​If you’re looking at this blog after reading the about the author at the end of my article in Zymurgy, welcome. It says I blog about beer and brewing, but I also blog about many other topics. To see just the homebrew posts, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on “Details”. That will put a list of categories below the details and you can click on “Homebrewing and Beer” for those posts. Since the main audience for my blog has not been homebrewers, most of the posts will contain basic information that you already know, but that non-homebrewers would not know.
 
I’ve been spending some time on setting up a website for my business. I’ve just launched that, if you’re interested here’s the link to click on: www.tkanecpa.com. I’m going to include a business blog on that site. I’m going to start with a few posts on using Microsoft Excel. You can get to the blog here:  www.tkanecpa.com/blog. I’ve only put up a welcome post so far. I’ll do my first Excel post tomorrow.
 
I launched off on a road trip earlier this month. I did a quick minor league road trip. It was less intensive than last year’s trip. (Nobody gave me a gun this time.) I’ll eventually write about that here.
 
Things have been quiet for homebrewing this summer, but I’m starting to get back into that. I didn’t brew for most of the summer. But I recently did brew up a cream ale. Wednesday evening I’ll be bottling that. I’ve got at least three more brews planned between now and the end of August. Two of these will be brewed at my church. Our Associate Pastor is also a homebrewer. He wants to do get a group doing homebrewing at church and we’ve been planning what and when to brew.  
 
I’m planning on sitting down and doing a calendar what to write about for my future posts this year. I’ve done that in the past and then got away from it. Looking back, I think that helped my writing to not have to spend part of my time deciding what to write about. (Thereby avoiding posts like these where I hit a bunch of miscellaneous topics.) I’ll be launching that soon.
 
And now that I’ve beaten the launching theme to death, I’ll wrap things up. Thanks for reading; I appreciate you all. 

​I’ve been trying to post on every other Tuesday. However, yesterday I blew it. I put “Do Blog Post” in my calendar on a repeat, but sometimes even that doesn’t help. I was just about to go to bed last night when I realized I hadn’t posted anything. So, better late than never. As a result of not having thought about what to write about I’m just posting some miscellaneous notes about blogging.
 
From the stats I’m looking at it appears that my readership is growing. I’ve noticed a few symptoms that are probably related to that.
 
I had decided to set up an email account for the blog. I went into gmail to set up a new account and found that someone had already taken the email with my blog name. I suppose they think I’m going to pay them for stealing my brand. Fat chance. If you want to email me, you can use [email protected]. I’ll put that on the contact page for the blog.
 
I’ve had a couple random comments show up to older blog postings. Both were clearly attempting to market products, so I deleted them both.
 
My last post was about the fact that it was coming up on five years since my wife had passed away. Part of what made that hard was that a couple years ago I had decided that at five years I would shut down her Caring Bridge site. When I looked at it, there were still people looking at the site. For now, I’m going to leave it up. I may transfer the posts to this site at some point.
 
Thanks for reading!

I have to apologize. I missed my schedule for posting yesterday. Between having a meeting of the Governing Board at church, Andrew coming home from college for Thanksgiving and doing the dishes writing a post slipped my mind.

I will post on Tuesday next week to make up for the missing post. I will then go back to my schedule, so I will post two weeks in a row.  
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I hope those of my readers celebrating Thanksgiving this week have a joyous time. As I look at the blessings in my life I realize that one of them is my readers. I am thankful for you all.

​Today was a day where I was able to feel some affinity for the Pastor that I wrote about in my past post (https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/learning-about-life-in-mexico) about our family trip to Mexico. The Pastor was having a day where nothing went as planned. “You know”, he said, “there is a technical term for this. When you have everything planned out and nothing works the way it should.  It’s a little word, only four letters.  It’s called life.”
 
I was planning on writing more about my minor league baseball trip today, but life intervened. I took my dog, Lucy, for a walk this morning when it was only misting as opposed to raining. Near the end of our walk, she took off after a squirrel and ended up in some bushes. When she came out one side of her was totally covered with burrs. I tried picking them out and then eventually switched to using a scissors and cutting them out along with her fur. Which sounds easy, until you remember that I was dealing with a dog. All told, it was about two and a half hours. So, nothing got done this morning.
 
No problem, I had a Board meeting at church tonight. So, I figured I’d be able to write after that. No such luck. While I was in the meeting I was called/texted by Alicia who was having car problems. I spent most of the night waiting for a tow truck with her. We had a nice chat. We had a few delays in the ETA of the tow truck. Then we noticed the app that was showing us where the tow truck was showed it moving away from us. We decided to call it a night and figure things out in the morning.
 
