Beginning to Start Initial Efforts to ...

My longform content has, well, been mostly nonexistent for a long time.  Last time I posted a new podcast was 2023, obvious when you look.  And I said at the time I was going to record John Stuart Mill's "Subjection of Women."  And then, well, I didn't.  And haven't.

Not even sure I spelled Mill's name right, it's been so long.

I am trying to get my butt back in gear. With the chaos of the last few months (since being diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma), it's a big step forward to be wearing pants.  Okay, maybe a little exaggeration there.

I will likely have to do podcasts in quick and dirty mode for a while. I'm way out of practice, and the quality tricks I used habitually Back Then are simply forgotten now. I have to sand off the rust and recreate such skills as I used to have, or more likely new techniques entirely.

Bear with me.  Turns out cancer is kinda stressful, and moreso when one adds in PTSD. (Read about the symptoms of PTSD for yourself from your own search.  Even my apparently casual tone may derive from PTSD itself.)  I definitely have the former, and appear to have the latter according to what I've gotten from the local County Veterans Service Agency or CVSA.  Though I had inquired about it on the off chance, I was surprised when they came back with "we think based on our records that you actually do have PTSD."  I ended up putting myself in-patient in the Psych areas of Essentia Health - Duluth to find out what exactly that means, what to watch for and so on. Learned little -- and found that some folks close to me aren't entirely convinced I have PTSD.  As usual, I'm baffled and confused, but it does make sense of some recent behavioral changes on my part.

Anyway... I'm dusting off some old hardware and software and seeing if I can regain some old skills I used to have.  For example, there was a time when I was very effective with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.  Yes, I mean DOS from Way Back in the Last Millenium.  There was a time when I was very employable, not really for skill with that software, but for skill writing correspondence and articles, which derived from using that tool, much better for Actual Writing than Microsoft Word.  Tricky to get WP-DOS working under Win10, but doable.  Still figuring out how.

I might also look at whatever is current for WP under Windows -- not an ideal solution, but likely easier to implement. If the newer versions don't allow for creating the content before creating the format of the content, then they are simply a step backward.  WP-DOS was best for typing what I wanted to say, and then figuring out how to format it, selecting fonts and such. If I can make it work, I may even regain some of my old abilities as a writer. This blog seems better than it was, simply because I'm just writing without first formatting.  Maybe my need to do that is rare?

So please be patient with me, and I'll try to become once again that fella I used to be. Who would not have used "fella" in the above sentence.  Baby steps, okay?

-- Griz