Let's Try This Again...

Hi. I'm Thomas Houston. You may remember me from such strange endeavors as "House Rules!", this very blog page. And of course, a silly little thing called "Planet Houston Podcast."

Both projects were started for similar but differing reasons. House Rules! was my attempt at expressing myself through writing. At the time, I had fiddled with various writing projects and concepts on other blogs and message boards, but I didn't have one that was just me. Heck, even my initial attempts at blogging had fallen short, as for some reason I was locked out of the page I was trying to create. But after a brief while (and after some "gentle nudging" from my friend, the late Sam Johnson), I started the blog in earnest. And while it never quite became what I envisioned it, it was my baby, and I loved it all the same.

Planet Houston Podcast? I guess you could say that was a need to express myself in a different way. Yes, I'm pretty good at turning a phrase or two when I'm writing, but it's not the same as an an active performance. In a perfect world, I suppose I could have tried to do the whole video thing, but honestly, I knew that would be way more work than I wanted to put into it. And really, I couldn't have done a video podcast in my underwear. (Not that I actually did that at any point, mind you. I'm just saying, sometimes a man likes to have his options.)

But for a number of reasons (some of which I may expound on in more detail someday) both projects fell off the radar. I have tried to get the old blog page back to a more regular posting schedule, but it seems like it wasn't in the cards until recently.

So what changed? Let me tell you what changed. It was something very subtle that occurred over the course of the past few weeks. I started to notice a friend or two on Facebook talking about the blog they were starting up. And yeah, I was a little curious about it, but I put it in the back of my head as something to check out later.

But then, it spread. Seriously. All of a sudden, this huge chunk of people that I know were either starting new blogs or reviving old ones. People... blogging thoughts and ideas... and then putting up links on the internet?

"That's my thing. The thing that I do. ...I feel like I'm gonna explode!" (My apologies to Milhouse for borrowing his angsty retort.)

So once again, we're going to give this wacky crazy blog of thing a go. Goodness knows I've got plenty of random thoughts and ideas to tack on here. I just need to get myself back into the flow of updating on a regular basis. So we'll see how that all works itself out.

... or I'll see you in my next post six months from now. One thing or the other will happen.