Life. 

I'm a bit busy this week, so I'm going to do this Tuesday's post on next Tuesday instead. I'll be able to fill you in on what I'm doing that's got me so busy. 

Tuesday night and here I sit with no idea what to blog about.

When I set up my blog schedule to post on every other Tuesday, instead of the every-week pace I kept for my first year, I thought that the additional time in between would keep this from happening. And it would work, if I didn’t have a life.

I’ve decided I need to set up an editorial calendar, so this week I’m going to sit down and plan out what I’m going to write about for the next few posts. I think knowing in advance what I’m going to write about will help me to do this better. I’ll be more focused plus I’ll be spending more time thinking about what I’m going to write.
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If you have anything you’d be interested in hearing from me let me know in the comments. 

​I get some statistics about my website for the blog. I have my choice of two sets of data. I can get very detailed statistics by using Google analytics. However, that doesn’t include any body who has cookies turned off. My other choice is from my website provider, Weebly. They pick up every view, but no data about the users. So, from them I get number of page views and number of unique visitors.
 
I typically look at the Weebly stats. The numbers are probably inflated, because there are search engines that just crawl the web. When they hit my site to index it, that inflates the page views. But, at least I can see the trends. I’ve got a spreadsheet setup where put the numbers in and I can look at graphs and averages. I also look at the total page views in the week after I put up a posting.
 
I am pleased with the growth in the numbers. Especially considering that the only thing I do to promote the blog is to link to it on Facebook when I post. But, rather than tell you about the numbers, I thought it might be interesting to look at which posts had the highest number. I’ve posted 70 times including this one. Here’s the countdown of the top 10% (7 posts):
 
#7 Nyamihuu Well Update 12/26/17
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/nyamihuu-well-update
I wrote about what happened with the money that was raised by Shepherd of the Hills church for a well in Tanzania.
 
#6 God at Work 01/24/16
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/god-at-work
This post was done from Tanzania and talked about some of the things we had done. Also, Bega Kwa Bega, the organization that coordinates the partnership congregations between churches in the US and in Tanzania, reprinted one of my early blog posts in their newsletter this week. I think some readers of that may have checked out my blog.
 
#5 You Are the World Part 2 4/18/17
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/you-are-the-world-part-two
This was a follow up to an earlier post. (You probably guessed that from the “Part 2” in the title.) Interestingly, every time I’ve posted in multi-parts like that the later parts get more views. Thus, my shameless attempt to draw more people in with the title of this post.
 
#4 Total Solar Eclipse 2017 Part 1 11/28/17
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/total-solar-eclipse-2017-part-one
This was about my trip to Wyoming to watch the eclipse. It covered the journey there.
 
#3 The Enchanted Isle 5/23/17
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/the-enchanted-isle
Remembering a family vacation to Puerto Rico and the various things we did there. Sad now to think about the aftereffects of Hurricane Maria. Hopefully, they will recover and thrive.
 
#2 Flowers 1/23/18
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/flowers
This was my last post, two weeks ago. It apparently struck a chord with people. When I link on facebook, I usually get “likes.” But with this one there was only one “like,” and all the rest were hearts.
 
#1 Total Solar Eclipse 2017 Part 2 12/12/17
https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/total-solar-eclipse-part-two
This was my description of what it was like to see a total solar eclipse after driving all night from Minneapolis.
 
 
An interesting list, and it was enjoyable looking back at some of my old posts. If I were to pick out my top posts, I’m not sure how much overlap there would be. Maybe this list is a bit skewed to more current posts, which could be the result of more readers.
 
I do appreciate all of you. Thank you for reading.

​It's been a while since I've posted a new blog entry. I didn't plan on taking so much time off from blogging; it just worked out that way. I did do some work on the blog this summer, but I took a break from my self-imposed goal of posting every week.
 
Earlier this summer I copied all my blog posts into one long Word document. I had two reasons for doing that. First I wanted a copy of the entire blog saved. Secondly, I was curious about the word count and how many words I had written.
 
When I put the blog posts into Word, I noticed that there were grammar errors highlight by Word. I realized that I should probably go through and edit the blog. That project took longer than I thought it would. It was also a humbling experience, confronting myself with evidence that I'm not a perfect writer.  Really, I guess I was a bit sloppy at times. I do know the difference between they're and their, but my fingers apparently sometimes type out letters on their own volition.
 
