Post-vacation Recap

Returning to blogging after annual vacation is always a challenge. The first problem is to recall what I was working on before the vacation started, and the second is to catch up on chess news. Last year I solved the problems with an inventory of pre-vacation posts (Now, Where Was I?) and a survey of TWIC (Catching Up with Chess News).

Two years ago I did an inventory (Moving on after Vacation) which was the inspiration for a new series. The year before that I reported on How I Spent My Summer Vacation, because it was tangentially related to chess blogging, and I also surveyed the news (No News Is Normal for Chess).

The bag of post-vacation tricks is normally light and this year it's even lighter. I summarized my current focus of interest just before leaving (The Adorjan Series to Date), and continued my long-running About.com series yesterday (More Carlsen Games), although it no longer has much to do with About.com. Since I had a good wifi connection for the entire vacation, I'm caught up on chess news, even if I haven't digested it. While on vacation I received an Amazon Kindle as a Father's Day gift and spent some time reading Rowson's "Seven Deadly Chess Sins".

The wifi connection let me continue with three ongoing, aleatory series -- Flickr Friday (last seen in Aus dem Schachbuch), Video Friday ('There's No Place Like Home'), and eBay top items ('A Holy Grail to Cookie Jar Collectors') -- so those will continue without interrruption, as will my supplementary blogs on chess960 and the World Championship (see the sidebar for links).

Thanks to this little recap, I'm starting to have a clearer picture about where I'm going with this blog over the next few weeks. On top of that I'd like to tackle an idea that has been germinating for some time: a survey of Youtube's many analytical videos.