Real life interferes again

By Jim den Hollander

Editor

Midwesthockey.info

Midwesthockey.info is my dream.

What I mean by that is working on this blog/website is part of a life I dream of. Waking up every day and going to work. At my hockey website. That’s what I fantasize this turning into. At the very least, I am hoping for this to turn into a labor of love that turns into a retirement project. Of course, that is a decade or so down the road.

Every hockey season I get excited about getting everything ready so I can follow along perfectly and keep my readers/followers (Yeah, someday there will be readers and followers I hope) up to date with all the information and updates they could ever want on Midwest hockey at all levels.

An early stumble has me playing catch up and I slip further and further behind to the point where I am spending hours and hours updating from two or three weeks prior. You can set your watch by the way things happen here ever fall.

Rather than fill my readers in on all the efforts I put into getting ahead of the game again this year, I will skip ahead to the fact that indeed, that stumble once again has occurred at virtually the season’s starting point.

The difference this time though is that stumble is called REAL LIFE. I guess I had what you might call a health scare. That is a little over dramatic. I had a health issue and I have handled it, but the picture is a little bigger on this.

I had a bit of an epiphany at the same time. Just writing that word – epiphany – it seems way too big to use in this situation, but it sorts of fits. I had a realization that while this website has become hugely important to me – it might even be my legacy someday – It is not the most important thing in my life.

With that new relaxed attitude, I have a new approach – starting today. I am picking up on the seasons. I am not going to try to scramble together stories from the past week that I missed. I am going to go through each league – starting with Tier I Junior and moving through junior to College to Pro and simply come up with a quick update story of where we are at for each league. And then I will pick up from there as if this is the opening day of the season.

If I fall behind again, I will do the same thing. Simply move on.

I am pushing toward 700 items on my blog (625 as of this exact moment), I used to think I needed to have a base of articles so when someone visited my site, there would be something to look at. Those days are past me and I finally realize that. I am going to start enjoying this and stop pushing myself to get to a certain point as of right now.

I hope others enjoy this as much as I do.