Yesterday marked the 500th consecutive post on The Portly Politico—a substantial milestone, I will argue, at the risk of tooting my own proverbial horn.  Making it to that mark—when I only intended to write for the thirty-one days of January 2019—has me looking back at the course the blog has taken in those 500 days.

As such, today I wanted to look back at the now-halfway mark—to the “250th Day Update“—for TBT.  It’s another exercise in girly self-indulgence.  I promise, the blog will have some more manly substance for you tomorrow.

One reward of blogging is that it’s interesting to look back and see what has changed—and what has stayed the same.  This post came near the beginning of the academic year, that point where teachers (and most students) are still full of optimism and vigor.  Appropriately, this look back is coming at the end of that long, unusually arduous academic year.

It is interesting to note that it’s been 251 days since an Internet outage from my incredibly unreliable ISP.  Let’s hope I didn’t just jinx it.

Well, enough of that navel-gazing.  Let’s look back to the navel-gazing of days passed with “250th Day Update“:

Today’s post marks 250 days of consecutive posting.  That’s a major milestone in my ongoing project to blog daily, which I last commemorated in a substantial way at Day 101.  With this post, I’m a mere 115 days away from reaching a year of daily posts.  So close, and yet—so far.

I tried to find a word that meant “250 days” in the way that bicentennial means “200 years,” or sesquicentennial means “150 years” (from those words, I reason that 250 years would be a “sesquibicentennial”).  My search proved fruitless, though I did learn that 250 is the number of men that rebelled against Moses in Numbers 26:10 (thank you, Wikipedia).

It’s a slow season with politics; outside of the trade war and the Democratic clown show, there’s not a great deal happening.  That’s why I wrote about Saturn on Wednesday: it was the most interesting topic I could find.  Now that Labor Day has come and gone, and with the first of the primaries mere months away, the political news should start heating up.

It’s partially my own fault.  Rather than listening to talk radio and keeping up with the news, I’ve been reading for pleasure, and listening to a book on tape.  I’ll be writing a couple of reviews soon based on that reading, one of Spotted Toad’s book on education, the other on Milo’s book Middle Rages, which is a collection of essays about the SJWs’ struggle to control Medieval Studies (and, thereby, the heart and soul of our interpretation of Western Civilization).

Eastern South and North Carolina endured Hurricane Dorian yesterday, which largely—and thankfully—brushed the coast with some buffeting winds and persistent rains, but it was no worse than a blustery, rain-swept day any other time of the year, perhaps with a bit more melodrama.  The Bahamas weren’t so lucky; here, the worst was a day out of school.  With my Internet down—yet again—I was somewhat stymied in my quest to avoid grading, but I eventually got around to grading a large stack of AP United States History quizzes that I’d been delaying—just in time for a new stack of forty-nine fresh quizzes to come in today.  Yikes!

This weekend my real hometown (not my adopted one) hosts Aiken’s Makin’, a large craft fair.  After a late night of prep school football action—I’ll be debuting behind the “golden mic” (we spray-painted a microphone gold in homage to Rush Limbaugh) as announcer for the varsity team tonight, moving up from, though continuing with, my duties as the junior varsity announcer—I’ll be heading to Aiken to enjoy the quaint woodworking and funnel cakes.

So, all in all, life is going well—an important reminder as we opine about civil war and social instability.  I’m finally—finally—over my lengthy respiratory malady, and seem capable of both singing and teaching properly again.  If I can ever escape the ever-multiplying football schedule, I’ll book some gigs soon.

That’s enough navel-gazing for now.  Thank you for all of your support these last 250 days; here’s to (at least!) another 115!

—TPP