The Daily Quill

Mommy

2010-10-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

Mommy is a word we tend to stop using after a while. I remember the day I stopped using it. It was one day in the spring. One of my friends came over and heckled me about still calling my mom, “mommy”. Before that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything wrong with it. That’s who she was and always would be. I started thinking the other day about what happens when mommies become mom, mother, and, an all time classic, parental unit.

As far as I can tell it’s part of the growing up and separating process that we all go through, a change of roles from the ever looked up to protector of everything, who can fix all of our problems without burning dinner to a relative role in life. We realize that our parents can’t fix everything, as hard as they might try and as well as they might have done in the past. A broken toy is easier to fix than a broken pet. Problems get harder and more complicated as we go through school and interact with others. We talk less about problems and start to lean on ourselves. After not too long we don’t think our parents know enough to fix anything.

Mom became a substitute for mommy. For me it was because I asked what I should use instead. Mom was an acceptable compromise probably because it kept the relationship intact and didn’t make me look like a little kid in front of my friends. I was very concerned about how my mom would take me using a different word and it took some time for me to get used to it.

Can we go back from mom to mommy? Maybe a little. Even the word invokes a sense of complete trust that, no matter what happens, everything will be just fine. Some might not think they can have that kind of relationship with their moms and they may be right but for the most part I believe moms around the world still think of themselves as mommies. Always there when they are needed and only looking out for the best for their children.

When I was very little, Mommom, my grandmother, sent my uncle to his room. He didn’t live at home any more at the time. In fact his kids were almost out of the house. He tried to protest but in the end gave up and went to a room in the back for his punishment for jumping on coal cars from a bridge over 20 years before. I’m sure it was this sense of mommy that invoked this response and reaction. He knew that although it made no sense to go to a room that wasn’t his, she had his best interest at heart.

I can remember when it happened for me but I don’t think I ever got to the point that I couldn’t turn to them when I needed to. Even if our mommies can’t fix everything it’s good to let them try every now and then. They’ve been doing it a long time and they usually surprise us.

Dinner Parties

2010-03-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

The dinner party is one of the oldest types of parties known. It started out as merely having some friends over and of course everyone has to eat at some time. So out comes the food , probably just a little something that was already being made anyway, and everyone eats a little. It didn’t start out as a lavish banquet fit for several kings, as it comes out some times these days, but more like a little quiet meal just because everyone was hungry and it was time for dinner.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the occasional dinner party and my wife and I have put several on this year for friends and have had a wonderful time. The main thing is to have people around you who you want to socialize with and not to worry too much about who likes what as long as no one is allergic to anything you are serving.
One of the dinner parties I went to recently had mushrooms in the food and I merely picked them out and set them on the side of the plate. They weren’t offended and I didn’t mind picking them out. I actually like the flavor they add to a dish. What I don’t like all that much is the texture of the little things. I would probably get used to it after a while since it’s not like they grab you and try to choke you to death but that is something that I might work on some other day.
When choosing who will be at a dinner party it is important that you don’t choose people on the basis of trying to gain favor. There is nothing more miserable than trying to make pleasant conversation with someone you don’t really like. I’ve tried it a couple of times and have since avoided the situation if at all possible. On the other hand, if you don’t know if they are the kind of person you like or not, you might invite someone you don’t know very well mixed in with people you do know and like to see how they fit in. In such a social gathering you can see not only how they talk to you but how they get along with others. Watching a conversation from the outside is often more informative than talking to a person directly since there is a detachment from it and you can be more objective.
The cost of a dinner party doesn’t have to be squarely on the host either. Our guests often ask if there is anything they can bring. If they are really insistent then you might ask them to bring a side dish you were planning or a dessert. One of our friends likes to bring wine. The food itself doesn’t have to be expensive either. Hot dogs and chips can be served as the meal for all it matters as long as there are people and food and it’s dinner time you have a dinner party.

