We ended up going to the botanical garden today. They had put up lights and had two actual reindeer. I assume they were real reindeer, but obviously my lack of knowledge on the subject leaves the door open. At the very least, they were clearly labeled reindeer and everybody seems to go with it. Some of the lights on the trees were a little extreme. This one tree literally looked like it was completely covered in LED lights. It was a tall tree. The tree had to be about 100 feet tall. My next thoughts were about how they managed to run power cables throughout the botanical garden, but that kind of questioning is pretty much standard at this point.
Our new puppy Captain Pickles is adjusting to life at our hours pretty well. Getting to know a new puppy is always interesting. Right now I’m watching the Ohio State vs. Wisconsin football game. This weekend was a pretty big weekend for college football. Major conference championship games were all scheduled for this weekend. That should have pretty much guaranteed a weekend full of really good competitive games. Things do not always work out that way. Certainly they could have worked out well, but this year has been a year of upsets and complications.
Something has to give in 2018 with respect to the things covered within my writing. Moving toward my goal of sustaining a 3,000 word a day writing habit will pretty much guarantee some additional coverage of politics and public policy. I always figured that my political views are complex and therefore should be avoided in print. That very real self-censorship will have to give way to the need to write 3,000 words a day. Stepping up to end up writing over 1,000,000 words in a year will require just going with it and writing about whatever comes to mind. That probably means a lot more content about guitar pedals, sports trading cards, and random thoughts on encryption.
Increasing my daily writing output will probably also put a strain on my proofreading skills. Most of the time that I engage in pure stream of consciousness style writing I leave the prose as written. I pretty much just remove all the red squiggles with spell check and move on to whatever is next on my agenda. Intellectually, I consider that practice of not adequately editing my work to be questionable. Given the sheer volume of my writing output I lost interest in editing my non academic writing some time ago. That probably happened over a decade ago. Sometimes I get motivated and edit my weblog posts, but some posts just get posted.
