the soft closing

I'm planning on ending this blog.

Not with a big closeout with a lot of fanfare but just letting it go quietly dormant, until a few years down the road, Google is going through old web apps remembers it has this blogging platform they totally forgot about and they pull the plug for good.

It's a good moment to end- it feels like a major chapter of my life has ended, and a new one begun. A new book even. I started blogging in 2003 as a way to keep relatives informed about how I was doing and feeling in undergraduate, and it transitioned into a travel blog when I traveled, went pretty dormant for the time I was working after I graduated, and kicked up again a bit in graduate school.

Education comes in good life-sized chunks- when I graduated, my education at an end, that was a definitive end to one chapter of my life. The next five years made up another chapter, loosely titled, Alec Gets Started where I traveled, developed myself professionally, made some big personal and relationship moves, and ended up ready to dig in and stay awhile. At the end of that tumultuous five years, I was married, living in a city I could see myself staying in for awhile, setting up all the adult things for the long term, and with a baby on the way.

We're still sort of settling in, but it's the long, slow growth of roots rather than the rapid adjustment to a replanting. With the birth of Momoko, we're in a new book entirely. Functionally, I don't think I'm going to have time to blog, but I think it's time for a change of medium anyway.

I'll still figure out a way to write, since it still has cathartic and metaprocessing purposes for me, but I think it's safe to say this blog is at an end. Blogger really does suck as a platform, and the only reason I didn't change years ago, was the ability I had to go back and read what I wrote so many years ago.

Many thanks to the devoted readers who stuck around and still checked back, while I let months go by between blog posts. As I write this, Momo is beginning to stir and fuss in her bouncer, so I'll keep it short.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.