Nature is full of cycles. Sunspot activity ebbs and flows on an 11-year cycle. Cicadas arrive to defoliate your land every 13 or 17 years, depending on the species. Tides, comets, bird migrations, our friend the moon.
But let’s be honest here in this out-of-the-way corner of the internetosphere. Nature is way out of whack right now. Until this week, every day in the last month and a half here in Maine (USA) has been either constant rain or sweltering 90-degree heat. These confounded (nice words only – this is a family blog, dammit) browntail moths are supposed to be on a cycle, and yet here they are scavenging our oak trees year-after-year. Even the water cycle, that staple of earth science class, is broken (https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trend/archive/spring-2019/the-water-cycle-is-broken-but-we-can-fix-it).
To see the full extent of how off-the-rails this world has become, look to the right-hand column of the blog. It is very clear that Playing with Concrete and Stone only pulls out of hibernation every ten years.
Until now.
That’s right. You have found your way back to this digital backwater roughly seven years ahead of schedule, yet another one of nature’s rhythms disrupted. You, my loyal fanbase, broke the Internet with the debut of (then titled) Learning to Play with Concrete and Stone. We laughed, we cried, we remodeled parts of the house. Then it was time for a pause.
Ten years later, they said the magic could not be replicated, and yet the newly rebranded Playing with Concrete and Stone arrived in the depths of the winter in 2020, just when you need a blog the most to pick up your cold, depressed spirits. There were more projects to be described to those of you who did not come over to help. There were also elements of the bigger world creeping in. Looking over the 2020 entries, I am surprised at how little attention the Covid pandemic got. Writing was a nice way of getting away from that craziness.
More importantly, May of 2020 saw the murder of George Floyd. That event hit a chord with me, my then online students, and most (not enough?) of the nation and a blog entry seemed wholly appropriate. The second season of this ongoing stream-of-semi-consciousness wrapped up with a DIY project that steered away from concrete and stone in favor of silicon and graphics cards. The computer I built in the summer of 2020 is still going strong, I am happy to report.
And then, this blog settled back in for its decade of slumber.
Well, I have grown antsy. It is 2023. We are in the midst of countless home renovation projects. No really, do not make me count. I cannot handle the number. Since the pandemic, we have doubled down on turning our home into a paradise homestead (read lovely place to be with a never-ending list of things to do). And I have new interests that I have not yet explored.
On top of that, I am trying to write more. And part of writing more is wanting to share that writing more, but because this is mediocre writing, I still need to make it available at a fair price. Free. That seems fair. ALL THAT SAID, a lot has changed on the internet since I launched this ship in 2010. The way we share information has changed. How the social medias function has changed. Words are scarce. TikTok videos rule the day. Memes have replaced discourse. Don’t even get me started on replies and comments. I think it is time for a change in how I share words and pictures with you, my dozen or so dedicated followers. As a prolific writer of now 20 riveting entries over the past 13 years, I owe my fanbase the best possible content and delivery.
Today I am announcing that this blog, this on-again, off-again blurt into the digital maw, is moving to the Substack platform. There, you will already find all the past entries. Going forward, there will be expanded opportunities for the core of this blog, DIY home projects and hobbies, along with longer-form writing, sharing of photos, and perhaps even a toe dipped into the audio world of podcasting. We will see where the spirit moves me!
For right now, know that I am mildly hard at work getting some new content to you. Hopefully, my 14 followers here on Blogspot will make that brave leap over to https://drgagne.substack.com/. That said, three of them are blood relatives and two of them are my wife. Substack might help grow the 14 of you and the additional five or six that I know checked out every episode into a larger community. Dare I dream…25? Then I can charge you all obscene subscription rates, quit my day job, and brag about using sponsored products in every aspect of my new influencer lifestyle. You know, the classic American success story.
Thank you to my mom and my wife for reading this. Special thanks to anyone not legally or genetically required to read it! We will see where this journey takes us! I mean, I have a plan and know exactly how this will go, of course.
To all assembled, welcome and welcome back to Playing with Concrete and Stone.
