Went to bed before 10, alarm at 5:30a to be at St.G at 7 to taxi a volunteer truck driver to FLL Enterprise depot by 8. The drive was patchy rain and would have been miserable if my passenger wasn't such an interesting cat. As we exited 595 onto Fed Hwy, we spotted a rainbow. My take on rainbows is a little more evolved than literal Noah's Ark, but I do believe it at least says something of the Creator's personality that He decorated the universe at all with frivolous, gorgeous phenomena like rainbows.

I had about an hour, once I got to the office, to prep for a staff meeting. It didn't feel like enough time, but I guess I was as prepared as I really needed to be. Between budget development, DioCon, board meeting, Give Miami Day, annual appeal, and other work things I'll refrain from snarkiness about, I feel like I've caught and carried the ball a lot of yards this game.

When Miss Cupcake rebooted her online journaling, I approved wholeheartedly. But I also felt like I didn't want to "have to" follow and respond to it regularly as another comm channel - on top of texting, email, Facebook messaging, and plain old-fashioned dialogue. It already borders on overwhelming to me that there are so many different channels - and some people can only be reached by, say, Instagram, while others can only be reached by email, and some used to email but now appear to prefer Facebook, and some can only be reached by phone but rarely actually answer it and also don't actually listen to their voicemail, and so on.

When I jumped the LJ ship to launch my handrolled blog engine in 2011, I stopped following any other blogs. And aside from Gamer Girl's gaming blog, my women didn't blog and didn't follow my blog (as far as I knew), so it just wasn't a comm channel. What I'm finding is that I really appreciate this extra window into Miss Cupcake's thoughts, and it's handy to be able to comment if I want, yet not have to feel like I'm remiss if I don't immediately, or at all. If I ever say "did you read my latest blog post? any thoughts?" ...then I've lost sight of the intention for which I wrote Phosphoros in the first place. To leverage the fire/Phosphor metaphor, the entire point was to have a crucible in which to dump raw thoughts, refining and tempering them before I apply them elsewhere.

And this is why I never bothered bolting on a comment system. Just like I don't turn the TV on to make a phone call, I don't go to a blog platform for feedback. And to circle back around to the crucible metaphor... when you make a regular practice of heating up whatever raw ore is handy that day, a lot of days you're not going to end up with a gold ingot no matter how hard you work it.

So then, if via blog is not a dialogue channel to me, then what is my most preferred channel? "It Depends". I often flip back and forth between text and FB message. I guess FB is just easier when I have access to a full keyboard; it also dodges the text message length limit. But something like a short grocery list or a well-formed street address is handier as a text, because who knows if you'll have data reception in the grocery store, and the SMS client is pretty good at recognizing addresses to make them clickable navigation app links. Email picks up where SMS's message length limits and mobile platform inputs get unwieldy, e.g. with longer lists or more complex attachments like PDF.