Pens

2010-01-26T19:27:00.000-08:00

Pens are one of the most common things in life, at least here in the states. My wife often calls herself a pen thief even though she really doesn't end up with that many pens and doesn't intend on taking any that aren't hers.
The number of references to pens and the variety of them really does boggle the imagination sometimes. Starting out as quills which are hollow feathers, usually long ones, they have since been made of many things. Of course before the pen there was finger painting and everything in between. This is not to say that there was no writing before the pen. The pen itself has been made of metal, wood, ceramic, synthetics, bone, and who know what else.
Book, theater, and movie references to pens in many forms are widely known. "The pen is mightier than the sword!" is such a well known phrase that even children who don't know what a book looks like have probably heard of it, although they probably don't have a clue why it's not more like the keyboard or cellphone.
The inks used are nearly as numerous as the instruments themselves. In National Treasure it was noted that the ink used to be made of iron. The color of ink is often a source of much labor in the industry. There is an ink that my astronomy teacher in high school used to show and absorption spectrum. When a light was placed in a solution with the ink the ink absorbed the dark violet color and thus looked black. I'm still not sure how that works but that was the spectrum we saw.
I also did an ink test many years ago trying to find the perfect pen to write with on an everyday basis. I found that among several expensive and not so expensive pens that the one that didn't leave clumps and flowed well consistently was the BIC Stick. I know they're cheap but they performed well above and beyond all of the other pens, even other BIC pens. This did not take into account non-disposable pens but I really don't like refilling them so :P.
Of course another relatively recent movie, Kate and Leopold, noted the elegance associated with pens that aren't disposable. Dipping into the inkwell and writing carefully thought out words is an art lost to time and recreationists. I'm sure my mom knows a few people who like nothing better than to write a good letter or more likely and award for some deed well done.
In another field there is the not so often used anymore drafting pens whose tips are designed not for speed or frills but for exact line widths. I though it was strange to have different pen line widths but if you draft you can appreciate the need for several widths to denote importance of the line. No one wants a to be demolished house interfering with the beautiful design of what is to go there in the future. Sure it must be shown but that's just so we know to get rid of it, kudos Jerry!
On that note I will stop writing... typing.

Cockatiel

2010-01-17T19:37:00.000-08:00

I love cockatiels. Not only are they less dangerous than their larger friends like parrots and macaws but they also don't outlive you. It's not like I want my pets to die but it sure does make it easier to make sure I don't abandon any animals to strangers, at least to them, when I die or move somewhere I can't bring them.
The later is exactly how I acquired my cockatiels. Some friends of some friends moved to Mexico and didn't want to bring the birds with them just in case they couldn't stay as long as they were thinking and had to come back. It seems that bringing the birds to Mexico is an easy thing but bringing them back to the states is nearly impossible. Smuggling is not something they would attempt nor is it something anyone should do. This act not only floods the market more but introduces disease and usually kills more birds than make it alive.
Alive is the best way to have them. If you want them friendly then breeding them is a little harder but not impossible. The problem is whey they want to mate with you instead of the perfectly acceptable mate sitting in the cage with them. Given time and a little ignoring and they might mate out of spite, or so I figure.
When growing up we had some cockatiels in the house but the female didn't want anything to do with the two male birds in the cage and so there was a lot of frustration as you can imagine. She laid a lot of eggs though just none of them were fertile.
The first bird I ever got was a cockatiel. To this day I contend that my mom coerced me into naming it Jostrich. The story goes that she said I was getting an ostrich. I quite liked the idea of getting a bird I could ride but it ended up being a cockatiel. It got away one day when I was giving it some air in the back yard. I lifted the cage by the top to bring it in and the top came off. If you were a caged bird what would you have done? We saw it for several days but then it disappeared. A cat probably got it since it wasn't a very good flier.
Listening to the birds I have now you would swear that I have two males since they both whistle very well but neither talks yet. Time will tell.

Bowling

2010-01-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

Bowling has to be one of the most laughed at sports. If you go down to a bowling alley and watch people bowling it really doesn’t look like much.

