Not so much anymore. Well, I actually think of stuff, but when the time comes to sit down at the ol’ laptop, well …
It’s just so much easier to veg and loose myself in my RSS reader, reading all the good posts from everyone else. Searching the web for the perfect string trimmer, browsing for cars that I’m not going to buy anytime soon or visiting my Squarebirds or pop up camper forums.
But a writer needs to write or else, well, he’s not really a writer, right?
I hope there will be more to come, I’d like to say that I have ideas that will be blogged. But I’ve said that before.
Sigh.

Today I get my report from Google Analytics and it shows a huge spike in traffic, 116% increase in page views. Naturally, I dug deeper to see what was up. The spike was nearly all on June 9th, which I still don’t understand exactly.
Turns out the traffic was all going to one page, my post from December of ’04 on Jay Leno’s Toronado. That post has always gotten a lot of hits, at one time it was the top result on Google for ‘Jay Leno’s Toronado‘, even higher than Jay’s own site. Not any more, however, but still the page views to that post were up 3,375%.
Google analytics told me that it was a result form search engine hits on ‘Jay Leno’. Odd, certainly there were far more relevant posts on Jay than my little post on one of hit lesser known cars. I tried Google, A9, Ask.com and Yahoo! and salguod.net was nowhere on the first page of any of them.

Then I tried MS Live. Lo and behold, there’s the picture of Jay’s Toronado from my post as picture #1 in the search of ‘Jay Leno‘. Why would that pic rank as #1 for all pictures for ‘Jay Leno’? Weird.
Makes me wish I had a Google AdSense account.

Just a note to let you know I’m back from my trip(s). Actually had a vacation camping trip after the business trip to CA. Both were adventures.
First, there was 13 hours of brake work on the camper before leaving for CA. My red-eye trip home from CA was canceled, so I basically lost a day of vacation since I didn’t get home until 5 PM instead of 7AM. Then there was the emergency repair to the camper before heading out. Oh, and did I mention that we camped in west central IN the 5th-10th? Yeah, when it flooded, shutting down nearby Brazil IN, Turkey Run state park and 70 miles of I-70. 7″ of rain on the first night. Woo-hoo.
We survived, managed to have a little fun too. Came thisclose to selling the camper afterwards, but we’re keeping it … for now. 😀

Been quiet for a while, and will likely stay that way. I’m away on Business in Long Beach CA and won’t be back on the computer until the 10th or so. Internet access won’t always be available, so no posts for a bit.

It’s sometimes amusing to see the search words that bring folks to salguod.net. Not today. In my Google Analytics report this week, on the last page of six, the last entry of 50, I discovered that one person came here by searching for this:
did god take my child because i could not give up my cd collection
I normally glance over this list, but that last entry stopped me in my tracks. Maybe it was a whim, but my site (the June 2004 archive page) is somewhere down around 25 on the Google list. That’s 3 pages in. That’s long way to go for a whim.
There’s no way for me to know who that was or why they went searching. I don’t know if they will find their way back here or not and I certainly won’t presume to answer for God. I’ll just ask, if you do come back here again, please, go read the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) and watch Jesus. Watch Jesus raise Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Watch him heal the demon possessed boy. Watch him stop a woman’s bleeding and with it, remove her shame. Watch him weep with the family over Lazarus’ death. And then watch him raise him again. Watch him heal on the Sabbath, knowing it will anger those in charge. Watch him rebuke the leaders for their lack of compassion. Watch him heal the forgotten, the outcast and the unclean, restoring not only their health but their place in society. This is God at work, directly, in the lives of flawed men and women. This is who God is.
God showed up here with us in Jesus to demonstrate his love for us, not only on the cross, but in three years of ministry. A ministry full of compassion, healing and restoration.
I can’t begin to imagine the heartache behind a question like that, but God can. Seek him and don’t give up until you’ve found him. I can’t promise that you’ll find the answer to your question, but God promised you that you will find Him, if you’ll seek. I hope that in finding Him, you at least have the comfort that there’s love behind whatever the answer is.

About a year and a half ago, I choose a new host for my blog, Total Choice Hosting. At the time I signed up, I was going to get 850 MB of disk space and 20 GB of traffic per month. Well almost immediately, they upgraded the plan to 1,200 MB storage and 40 GB transfer for the same $5 per month.
In January of last year, they upgraded the plans again, providing twice daily backups on all servers. Same $5 per month.
Last week, they announced yet another upgrade. My same $5 per month now gets me 2,400 MB of storage and 80 GB of transfer. I love TCH.

Now that I’m done with my study of Luke, I think I’m ready to come back to blogging again, on some level. Probably light stuff at first, because I’ve really been enjoying my Bible study. I want to keep that focus to my blogging.
This has probably been the most profitable study in a long time. I really felt like I learned new things about Jesus and saw Him in a new light, so I’m going to stay on with my gospel focus and start reading Mark.
Thanks for hanging in with me.

I’m coming to a conclusion that I’ve been trying to avoid for a long time. Avoid it while, ironically, implementing it by failing to post anything of substance.
I need to take a break, of sorts, from blogging.
I’ve felt like posting some stuff, felt I should be posting some stuff, but just couldn’t get the enthusiasm for it. Instead, I piddle around the blogshere, reading this and that, getting some good stuff out of some, but mostly just wasting time. Meanwhile, the funk I’ve found myself in, a general hopeless malaise with no real explanation, remains. No matter what I do, I can’t really shake it.
It occurred to me that the last time I felt this sort of malaise was back in college, before I studied the Bible in earnest for the first time and eventually became a Christian. At the time, the commitment to the Father completely erased the low feelings that I had been experiencing. Lately, I’ve been wrapped up in my own thoughts, my own emotions and the endless spiral of trying to sort things out. I’ve been reading and praying less and less.
A few months ago, a friend and I were talking. He observed in me several gifts that God had given me and that those things should be the core of my personal ministry. Not Ministry with a capital ‘M’, but the kind of ministry we all should have. Our own ongoing way of using what God has gifted us for the advancement of his kingdom. He also observed that when I was not doing that, I was not a happy person. The lack of joy was evident.
I think there’s a battle going on. A pull between the spirit guiding me to use what God has given me and my own desires to sit and veg. My flesh has been winning lately, and I’m honestly not sure I want to change that right now. But I’m certainly tired of the funk.
The bottom line of all this is that it’s time that I turned my attention away from myself and back to God. To start that, I’ve decided that my Bible study and my prayer time need to be returned to a higher priority. It’s not the end I seek – I seek God – but to know Him, I need to commune with him.
To that end, I’m taking a break from this blog and from others. I spend a lot of time on line. A lot. Several hours a night. My commitment for the near term is no surfing until I’ve been in my Bible and on my knees (figuratively) that day. It’s not a forever rule necessarily, those sort of things loose their impact after a while, but merely a forced discipline to help me refocus.
I do plan on posting my quiet time notes here, so I won’t be gone completely. Those notes and the discussion generated help me dig deeper. I also hope, frankly, that as I refocus I’ll be inspired to post more here as well – just after my reading time.