.

So here I am. I am going to try again…

I don’t have a wealth of material stored up so I’m going to start things off with a piece of my own art below, newly created for a recent graduate school application. If you have any thoughts about it, or about this blog in general, or what you’d be most interested in seeing in future posts, or if you just want to say hi, I’d truly love to hear from you…