The tyranny of large round numbers

When I look back months or even years from now, I'm going to see the gaping two-week hole in posts and, in a moment of forgetfulness, ask myself, "Was I on vacation then?" Sadly no. What happened was that I suffered the same sort of writer's block that I do whenever I try to treat this venue as anything more than a glorified scratch pad.

You see, I noticed six months ago that my 5,000th post was around the corner and decided this needed to be distinguished in some way. But I failed to give it much concrete thought until very recently. I tried to think of how to sum up thousands of posts without having to actually read more than a few of them, and eventually stumbled upon the solution of text analysis software. But my preferred tool couldn't read more than a page at a time, the downloading software I've used before doesn't seem to be maintained any more and yadda yadda. Basically, my technological hopelessness quickly thwarted my ambitions and I slunk away.

So this is how the world missed out on an entire half-month of lame food posts, lame gardening posts, and amateurish reviews for books you're not going to read. The next post will be a placeholder that I will contemplate replacing with actual content for a while but never get around to. Sometimes art imitates life way too closely.