A guy stands up and gets a ball. He then rolls the ball down and alley and tries to knock down some pins. It doesn’t seem to matter how hard the ball is thrown because pins usually fall down and the game goes on.

There can be several people on a single lane and thus the amount of time spent rolling or throwing the ball seems to be very small compared to the time spent drinking beer. There is no Gatorade in bowling because breaking a sweat is not a requirement. Pizza, nachos, burgers or some other calorie injecting food seems to be a major requirement.

This is not to say that all bowlers are out of shape beer drinking lazy individuals that don’t want to do any form of real exercise. On the contrary, try bowling more than two games in a row and see if you don’t feel like not moving the next day. I believe two games is my limit at a time since my entire body is sore the next day. You may not feel it that night but throwing a ball down a lane 40 times in quite a workout.

Something they try to make seem as sanitary as possible is the fact that, unless you have your own, you are wearing the same shoes that hundreds of people before you have worn. You can instead get your own bowling shoes for fifty bucks or so and within ten trips to the alley have paid for them by not having to rent any. The ball on the other hand is not really that important unless you are really competitive and bowl a lot.

As far as the food goes, I don’t recommend you eat there unless you get something as a snack. The drinks on the other hand are well worth the money. A really large soda or other beverage, not alcoholic, will probably last you throughout the two games that I recommend you play. You may run out near the end but you’re about to leave anyway and can stop by a gas station or the like if you really need that much soda.

One thing I liked as a kid when my mom was in a league is that there are more things to do than bowl. Pool is a major part of the bowling alley as is the video game area. The latter has greatly expanded since I was all when the choices were Galaga and Pacman. I’m not knocking these either. I still play Galaga when I come across it in an old gas station or convenience store. The point here is that even if your kids don’t like bowling there’s still a lot they can do. Although if you’re a kid I really would try bowling. Chances are that you’ll be really good and be able to beat your parents in yet another game.

Groundcover

2009-11-09T13:10:00.001-08:00

Groundcover comes in many varieties. The most common being grass but there are many other plants that can be used depending on many factors.
For starters, do you want the area to look like the rest of the area? If it’s in the front yard you might take into consideration your neighbors. If they have grass you might want to stick to a type of grass although you might get a different kind. If they have accents of jasmine around trees or other landscaped areas you might consider jasmine or other low-lying cover.
If on the other hand if you don’t live very near anyone else you probably have a large area to cover. Native grasses can form a pasture area where you might have some livestock grazing or you may prefer a large lawn with garden areas in the middle of it.
This gets into another area to consider, how much maintenance you want to do? A pasture takes less maintenance than a lawn. The more complicated the area the more needs to be done to keep it looking good.
Shade comes into play since plants need different amounts of light. Large trees might dictate that some groundcovers won’t work since they would kill some grasses and other plants. If the area is heavily wooded you might consider various vines that can grow up the trees while at the same time covering the ground between them.
The amount of water the area gets without your help might also be considered. If you live in an arid climate you would choose a much different plant than if you had a more humid climate. The same would go for temperatures.
If you want to amend the soil or water it then your options increase greatly but with the larger areas it might not be a practical idea.
Whatever you choose to use be sure you want to keep it for a while. It might not be very expensive but the work behind putting it in and removing it if you change your mind later can take a long time especially if you don’t have a lot of help or power tools to do the work.

