It's 5:30 AM here in southeastern Australia. We got off the plane yesterday from a two-week, whirlwind tour of our past lives in the USA, and I've been awake since four partly due to my own jet lag and partly due to Elias's. Elias is now back to sleep after having figured out that the reason he was tossing and turning so was that he needed to drain a half liter of urine from his three-year-old bladder, but I remain awake. While lying curled in the toddler bed next to Elias's crib (He has remained reluctant to graduate to the bed even though he can enter and exit the crib at will) in an attempt at least to contain his early wakefulness and prevent its spread to the remainder of the family, I had some time to reflect upon our trip and upon the events of the past year--an eventful year it has been--and I now think it may be worth resurrecting the blog. At the very least I will, as they say here in Geelong, give it a burl.
When I first created this blog back in August 2007, my stated intentions for it was for it to act as a clearinghouse for news of me and and my family as well as a place for me to post my daily productivity when it came to my novel-in-progress The Wide Missouri. In realty though, it functioned mainly as a document of my impressions of and experiences in Namibia. This is one reason I canned it back in March; life back here in Oz seemed far less picturesque than in Africa and less worthy of close documentation. But now I'm starting to think that the fact that I was trying to get things down in words contributed to the vividness of my time in Namibia. Even if you don't ever write about a particular experience, if you think that you might write about it, maybe you pay better attention noting the details. It (maybe) ads texture to experience. Without doubt it improves my memory of things.
Here goes.
