NaBloPoMo Round-Up #3: Xs, Ys, Zs, & Ds

Between my NaBloPoMo participation, recent half-all-nighters working on CK’s WordPress conversion, an aggresive social schedule (tonight: Cheap Trick / Ok Go), and – oh yeah – my full time communications job, i haven’t lived anything resembling a life in my own home for almost a week. I don’t have any food, i have no clean socks, and after i pull tonight’s half-nighter of WordPress fixin’ i should be able to post a camera pic of the disaster area that is my office/recording-studio.

All that is just a long way of saying i have so much stuff i should be doing rather than this, but i find myself doing this anyway because i have 23 more letters worth of NaBloPoMo left to review in only 15 days. Here we go.

I decided to pull a few late-alphabet letters into the mix, since those blogs are probably benefiting less from reviewers and traffic from NaBloPoMo central. There are only 31 XYZ bloggers, who were maintaining a 75% participation rate when i read through them a few days ago.

I’ve already already found a favorite XYZ blogger in the previously linked You’re Doing It Wrong, who graced me with a lovely email exchange over the weekend. However, i also thouroughly enjoyed You Can’t Make this Stuff Up, who told a story about being young but still the oldest person at a concert, an experience i seem to relive at least once a month. Where for art all the hip oldsters? I was also especially fond of the clean, easy to read layout at Zanshin.

Other notable XYZers included Yarn Porn, a mom whose son knits. I love parents who are completely over the whole silly concept of gender-based activities for children. That’s how we wind up with so many meat-headed adult men and wilty grown woman. More power to her. I also love finding out about processes whose workings i don’t understand, so i enjoyed Yet Another Heather‘s treatise on why movie theatres are disgusting.

X Facta had a back-to-back pair of interesting posts, one about some sort of construction (an elaborate log cabin?) and then about the unique challenges of working with the disabled. Finally, Yoga Gumbo is NaBloPoMoing and NaNoWriMoing, and excerpts a quote that i’ve found to be very true in my personal life from a Washington Post article on NaNoWriMo:

“A lot of people discover the month they’re writing their novel that they have more time for everything else in their life than they did before,” Baty says. “Once you decide to really prioritize something, whether that’s novel writing or learning a foreign language, you tend to cut out the superfluous bits.”

The quote jives with my whole theory of personal betterment, which i’ll lay on the line in a post coming REALLY SOON. But, first, the Ds.

There were 96 Ds to read, primarily made up of 46% from BlogSpot and 16% from WordPress (yes, my OCD knows no bounds). Of the Ds, 73% have kept up daily. I wonder if this ~25% dropout rate for the first half of NaBloPoMo is typical of all letters, and if it’s still declining?

One of the failed NaBloPoMo blogs is actually pretty notable – Dad Daily Blog is working on a sort of “MySpace for Dads,” which was a nice respite from all the mommy-blogging. He also offers an informative post on how home aquariums have changed from the purple-graveled affairs of our youth.

On the whole I enjoyed a lot of the Ds, but a few deserve special attention. Debbie Millman is a communications-oriented blogger who posts videos and media-responses. Derivative of Witty turns in a fascinating post on a new series of cow mutilations. Defying Labels, Gravity, and Sleep Deprivation is another Blogger/Marathoner, and she offers a very vivid description of her recent marathon experience.

Doctor Anonymous is an honest-to-goodness doctor blogging primarily on medicine-related topics (quite well, too) – where does he find the time!? He’ll be hosting the next virtual “Grand Rounds” of the best recent medical-blog writing.

In the mommy-blog category, Letters to Lucy is in the form of a mom’s daily notes to her daughter, which reminded me of an old favorite – the now defunct Henry’s Diary. Diary of a Crazed Mommy isn’t afraid to be a little mean to her kids when the situation warrants it.

And, finally, Dante’s Inferno w/Children posts a funny waiting room story that reminded me of Garden State, and generally writes compellingly about her son – who is rated on the autistic spectrum. Quite a few people in my professional life are also experiencing this with their children, and it was refreshing to have a window into someone’s personal experiences.

Next up are the 60 Es as well as the combined 44 Us and Vs.