So long, and thanks for all the views!

Sweeping out the attic, mopping up the basement, clearing out the garage. Everything not of value must go.


Messages from people I haven't heard from in 5 years. Confirmation of orders from Amazon.com that I have received, used and probably thrown away. Promotional offers that I have never taken advantage of. Things that should have been marked as being spam, but lazily never were. Facebook notifications. Yes - someone commented on my blog post. No - sorry, you did not get the job.


Yes, after six years and sixteen thousand messages, I finally went through my GMail account and gave it a much-needed cleaning out. It took a while, and after a bit (the first twenty pages), I got pretty lazy, and, where before I was making surgically precise deletions with the finely honed scalpel of my own human intellect, I ended up trusting the machine and clear-cutting through the forest of emails with nothing less than the Napalm that is Google's filtering mechanism.


*sigh*


Much remains; letters from friends and family, mostly. And of course, every word that Carrie has ever tossed to me from across the transom that separates one DNS server from another has been lovingly saved and preserved and cherished, or will be on my hard drive (which prompted me to clean out the account in the first place - ever try to download sixteen thousand messages including several gigabytes of attachements? Not fun!).


But that is just the beginning. My Yahoo email account, my very first one ever, which I signed up for back in 1997, is no more. Neither is the Flickr account that I dumped in favor of Picassa. No longer am I documenting ad tedium about my Java Programming or ad nauseum about my the routes that I run. Pretty soon, I'll no longer be issuing ad infinitum massive missives about all things "just Charlie (or Tony, or C.A.)". Yes, folks, sadly, this will be my final post here on the (soon to be gone) "Caffeine - Nation, baby!".


I am taking a good hard look at the relations that I have on the overcrowded (and increasingly more trite) warrens of Facebook , and go about building the relations that I want. I am slimming down and straightening up, re-asserting the priorities that I had once held dear, and re-focusing my sights on the things that are truly important to me. Which doesn't include blogging, but (in what could be a rather paradoxical twist) blogging about the things that are important to me does give me relief of a sort; call it catharsis, I guess. It also give me pleasure; call it self-indulgence. But, rather than electing to speak solely in an ego-centric forum (which is what "Caffeine - Nation" really is), I will be speaking more and more within the context of the wonderful family that I am truly fortunate to belong to: the one that has Carrie, Charlie, Gabriel, Oliver and Axia at its core. Having said such, I invite you to read about our continuing travels, travails and "just the normal pace of life stuff" at C.C. and the Beans.


Of course, instead of focusing on three diversions, I shall be keeping notes of my one allowed dalliance, writing (which is one of the things that I am planing on focusing a bit more on) at Charlie's Cafe. You can join me there as well, if you'd like.


See you - there :)


- Tony / C.A. / Charlie




-update( September 11, 2010)


It has been a while since I originally wrote this post and saved  it as a draft. Several things have changed since then, which has caused me to rewrite it slightly. I am planning on starting up a programming-centric blog, but (hopefully) it won't be as tech and code heavy as the last one. But I will always put my blogging efforts first and foremost into C.C. and the Beans.


-update ( October 8, 2010)


I really should just push  this out there, shouldn't I? I've ported most of my Blogger posts to my Wordpress account, so hopefully things won't seem too strange there.