I mentioned in passing that we have a bit of a family trip coming up in July: Mr. Mezzo and I will be cruising the Baltic on one of those once-in-a-lifetime before the kids grow up and leave us in the dust trips. (My sister’s kids, not mine.)

As much as there is part of me that would want to try and keep up with my posting and with current events while we are a-travelling — so many news stories! so many feels about those news stories! —

In the mature part of my heart and brain, I know that to try and do that would quite simply be bananas. Although I think we’ll be able to find some sort of “Internet cafe” on the boat, I don’t want to count on a robust enough wifi connection to sustain my long-windedness. Besides, this truly is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I’d like to give myself the chance to really experience it, rather than be devoting my energy to surfing the news sites and waxing loquacious about what I find. Slate, Salon and HuffPo will all still be going strong when I get back stateside…

But I also don’t want to leave JALC completely shuttered for the time we’re a-sea. So, I’m going to start (slowly!) taking on a “25 songs in 25 days” blog challenge I stumbled across.

It seemed one of those challenges that was tailor-made for me. After all, when asked to write about only three songs back during the Writing 101 experience, I was kind of jammed up by needing to reduce all my passion for music into only three pieces. (And even then, I stretched it to four songs, rather than three. *grin*)

I also like how instead of just asking something banally impossible like “What’s your favorite song?” — favorite for what purpose? in what context? current favorite or for-the-most-of-my-life favorite? — these questions are asked from very specific lenses. I think it’ll be fun to see where these different angles of inquiry take me.

So here’s the plan. During this holiday weekend, alongside of the packing, the Wimbeldon-watching, the last-minute shopping and the job-work I need to do, I’ll be responding to the first however-many of the prompts on this list: as many as I’m able to, but you can see that I do have a few other things on the to-do list. So I’ll just have to see how many I get written.

Whatever that number is, I’ll use the handy scheduling feature (thank you, WordPress!) to scatter those song posts semi-evenly throughout the time we’re away. That way, there’s at least a little bit of activity on JALC, and it’ll also be a cool chance for me to talk about something — music — that has always been an important part of my life.

I’ll chip my way through the remainder of the 25 songs list once I’m back in the States. So it’ll definitely take me more than 25 days, but it’ll still be a fun project.