Confessions of the disappeared

Seeing as my cousin has recently informed me that beginning a sentence with "so" is a uniquely Northwesterner habit, I shall do just that; so where have I been for the last three months?  Clearly not blogging.

Yes, I have been busy.  But then I always seem to be ... as does everyone else who seemingly has no problem keeping up with their blogs.  And in fact, I do think about blogging quite often.  Countless times along the walk or tram ride home I have mentally written what I had intended to have end up as a blog.  So what's been the problem?

Quite frankly, I've been having inner battles about the whole invention, about personal privacy and about the world wide communication tool turned the Big Brother that is the Web.  You see, it's been about three months now that I've been using Google Alerts at work and quite honestly, it gives me the creeps.  For those of you who don't know what it is, essentially I can set an alert for "Nayr Annala" and every time that that keyword appears anywhere on the web, I get a notice about it.  This means blogs, that, while they have never been private, are now easily being "found" by people - and companies - far beyond the relatively intimate spheres of family and friends that would normally be reading what I write.  If only I had learned pig latin, then perhaps the alerts would miss my blog in their sweeps. 

There has been another problem as well.  Free space.  Apparently I missed an ever-so-important notice (if ever there were one) notifying me that the free space on my computer was being eaten up in big chunks.  Low and behold, I wake up on morning to find that I have 1% free space.  For those of you who have never been fortunate to have this problem, allow me to enlighten you.  When you have less than 15% free space, you can no longer perform defragment functions, burn CDs, watch streaming videos online, etc.  15% is the minimum.  I have 1%.  Which means I am left with two options: delete or buy (an external hard drive, that it).  Seeing as I have no money, I am left with the former option, leaving me to painstakingly sift through thousands of precious photos to delete any I can ... until I can get enough free space to be able to burn the remaining ones to CDs.  

In a nutshell, then, I cannot currently share any pictures from my most recent adventures, which is, for me, the best part of having a blog ... to share the story in pictures of a day in my life with the people who are most important to me. 

I have now gotten up to 6% free space and am hoping to "find" the remaining 9% this weekend so that I can say screw the internet prowlers and begin, once again to share the insignificant adventures, ponderings and wonders of life with those of you who have been wondering just where I have gone ....