The Grand Finale

Day 31...

Day 31??  What the...it's 30 days of random, I thought?  It is.  This is the wrapup.  The yoga pants (1) on the taut ass of this series of blog posts.  So, please stay long enough to open up the cookie of my thoughts and consume the creamy center of my meaning (2).  The same person who has given me most of my ideas, about cats, for example (3) also suggested this grand finale, so, like a lemming (4), I decided to do it.  You "owe" her for this post.

The point of the exercise, the reason I jumped (5) was to stretch my creativity a little, get in a habit of writing more frequently, and also remind people that I still have a blog.  I THINK it was successful overall.  The things that I spoke with most "expertise" on were a piece of cake (6) to write and for the most part seemed the most successful.  That makes sense to me because most of the people who read this blog came here looking for autism-related parenting stuff in the first place, so my "demographic" is obviously driving the success of those posts.  So having the special needs piece be most successful certainly didn't make me depressed (7).

Some of the posts were crap, let's face it, but I never promised Shakespeare (8).  To return to the Chopped analogy when I started this exercise, I know those basket ingredients don't always turn out to be five star dishes.  But I will say I'm proud of myself for having stuck with it, doggedly attacking the topics like a honeybadger (9), though perhaps unlike the honeybadger, some topics got the better of me.

Some topics were slow, and gradual like a sprouting chia pet (10), while others took off like fire...which was good (11).  Some topics didn't seem to go together...like pairing blueberries(12) and candy corns(13) at Thanksgiving Dinner(14)...but I muddled through them anyway. 



And though I did get stretched a bit thin at times, finding balance (15) wasn't as hard as I thought.  The special needs of this exercise did lead to some marital strife (16) as I tried to justify why I needed time alone to write when I had other responsibilities looming.  I genuinely felt stressed anticipating not being able to complete a post by the daily deadline.  But I'd rather have frozen to death or been burned alive than miss that date (17).

I was surprised people said they'd miss the dailies.  A blog post a day, unlike an apple (18), will NOT keep the doctor away, but I guess maybe it staved off boredom, and kept people from picking their noses...or worse, their friends' noses (19).  It IS my intention to blog more frequently.  Maybe it won't be EVERY day like this has been, but it will certainly be more than the every three weeks I'd dropped to before reviving.  It will be less random, more family-centric, and probably more autism-centric too.  I'll even draw pictures on occasion.  I really like drawing, and it gives me an excuse to exercise that as well.

I did feel like posting every day didn't necessarily produce as polished a product...it was like Matthew Modine in Space Jams versus The Mummy (20) (and yes...I know it wasn't Matthew Modine).  I typically like to have a picture or two in a post just to break the monotony of the words.  That said, I was able to incorporate a couple pictures of my smart, pretty daughters (21) and our Halloween costumes (22) in addition to sketching here and there or graphing.  If I was incorporating how much time I spent on this into the graph of "how I spend my time" (23), I think the numbers would be very different.

Hopefully you found something as useful as a measuring tape in a junk drawer (24), or as entertaining as a book on a desert island (25), or as inspiring as sibling love (26).  If this is your first exposure (heh) to the blog, I hope you'll add it to your playlist (27) and if not, I hope it has climbed its way into your list of favorites (28).

After the initial learning curve (29) peaked, I felt confident (30) I'd be able to finish.

And if you haven't figured it out yet (and you HAVE to have figured it out by now) the final challenge was to ATTEMPT (call it a partial win) to incorporate every 30 days of random topic into one final post.

Here are the posts and how they stacked up popularity-wise...

The most recent probably doesn't have the benefit of a few extra days viewing, but it looks like nobody really cares about cats or blueberries or nosepicking and fire, for that matter.  I didn't bother attempting to tie the dates posted into the data, but I suspect those topics posted over weekends, regardless of how compelling, suffered for it.

That's it, kids!  The great 30(1) days of Random has concluded.  Now I just have to decide if I'm doing Nanowrimo or not...