Blogging

Tomorrow morning, I head off to Culpeper, Virginia for the weekend’s tour of central Virginia cavalry actions. It’s going to be a full two and a half days, and I don’t know if I will have time to post here until I get home Sunday night. I will try, but please don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me again until I return home.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

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Time for some housekeeping, which I haven’t done in quite a while.

Steven Mynes has a new blog on battlefield stomping. Thanks to Brett Schulte for bringing it to my attention. I’ve added a link. Welcone to the blogospher, Steven.

I’ve also finally gotten around to adding John Hoptak’s 48th Pennsylvania at Antietam blog to the list, which I’ve been terribly remiss in doing.

I’ve restored John Maass’ excellent blog to the blogroll now that John is back blogging again. A belated welcome back, John. You were missed.

Since it’s now been 10 weeks since the last post, I’ve deleted the link to Chris Army’s blog. If he resumes posting, I will be happy to add a new link.

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I apologize for the lack of posts over the last few days. As I hadn’t been to see my parents since Thanksgiving, it was time for a quick visit. I left Thursday and got back this afternoon, which included 14 hours of driving time out and back. Because I am stuck with dial-up Internet access there, and there are software glitches with the USB modem that Apple sells for its MacBook computers that caused my computer to lock up each time I tried to dial in, posting from there really wasn’t an option.

Those of you who read this blog regularly are aware that my father had a major stroke last July. I can report that he is physically doing remarkably well. He’s walking well, and is able to use his right hand reasonably well. He can even walk a bit without his cane, although my mother won’t permit him to leave the house without it. His speech remains a mess, but I was able to understand most of what he was saying. It was good just to sit and watch a few Phillies games with him, which is precisely what I did.

Then, when I got back this afternoon, I had to go through the final page galleys for our retreat book. Once we sign off on them, and Ted Savas fixes the last batch of typos, etc., he will have the thing indexed, which will take a week or so. Once that’s done, it’s time for printing. For those who’ve been eagerly awaiting the publication of the retreat book, please be patient just a little longer–we’re nearly there. I just sent my list of corrections to J.D., who’s serving as coordinator, and have finished my review of the thing. Without index, the work is 528 pages in length.

Now that I’m back, I will resume posting regularly again. Tomorrow, I will post some upcoming appearances/events for those who might be interested.

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According to the statistics that I get from WordPress, this is the 700th post on this blog. When I started this exercise on September 24, 2005, I figured I would try it out, see if I liked it, and fully expected that it would probably go the way of the dodo bird much sooner than later. I had good reason to believe that–prior efforts to keep a journal petered out in a matter of a few weeks, and I figured that this would work out the same way.

Instead, I found that I really enjoyed having a place to vent, and that even more than having a place to vent, I discovered that I really enjoyed the interactions with the folks who give their valuable time to read what I have to say each day. Nearly 4,500 comments have been left on this blog (not counting the tens of thousands of spam comments that have been gobbled by the software that I use), which is really pretty staggering. I’ve met some terrific folks through the interactions here, and I’ve developed new friendships as a consequence, and all because of this blog.

Along the way, and to my very great shock, this blog was voted one of the top twenty sites on the Civil War on the Internet, and it’s regularly rated in the top 200,000 blogs on Technorati. When you consider that there are millions of blogs and that this is a niche blog, that’s really remarkable. It’s also incredibly humbling.

And so I will continue on. And I hope that you will continue to indulge my rantings.

Thanks to all of you who do.

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Not having been aware of it previously, I’ve added Craig Swain’s Marker Hunter blog to my blog roll.

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Here’s a blog for Philadelphia sports fans. The name sums it all up: City of Pain. It’s been 25 years since any Philadelphia professional sports team won a championship (the 1983 76’ers, to be precise), and there’s no end in sight to the suffering.

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I would be remiss if I didn’t give credit where it’s due and if I didn’t point out what a great job Rene Tyree’s doing over at the Wig Wags blog. Rene’s been posting some remarkably insightful and thoroughly fascinating material on Jominian military history that are some of the most informative blog posts I’ve ever seen.

Keep up the really great work, Rene.

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I decided to take a few days away from the blog–three or four–just to recharge my batteries a little bit, and also because I didn’t really have much of anything to say. I’ve been working on stuff related to a completely unrelated business venture that has nothing to do with the Civil War as well as legal stuff, and nothing terribly interesting pertaining to the Civil War or to this blog came up. In short, I really didn’t have much of anything worth saying, so I decided to take a couple of days away from the blog. I know you all are used to my posting nearly every day, and I apologize for being away for a few days, but it was unavoidable.

I’m back now.

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Hat tip to Harry Smeltzer for pointing this one out to us….

Welcome to the blogosphere to Robert H. Moore, II, who’s got a new but interesting blog called Cenantua. Robert wrote several of the volumes of the H. E. Howard Virginia Regimentals Series (mainly on artillery subjects), so I am familiar with his work. I’ve added a link to his blog.

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Old friend and fellow blogger Harry Smeltzer came to Columbus yesterday and did an excellent presentation to our Civil War Roundtable last night on some really interesting obscure topics arising from the First Battle of Bull Run. I joined Harry and our program chairman, Mike Peters, for dinner, enjoyed the company, and then went on to hear Harry’s talk which was, without doubt, one of the most interesting CWRT talks I’ve ever heard. Thanks, Harry.

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