I achieved tenure and promotion. Then I converted my role from bipartite (teaching professor) to tripartite (research professor).

I got pregnant, finally stayed pregnant for an appropriate amount of time, and had a second baby. I went on maternity leave. I have kept this new human alive for over a year.

I applied for and was awarded a sabbatical, which will begin 1 January. My first peer-reviewed podcast made it to the world.

The government changed in the US, and then in Canada. It feels like things are pretty much worse everywhere.

Covid is still happening, though we’re mostly pretending it’s not.

There’s a genocide in Gaza, though we’re mostly pretending there isn’t.

I quit Twitter and Instagram and (mostly) Facebook — like so many of us, I have a blank profile for keeping up with school news and community events — and joined Bluesky.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how if I invested in this blog (or any previous incarnation of my blogs) the way I invested in Twitter and Instagram and (sort of) Facebook and now Bluesky, I would have a record of all my thoughts and a lot more control over my web presence.

Which is sort of what prompted me back here.

I’m also here because my postpartum brain is so slow, and I have so many loose ends I would like to wrap up before my sabbatical starts. I have a co-written article to finish, a conference paper to write, and I need to finish the book manuscript I have been plugging away at in fits and starts while I have been on leave (it’s a textbook, and it’s very fun to work on). I get about 30-60 minutes a day to write, and I have been telling myself that means I don’t have time for blogging, but maybe the opposite is true. Maybe little bits of writing here would make big bits of writing elsewhere feel more possible.

I have a to-do list around here, too. I kind of hate this theme now, which felt so edgy and analogue a couple of years ago and now feels unreadable and tired. I also want to do some work on my website itself, which also kind of feels bleh to me. I want to set up a space for journalling my sabbatical, too. I want to do a better job of cataloguing my writing elsewhere. And maybe I want to start another podcast, who knows.

And posts! I have so many draft posts. About grief. About AI. About talking to my kiddo about edtech.

Cognitive completionism is one of my absolutely most unhelpful traits and the more I want to do with this space, the less time I spend here. The number of times I have thought to myself that I will definitely write again as soon as I find a theme I like. As soon as my main site is redesigned. As soon as I finish my book manuscript. And in the meantime I don’t write anything at all.

But what if I wrote something anyway?

Even if just to ask: is this thing still on?

I’m more of the, like, re-develop every course you ever teach entirely from scratch every semester because the idea of revisiting your own notes makes you want to die kind of gal.

It’s not ideal, but we make do.

Anyway.

One of the things I have always found the most difficult about maintaining my own blog space is the part where you have to maintain it. Like, once a year, or something. You have to renew the frigging thing! Seems fake.

It’s been a rough year for me, and among the many things I let slide was checking the email address that those renewal reminders went to. And so, blog.communityofpraxis.ca and brennaclarkegray.com both expired, joining the once beloved notthatkindofdoctor.com on the scrapheap of my internet history. And like all my domains before them, they were snapped up within a few weeks of expiration, and now there’s stuff on them that isn’t mine.

Ah well.

I actually do have backups of those sites, and one day I hope to getting around to restoring them. But for now it’s a fresh start — and calendar reminders for renewal dates, too!