Wide White

It’s time to sign off

First things first, happy birthday to my twins! They’re 3 today, so I no longer have 3 kids under 3, which is nice. I think this is a recipe for more sanity at some point in the near future.

Second, happy birthday to my blog!

7 years ago today, I wrote my first post. At the time, I wrote:

Most blogs fail quickly, and this one is probably no exception. But I’ve flirted with trying it for a while, and you never know until you try….

Since then, I’ve written well over 1,000 posts on just about everything. Politics was the initial driver before I left that life and wrote about pretty much anything I wanted to. There were times I posted every day and times I only posted once a month.

But I always posted at least once a month until a few months ago, October 2012. That’s when I wrote the last post that’s been published here until now. I’d already written just one post a month for 6 straight months, a new low for me. Then the end of November came, normally a motivator for me to get into gear and write a post, and I just didn’t. For the first time in nearly 7 years, I let the month slip away without a post.

I’ve had fun around here, but it’s time to hang it up. I’m not necessarily leaving blogging altogether, but I am finished with Wide White. I’ve enjoyed the opportunities it’s given me, such as the first job I got after I left politics, which came through a referral in a comment on this blog. I’ve met some great people through it.

But I have those twins who just turned 3, their little brother who just turned 1, their mom who I love hanging out with, and numerous other commitments with work, church, civic involvement, and friends. Blogging has slowly dropped down the list of priorities as other things have squeezed their way into my life until it has simply fallen off the list altogether.

I have other blog ideas that I may pursue. I purchased a domain a few months ago that I haven’t done anything with yet. I wanted to wait until I could really dedicate some time and energy into resolving what I wanted it to be. I know this: I don’t want to blog aimlessly. I have a few blogs where I may contribute elsewhere. But I’ve long been dissatisfied with my lack of focus with Wide White. I never wanted it to be just a personal blog, but for a long time it’s lacked much focus elsewhere.

Thank you for reading along for these 7 years! It means a lot to me that so many people – friends, family, strangers – have read what I’ve written.

If you’d like to keep up with me going forward, you can find me on Twitter at @onejoey.

I’ll leave this site up for a while. I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up exactly. There’s a lot of information here and I’ll probably try to archive it somewhere. There are a lot of memories I don’t really want to say goodbye to yet.

But eventually, it’ll be time to renew this domain and I won’t.

Thanks for everything,
Joey