After an almost two-month hiatus, I’m taking another plunge with the blog.  I’ll admit, I was this close to giving up on it entirely.  It wasn’t the writing requirements, it was the incessant blog spam.  Tramadol.  Soma.  Phentermine.  It got to be too much to keep up with in late March/early April, so I stopped blogging entirely to see if anything changed.  The spam still kept flowing into my moderation list for a couple weeks, but then it seemed to taper off a bit.  A couple days ago, I returned from being out of the country for two weeks (more on that later), and what am I greeted by but – amazingly – no additional spam!  So I have a little hope now that maybe this little blog has fallen off the radar of the zombie comment spam engines.  Anyone know how to avoid this crap?  I enjoy blogging and would like to continue doing it, but if it means sifting daily through the mountain of spam I was getting before, then I honestly won’t be able to justify the time.  So anyway, here goes again…