Puzzles

2009-10-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

The first time I was introduced to a puzzle box it took only a few minutes to figure it out. I was nine years old at the time.
It was apparently impressive to those around me and so to get me out of their hair I was given the egg puzzle. It's a clear puzzle with flatish pieces that interlock to make an egg with a key pin to hold it all together. They figured it would take me several hours to complete and as stubborn as I still am I would have sat there that long if that's what it would take. It didn't. It took all of just under an hour. This too impressed them since it took quite a bit longer for an adult to do the same puzzle the first time he had tried it. Of course it gets easier if you do it more and remember what shape comes next but that led to even more puzzles. One of the harder ones was a set of puzzles that you had to put together to form cubes. Each cube was a different color and was made to fit with its own pieces. They got harder as they went down the row. The last one I wasn't able to figure out and decided that it would be easier to wait until someone else figured it out for me and work backwards. Everyone said it was cheating and I asked to see the rule book. There wasn't one and so I had no problem with it.
The first puzzle I ever had that wasn't a jigsaw puzzle was a very old ball puzzle made of only five pieces. My grandmother gave it to me and said that she had gotten it out of a cracker jacks box when she was little. I don't know where it went and to this day can't seem to find another one. It's not on any cracker jack prize list I can find and no search results come up with anything remotely close. One day I hope to find another one tucked away somewhere and if I do then I'll make several copies out of wood or whatever I can find. It was a brilliant idea. The last piece slid through the middle of the rest of the pieces, a key, and had a loop on the front end to hang it from. Gravity kept it together.
Since then I have played with many other puzzles, jigsaws being one of my favorite still. I don't think I would make a very good puzzle maker though. In general it seems that puzzles are merely copies of past puzzles with a little twist somewhere to be a little different. Some of them aren't even puzzles but are good enough. They still challenge the mind and make you think. Among these are the sliding banks and sculptures that are more decorative and interesting to look at since they often have moving pieces.
Similar to puzzles are mazes which I don't have the room to even start to dream about. I only know of a few types of in person mazes, shrub maze, labyrinth, hay bale maze and maze of mirrors. I don't have room for any of them. I have drawn mazes just to see how complex they can get. I think they have been lost to the past but I once drew a pixel by pixel maze 600x800. It took me a couple minutes to draw the solution and would take months if not years to get through it in person if you didn't know the way.
Riddles are a written or verbal puzzle. Some of them have to be written to really make sense and challenge the person trying to come up with the solution.
This brings me to ask, although I could probably google it, why are old familiar things called chestnuts?

Cats

2009-10-16T22:00:00.001-07:00

I have two of them and yes that is in the right order. I can't help it if some people spoil their cats to the point that they become slaves. People do the same thing with their children and yet no one seems to understand that, just like children, cat's want discipline. They don't want to admit it and for that matter they don't want to admit anything. If a cat falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, did it really happen? The cat would deny even being in the woods when this supposed falling occurred.
There have been many times when one of my cats fell from some perch of theirs and fell flat on their side and denied ever having been in the room much less on the perch. They do this by quickly leaving the room and minutes later sauntering in like they had been taking a long nap. They even stretch real long the moment the come into sight so you understand that the nap really went well.
That brings me to another of the many misconceptions of cats. They don't always land on thier feet. This can be due to many reasons. The most common reason being they were asleep and didn't realize they were falling in the first place. This is followed closely by the, I didn't realize I hadn't jumped high enough or possibly in the right direction, reason. While hunting a cat doesn't always know exactly where they are in relation to anything else and the edge of a bed can shift on them and wham they hit the floor instead.
One positive thing can be said for most cats, they bounce well. Unless your cat is suffering from old age or bone loss, your cat can bounce back from a great many things. Cars is not one of them which is why it is often a good idea to keep cats inside, well that and a host of other things like dogs, other cats, diseases, and possibly other predatory animals that might think your cat is a tasty meal.
A cat usually lives to be around 15 years old if kept in good health. This goes down to about 12 years in my experience with outside cats. One friend of ours had a cat live to be over 20 years old. She got it when she was born and it died a few years after she got married. It was active until the end so they don't think it was suffering, it was just old.
Really cats are wonderful pets as long as you take care that it stay the pet and not the owner.

