If you follow our Twitter accounts, you may have noticed from our tweets that we were on vacation last week.  We didn’t go anywhere exotic or out of the ordinary, but we had fun swimming, lying on a beach in the sun, roasting marshmallows, relaxing, and having lots of sex.

You may not have realized it, but we took a week off of blogging as well.  All of our posts from Sunday, June 24th until Thursday, June 28th were written and scheduled for publication well in advance.  We auto-post as much as possible during the week, in some cases just an hour or two before the typical post’s midnight publication time, but in this case it was out of necessity as we were unsure as to whether or not we’d have an internet connection while on our trip.  As it turns out, we had wi-fi most of the time, and that allowed us to keep up with the blogs we follow as well as monitor and approve comments on our own blog.

It was wonderful to have so many of our posts written, auto-posted, and more or less out of mind so far in advance.  This would have been impossible without the cooperation of meme-keepers like Hedone and sub_Rebel, who gave us an early look at the week’s TMI Tuesday questions and Wicked Wednesday prompt, respectively.  In getting the week’s blogging out of the way early, we were able to concentrate on relaxing, without spending the a significant amount of each day hunched over a laptop.  Generally, blog-related activity was limited to an hour or so in the evenings or at night just before bed, wherein we’d comment blogs, tweet links to our just-published posts, or submit links to meme sites like Sinful Sunday and The Naughty Hangout.

As our vacation wound down, it occurred to me that it would be an enormous relief to be able to regularly autopost the entirety, or at least the majority, of a week’s blog posts in advance.  We have done this to an extent with our Retro HNT posts, as they require almost no creativity, just an already-taken photo and some copied-and-pasted boilerplate.  In fact, that the entirety of our Retro HNT pictures aren’t already auto-posted is due to my own laziness and lack of interest in repetition than any technical limitation.

In reality, however, this is pretty much impossible.  Even were we to divide up the blogging responsibilities equally, there is no way we could devote the necessary time.  It’s unlikely now that Jill is on summer break, so there’s no chance of this happening during the school year when the day-to-day child-rearing is done solely by yours truly.  At any rate, even if we had sufficient time and energy to spend writing all of a given week’s blog posts in one day, we’d much rather spend that time doing fun things that do not involve a laptop – or even our phones.  It’s summertime, and taking our baby to the park, walking through the icy surf on one of many local beaches, barbecuing, going to the movies, and having lots of sex all trump blogging.  Sorry, but it’s true.

Case in point:  A couple days before we left on last week’s trip, while packing, shopping, and generally maintaining the harmony in our household, we also managed to write, edit, format, and auto-publish seven different posts.  This proved a daunting task, and while we enjoyed the sense of accomplishment we felt as we completed each one, it was pretty stressful.

Make no mistake, it wasn’t a chore, nor was the stress level unpleasant.  But the assumption that we wouldn’t be able to blog day-by-day was a strong motivator; I question whether we’d want to set aside a possibly five- or six-hour period on a Sunday or a Monday for the purpose of completing all or most of the week’s blogging if we knew we’d be able to write and post our stuff the night before.  It might be worth it to do so; it’s simply not feasible.

This brings me to the point of this post.  Later this month, we will be away from home for approximately two weeks.  Once again, we have reason to believe that we will have little or no internet access on the road; for all I know we won’t even have network access on our phones.  Therefore, we will try to write and schedule as many posts in advance as we possibly can.

Given our regular weekly blogging schedule, we’re talking anywhere from nineteen to twenty-two posts, depending on whether or not we blog on Saturdays.  Nine of these are photo posts, including two Retro HNTs which are so effortless that they practically post themselves.  Anywhere from ten to thirteen (again, Saturdays) are more in-depth written posts.  However, six of these posts – two each of TMI Tuesday, Wicked Wednesday, and Flash Fiction Friday – are dependent upon our knowing a prompt, or in the case of TMI Tuesday, a list of questions.

Because of this, in the worst-case scenario in which we are completely off the grid, without internet access of any kind, we won’t be able to take part in these posts.  We imagine that such a scenario is unlikely; even the most obscure backwater town has a Starbucks or at least a public library that features wi-fi.  Or at least, we hope so.

There’s no need to worry that blogging will cease altogether during our two weeks away from home and (presumably) the internet.  We will do our best to have regular content scheduled to publish on a daily or near-daily basis before we leave.  Though we may be forced to skip an occasional day or two, we imagine that our absence will be no more than that.

That sounds great, Jack, you may be saying.  How can I help?  The answer is simple.  Stop by our Formspring page and ask us a question or two.  Our inbox is close to empty, and ensuring that it stays filled to capacity means that we will have a Formspring Friday post up each week.  Not interested in going to the Formspring page?  Too lazy to click a link?  You can also drop questions into the Formspring widget on the right-hand side of this blog and submit them that way.  Don’t see it?  You may have to scroll up.

In conclusion, the next few days will be quite busy around the Jack and Jill household as we try to cram as much advance blogging into that time as possible, while not letting the amount of non-blogging summertime fun (and sex, for that matter) suffer as a result.