A New Beginning- Sort Of

In January 2007, faced with a prolonged period home because of a serious injury, I decided to write a blog as part of my plans to keep myself occupied.  When I returned to work six months later, updating the blog proved to be an onerous task and despite my best intentions, I stopped blogging soon after.  Over the next few years I would often formulate various ideas in my mind about a blog post but when it came to actually writing, I never managed to reach that far.

It is now seven years since my first blogging experience.  The nomad in me is increasingly restless and I have decided to restart my blogging as one way of focussing my energy.  My wife (marriage is one of the many changes in my life since 2007) is of the view that my blogspot and the moniker that went with it are out-dated.  She tells me I need a fresh name and that I need to use wordpress.  Yes, she likes to boss me around!

I was sitting at my laptop trying to come up with a name that she would approve.  I made a few suggestions which she immediately dismissed.  I began to get frustrated and then suddenly a thought crossed my mind and not wanting to lose it, I blurted “how about paradoxical Iqbal”.  She expressed delight at this idea and insisted that I proceed to right away sign up for wordpress with this “name”.

I signed up for a wordpress.com blog as instructed by my wife, but the Iqbal-Wordpress relationship soured almost immediately.  I guess I went into the relationship expecting too much.  I had heard and read quite a bit about all the wonderful flexibility and customisation tools on wordpress.com.  What I was unaware of was that these are only available at a cost.  The scheme wordpress seems to be operating is to sucker people in with the attraction of hundreds of themes from which to choose.  However, after being duped into choosing one of these themes, the ability to undertake any real modifications is curtailed unless one is willing to do so at a cost.  I felt hard done because blogger, while not providing the highly sophisticated tailoring capabilities that wordpress is touted for, allows for more than adequate customisation and for no charge.  I therefore decided that I would stick with blogger!  Sorry wordpress!  This article lays out in a very clear manner the differences between blogger and wordpress and I found the guidance offered extremely useful in my decision-making process: 

So here I am.  The wife helped me with some of the features to make the blog appear aesthetically pleasing.  She is rather multi-talented unlike me and I depend heavily on her for advice/assistance in most things I do.  I have to give her credit here because if I don’t not only will advice/assistance not be forthcoming in the future, but I also face the possibility of increased physical abuse.

The blog is now up.  The difficult part -updating it on a regular basis- comes next.  I always have a million thoughts and ideas circulating in my head.  The challenge for someone whose wife strongly believes they have adult ADHD, is putting those thoughts and ideas down on paper or in this case on a screen.