There were more than just grammar problems also. So, there were times when I rewrote portions of some posts. For example, in one post I had talked about some of the things that had happened in the prior year. In talking about some sad things I mentioned a relationship I had been in that broke apart. I was focusing more on the breaking up part of the relationship. I didn't realize at the time that it could be taken as a comment that the whole relationship was sad. I reworded that section as that wasn't the case.
 
When you're pushing yourself to do something new there's always that inner voice telling you that you can't do and you'll be no good at it. That voice becomes louder or softer depending on how much you listen to it. After castigating myself for all my mistakes in the blog, the voice was loud. I didn't feel good about my writing and let the summer slip by without writing as much as I had hoped.
 
I wanted the word count off the blog so I could set some goals for this year. I wrote 33,670 words last year in the blog. I was pleasantly surprised. That's more than half of a novel, if I were writing fiction. I did want to try writing fiction this year to see if I enjoyed it. Having that benchmark of words gives me a goal. I'm going to try to write 36,500 words of fiction this year. Yeah, I picked that number because it's easy to calculate how many words per day that comes out to. I'm going to look at it more on a weekly basis, but it's something to shoot for.

My plan is to focus on short stories. I can vary my writing more and learn more about what I like to write that way. If I decided to write the "Great American Novel," I'd have less flexibility. Plus I can submit short stories for publication. It's the ultimate feedback, even if it is just a yes or no.
 
I want to keep this blog up. So I will be posting this year. I'll do my postings on Tuesdays as I've done before. I'm going to try posting every two weeks and see how that goes. 

Last week was the 52nd week of blogging. With that post I completed my goal of doing a weekly blog post for a full year (with a slight interruption during my time in Tanzania.) The time has come for me to discover a new goal.
 
Having goals and deadlines for this blog has been a positive for my writing. It forced me to sit down and write consistently. As for the consistency of my writing; I feel it was not the best. There were too many times that I wrote something in a hurry just to meet the goal.
 
So, my new goal will involve writing consistently and taking the time to do it well.
 
In the blog, I've also constrained myself as to the types of things I will write about. Despite my background as a CPA I've not written business related posts. I also steered away from political issues. However, as you can tell from my posts I do like to write about different things.
 
So, my new goal will involve exploring different types of writing. I know I'm going to explore writing fictional short stories, because I've already been trying that.
 
I've enjoyed doing the blog and have appreciated all the feedback I have received. But, I don't like the fact that on Tuesdays I'm tied to the blog. There's not much flexibility.
 
So, my new goal will involve continuing to post on this blog; but not on a weekly schedule.
 
Sounds like my new goal will be pretty involved. I better figure out what it is. Stay tuned, I'll post something next week and let you know if I've figured it out.
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During Debbie’s battle with breast cancer I kept people informed about what was happening via a Caring Bridge site (www.CaringBridge.org/visit/DebbieHillarKane). After Debbie had passed away and I had stopped posting someone commented that they would be happy to read if I wanted to post further updates or memories. So, I decided to start this blog.
 
The reason I bring this up is because this will be my 100th posting including both Caring Bridge and this blog. I thought I would share some of my reflections about writing these posts.
 
When I started this blog I made a commitment to post something every week on Tuesday. I’m proud of myself that I’ve mostly kept that up. Working with a deadline has given me a whole new appreciation for journalists and their work. Day in and day out I get my newspaper with articles, columns, opinions and analysis with high-quality writing.  
 
I decided early on that this blog would not be a political blog. That was the right decision for what I’ve been trying to do with this blog. I have been tempted at times. So, I’m going to take this opportunity to make a quick political comment. When you see how badly thing are working in Washington with the generation that is the first generation that was raised with TV in power, it makes you realize why pediatricians recommend no TV for young children. There, that helps to have gotten that off my chest. I’m not sure I’ll be able to last another 100 posts, but it will hopefully cover me for a while.
 
I do better when I’m writing if I can write something, let it sit for a while and then come back to it. So I apologize for the quality of some of my posts which were written in haste late in the night on Tuesdays.
 
I’ve enjoyed writing tremendously and feel that I’ve had some personal growth through doing this. But, I would trade all that in a heartbeat if Debbie hadn’t gotten breast cancer. It’s a little over three years since she’s been gone. The grief gets less intense and more spread out over time, but it never goes away entirely. Sunday, I found something of hers in the back of a desk drawer and it hit me. I just had to stop what I was doing. My love for Debbie didn’t die with her, it’s still here.
 
One of my favorite things with this blog is the support and positive encouragement I have received from people who have read it. Thank you to all my readers I am so grateful to have you as a part of my life.
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