Walking Into a New Day

The race to 2026 begins. As we age, time seems to move faster. On days like today I want to slow down and breathe.

We cope by taking one day at a time and living it as best we can. That doesn’t mean we eschew longer term goals. Rather we live consciously in the moment and make what good from life we can. It takes awareness to experience success at this. I decided long ago to make things from the experiences and artifacts of my life and put them out in the world. That is a main reason I became a blogger and have persisted.

My to-do list for this fall is short: Continue to finish daily chores. finish apple season, plant garlic, close down the garden, maintain health, and resume writing my autobiography. These things should be familiar to readers of this blog. I need to take up a new task: combating falsehoods clogging our information wavelengths. How I will do that is a work in progress.

I’m having a bit of a China issue. As I write, my blog has had 1,545 September views originating in China compared to 343 in the United States. I recognize many international visitors here, yet not like this. Something is going on, and I don’t understand the increase in views. The increased China traffic started August 14.

I’m familiar with the “Great Firewall of China,” designed to restrict access to the global internet within the borders of the Chinese mainland. Apparently there is a leak. The way views tally up is one at a time at a rate of 3-6 per hour. Seem like if a machine were training artificial intelligence with my posts, it wouldn’t be so slow. The other thing is Chinese “viewers” are seeing older posts and downloading a lot of files stored in my media file. In particular, files relating to climate change and nuclear power have been download quite a lot. The downloads otherwise seem somewhat random and related to specific posts. In the scope of the Chinese population, a couple thousand views per month is insignificant. Yet, it has me worried.

Bloggers make a decision to post our content on websites like WordPress. From the beginning we understood the possibility of piracy, yet I’m not writing posts for which I expect to get a Nobel Prize in Literature. If I determine the risk is too great, I will transfer my website address to one of the spare blogs I keep hidden and reduce the amount of public access to the old stuff. Who is really interested in what I wrote twelve years ago? That was when I took the whole blog down and started anew.

Anyway, this autumn is a time for writing. I hope to get back in the saddle with regular posts here, beginning today. It feels like fall. “God’s in his heaven— All’s right with the world!” ~Robert Browning