Favorites

2009-10-15T19:38:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a favorite. You might not have a favorite everything but I think that’s going a little overboard anyway.
You can blame my wife for this post since she is the one who inadvertently mentioned it. She merely stated that everyone’s favorite mug should have a tea stain in it. Hers definitely does and it will probably only get darker as the days trudge on.
It all begins when we’re little. A favorite color or toy quickly gets replaced with a new favorite and the cycle only seems to slow down as we get older. There may be a favorite ball player until he starts to loose, commit crimes, or end up in rehab. A favorite movie can last a long time but usually gets replaces several times throughout life. Tastes change and the great movie that you loved in the eighties is now a so-so movie in 2009 since the special effects are not all that good anymore and the plot doesn’t make as much sense as when you were eight.
Favorite friends change much more quickly. As we pass through different phases of life, childhood, school, working, marriage, moving away, these all change the favorite things by giving us a different perspective to look at them and it’s really hard to keep the friends with you if you move a long distance. We’re so busy in life that things that aren’t readily there can be forgotten.
This is exactly why the tea stain is important. It is proof that it is actually a favorite since it is used so much that the stain won’t go away. I can vouch for it’s permanence since I have personally tried washing it umpteen times to no avail.
None of us want to be considered wishy washy though. You might be thinking, “I would never forget my best friend!” and you might not. Can you remember who your best friend was in elementary school or your lab partner who you may have hung out with constantly for a semester in college? Maybe, but most of us go on with life and new people flow in and out all the time.
Sometimes it’s not a case of forgetting or moving on but our own bodies might just make the decision for us. For example a food allergy might make one of your favorite foods not so favorite as it starts to close up your windpipe making it a little difficult to breathe. Our taste buds change every so often and you might think that liverwurst and onion sandwich is to die for. I haven’t had any thing that drastic happen but it could. Your body also gets used to things or in some cases no longer is able to stand some of the things you once enjoyed. Tabasco might not be in your fridge for a reason.
Even the blogs you follow change from time to time depending on what’s happening in your life. Just because it’s a favorite now doesn’t mean you have to follow it until the writer dies.

Deeds

2009-10-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

A deed is a piece of paper which describes a piece of property and who owns it. The entire country is divided this way and the records are kept locally at the courthouse in your area. This might lead a person to conclude that everything is accounted for but there are constantly problems with what the records say and what you might find when you get to wherever you are going. Some places still have squatters rights, which simply means if you settle in a place for long enough and no one tells you that you can’t then you have the legal right to go down to the courthouse and claim the property as yours. Now if you happen to be the person who owned it previously and weren’t aware that someone was squatting there then you might be a little surprised and upset to find out that you don’t own it anymore even if you’ve been paying taxes on the land.
There are also fence rights. Simply put, if you have fenced in an area and have maintained it as yours for some length of time and no dispute has come up there is a good chance that you may legally own it even if it originally belonged to your neighbor. Of course a lot depends on your lawyer and the particulars of where you live and who’s fighting against you. If it’s a mega corporation then you might as well give up.
There are still cases of property that no one seems to have claimed yet or that has slipped through the cracks. I’ve seen some pieces of land two feet wide and several hundred feet long go unnoticed for decades until someone decided to develop an area and realizes that there is a strip of land they can’t seem to find an owner for to get their permission to cross over.
There are also public right of ways all over the place that just run through properties unnoticed by the general public since there is no pavement or obvious access to it. There was an abandoned road that ran for over a mile back behind some houses that the city didn’t even remember. When they were asked about it they were surprised to see it there since it was thought to have been released a long time ago. The pavement was almost entirely crumbled back to little rocks when it was finally released.
In Louisiana I know that it can be hard to get land in some places since one piece of land can be owned by several people to various degrees and to purchase it outright you need to contact each person and get each one to agree to the sale. Much of the mass ownership comes from inheritance issues. At least in the past, I’m not sure if it still works this way, when someone died without a will the land was jointly owned by all of the heirs. They would then have to decide what to do and often did nothing more than jointly use it.

