Semicolon
31 December 20152015 was a year with a lot of downs, and I’ll be glad to see its end. Really. There were of course positives, but overall zero sense of balance.
2014 was equally odd in that regard; my wife nearly died in the July and, restricting myself to social networking, I’d:
- Messed about with Linux doing some, what I’d call, rudimentary shell script coding based on top of Ayadn - a command line client for the App.net social network,
- Inexplicably tailed off from my initial enthusiasm with the App.net Wiki, and have struggled to retain that,
- Told everyone I wasn’t going to be using Facebook again,
- Or Twitter.
2015, a year in review:
This year I continued my idiosyncratic approach:
- Increasing my use of footnotes* in social media posts,
- Adopting the [Oxford Comma] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma) more widely, occasionally even abbreviating the following “and” to “&”! And, even though I know it’s not its only use case, preceding only “and” gives me room to grow,
- Starting to use the Semicolon more frequently.
This last one puzzles me. Until late this year I’d almost never used it, succumbing as I did to peer pressure during my final couple of years at school by intentionally not caring about ‘English’ lessons. So why now?
A desire for self-improvement perhaps?
2015 also brought:
- A late-year increase in the frequency of my blog posts, partially in response to installing the Journey (daily) journal app on my Android phone,
- My slow-but-sure takeover of the #ThemeMonday hashtag on App.net (page needs updating.) I make the call to choose a shortlist of themes, collate, remind, and then post a poll to get votes to pick each. It’s not hard work, not really.
So, this blog post ends as the year ends, on a low note:
2015 does not get Baz’s Seal of Approval; really, it’s had very, very few highlights.
The only standout was a weekend trip to London with my family, my first. (Family and trip to England’s capital.)
[Edit:] Ruby puppy arrived in April. Now that changes my perspective a tiny bit towards favouring ‘balance.’
*I can’t honestly recall when I started using footnotes, it could have been 2014.
I reserve the right to edit this post as events unfold on this, the last day of the year. Naturally I reserve the right to edit all the posts but rarely do, aside from typos.