Hello again!

Hi friends. :) How are you doing? How was your Fourth of July?

Okay, so I have a confession. There's a reason I kind of flipped out a few weeks ago and had to give myself a break. It has to do with the fact that I'm a little paranoid. Because I am not bionic, I do require vacations every once in a while. But I really hate letting people know I'm not home at any given point in time, even if it's just like, going to the grocery store or taking a day trip. It's too easy for people to rob you if they know you're going to be out of town for, say, two weeks. This is why you'll never see me "checking in" anywhere on Foursquare or Facebook, I rarely post my Instagram photos in real time, and I'll never tell you that I'm going to be out of town before I'm back.

So my original plan was to schedule blog posts via my normal four-days-a-week schedule while I was out of town for those two weeks, so it wouldn't look like I'd gone anywhere. And I had it all mapped out too. But between figuring out how to respond to comments on my phone and scheduling tweets and making sure my online presence LOOKED like someone was there, suddenly my brain broke and it seemed like the worst idea ever and I unscheduled all the posts and just quit everything.

I hate to admit this, but I both loved and hated taking a little time from posting. I loved not feeling like every moment had to be blog-worthy. It was nice to spend time with family, playing card games and drinking wine and looking at old family photos, without feeling like I needed to document it all. But I hated it because I am a writer, and I can't NOT write. My brain kept blogging even when I wasn't writing any of it down.

So what did I do while I was gone? Well, we visited various family members and road-tripped around the central United States. I crossed three things off my Life List, and countless others off my summer bucket list. (Don't worry, I'll talk about all that later!) I thought about this blog a lot. I journaled every day so I wouldn't forget things — something I hadn't done in YEARS!

I tried to relax as best I could.

But I still feel like I kind of need to ease back into this. I have a ton of posts in draft form, and the schedule-happy part of me is like POST THEM ALL ONE AFTER ANOTHER! while the rest of me realizes that is an insane idea and that I might just implode if I tried to do that. I'm trying to determine what a good schedule would look like for me, or even if a schedule is the way to go. So please bear with me as I get back into the swing of things.

How do YOU manage vacation time and blogging? And how do you decide how often to post?