"Well, I'm not usually one for speeches, so goodbye." - Ron Swanson

It's not you, it's me.

The only Van Halen that truly matters y'all...

Historically, I've long hated change. It has been my standard operating procedure since even before Van Halen transformed into Van Hagar and also well before something called New Coke hit grocery shelves.

Yes, whoever coined the phrase, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" is one of my favorite philosophers.

Sure there were signs of cracks in my exterior; small instances that one could point to and say, "Hey, you're not so scared of doing things differently after all." For instance, as I grew up I liked to rearrange my room at times, move furniture around and see what space opened up. In adulthood I also once had a brief, uneventful, and sublimely lacking affair with something called "decaf" coffee.

But for the most part, I've long enjoyed living each day in comfortable and familiar environs. That said, as I age I've noticed a need developing; a need to appreciate opportunities to stretch my horizon, challenge my own status quo, and take different paths through this jungle of Life.

A large part of that is why this blog has throttled down to a virtual halt. When my girls were young they would be in bed and asleep by 8:00pm most nights. I'm not much for mainstream television, so that left me the better part of two hours to write about my Alma Mater, her athletic developments in particular.

I got a real charge out of prepping a couple posts, scheduling them to publish about the time the ol' Dawgbone.com woke up, and then seeing the stats climb. There's some of you that have had this little blog bookmarked just about since its inception. Others have joined up along the way, some of those have even stuck around. I truly appreciate your visits, your comments, the emails, the criticisms, the laughs, the lows endured together that have made us stronger, and just the camaraderie along what will have been a ten year journey next month.

No, today is not the very end of Bernie's Dawg Blawg. But today is the start of something new for me that will mean...yes, somehow...even less posts here.

You see, one change I've been working on for some time (really ever since this post a few years back when I expected to go on a little hiatus) is broadening my writing into other avenues. And while some of those topics may have been broached here, it just seems a better idea to pivot rather than force content that doesn't always fit into what we've built here.

So no Ron Swanson, this isn't a good bye so much as a chance to introduce you to a new venture. It's something I guess I'd knew I'd always get around to...one of these days...