We don’t always know where we’re going until we get there.  But if you’re like me, you plan ahead even if you don’t know the destination or when you’ll arrive.

While I don’t want to delve into specifics at this time, I want to say my life has had its share of challenges in recent months.  So as part of my contingency plan, I have a series of scheduled posts that will begin appearing if I’m out of pocket for a certain amount of time.  This is the first such post.

I began calling this journey my “bridge to nowhere” because, like these photos taken at White Rock Lake in January 2008, it’s a path obscured in the distance and only clear in this moment, in this place where I stand right now.

I’ve tried to include a variety of topics in these posts.  That seemed important to me for many reasons, not the least of which are that I don’t know the destination and I don’t want to set/reset the tone of my blog based on a single event.  Besides, I’m too capricious to maintain a theme.

So long as these posts are showing up, it means I’m out of pocket.  Hopefully I’m not in jail because that would be downright embarrassing!  And hopefully I won’t be gone long because I’ve only planned a finite number of posts over a finite period of time.

Please note that my absence means I can’t respond to comments.  But don’t let that stop you from speaking your piece.  While I might not be part of the conversation, that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to each other, and it certainly doesn’t mean I won’t catch up later.

And in closing, some of you are aware of my circumstances.  That disclosure also was part of my contingency plan.  All I ask is that you not share that information in an identifiable way.  So long as there’s life in these old bones of mine, I don’t want this hanging over my head in the future.

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Footnote for the technically minded: Though this absence is not necessarily unforeseen, it is unscheduled.  And because I couldn’t schedule posts according to specific dates since these will only show up if I’m gone unexpectedly, I scheduled them based on a trigger file and a cron job that runs hourly.  So long as the trigger file was updated, the posts would remain unseen.  Once that trigger file became so many days old, however, the cron job would start processing the posts.  Thus you will see at the bottom of each post a small marker.  That tells the cron job that it’s a “bridge to nowhere” post followed by how many days to wait before posting it followed by what time in UTC to post it. Yes, I’m a big ol’ geek if ever there was one!

[my apologies for reposting this; I had intended not to share this series and so had removed this entry, but after some though I’ve decided to go ahead with these posts]