Tea

2009-10-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

Tea is one of the oldest and most common drinks on the planet. There are even entire businesses dedicated to the stuff. What would an antique shop be without the tea room on the side to attract the lunch crowd? Tea is also one of the most commonly misunderstood drinks on the planet.
What exactly is tea? Well in a nut shell it is what you get when you steep a specific leaf in very hot water. The exact temperature of the water depends on the person’s taste in tea but it’s usually hot. The thing that people call herbal tea is not a tea but merely an infusion or decoction of whatever plant is being used.
There are different kinds of tea depending on how the leaves were prepared and what part of the leaf is used. White tea is made from only the tips of the leaves, usually the first sprouts of the season. The degree to which some teas have been prepared can range from green tea to black tea. Additives to the tea leaves result in various types of teas like earl gray and irish breakfast tea. Breakfast teas are so named because of the amount of caffeine in them which is to wake you up.
Many claims have been made about the health benefits of tea from curing cancer to helping digestion to getting rid of the little puffy bags under the eyes. One thing that most people seem to agree on is that it tastes good and there are of course some who will even disagree to that.
Tea is grown in a wide range of places from the orient, where it is believed that it originated, to people’s back yards. It’s such a large industry that there are still more companies trying to find more places to grow the stuff to either keep up with the demand or get a slice of the pie. I’ve even toyed with planting a tea plant myself.
The tea plant is not where tea tree oil comes from however. The tea tree is another of the many non tea plants that you can use to make an infusion out of and still is used in Australia where it grows.
Of all of the teas that I know people around here drink the two favorites are earl gray and green tea. I blame Star Trek on the popularity of earl gray since there are a lot of Star Trek fans in the area, although that might just be the people I know. Of the non-tea teas the favorites seem to be chamomile, red rooibos and mint.
If you don’t know what kind of tea you like then there are many companies that you can look up to get sample packs or tea rooms that will give you a taste of some of the teas they have for sale. You might even want to throw a tea party and have each guest bring a different kind of tea. When I say tea here I mean all of the infusible mixtures available in bag and loose forms.

Sweaters

2009-10-11T20:32:00.001-07:00

In the cold months ahead many people will don the often-used sweater. It’s interesting to see the vast variety of sweaters out there from the plain sweater just made to keep you warm to the very revealing sweaters some youths wear that I don’t think will keep anyone warm since it really doesn’t cover much past the arms. I have owned many sweaters and during my youth did not like wearing them. As I’ve gotten older I find there is a good reason I didn’t like them. It wasn’t the look since they really don’t look any different from most of the clothing out there aside from some of the patters they can come in. Well if you go that route there are some very definite reasons not to wear some sweaters, they’re extremely ugly. But past that the look isn’t bad. Even after buying more sweaters and not wearing them from some terrible childhood memory it never clicked what the actual problem was. They just felt bad. Itchy, scratchy, burlapian, whatever you want to call it, I like to call it torture, they were just not what you should put against your skin. It took a while for this to come up into my mind but it was the material that made sweaters unbearable to me.
Recently I took up crocheting again and have made a blanket out of some cheap yarn and yes cheap is the word. It didn’t cost much for good reason but it is warm. It took 4 skeins of yarn to complete it. It isn’t fancy, a simple single stitch throughout and all the same purple color. It’s utilitarian at best. My wife then took me along and we were looking at wool yarn. We bought 3 skeins of it and took them home. Honestly it’s more comforting to hold one of those skeins than to use the blanket made of the cheap yarn. While holding one of these skeins one evening my wife asked me why I hadn’t worn the sweaters I had bought. It came to my mind that they must have been made of cheap yarn. The truth is that I probably never even looked twice at them remembering the sweaters of years past and cringing. She brought me out one of the sweaters and handed it to me. It was not like I had remembered it at all. Then I looked at the tag and found that this sweater was made of 100% wool. There was the key to a wonderful sweater. I had been used to only being able to afford cheap sweaters and here was a soft warm and very comfortable sweater which I am currently wearing as I write this. Next time you want to buy your children something warm for the winter please don’t buy them a torturous garment made with cheap yarn that will scar their memories for years to come. Not only will they not want to wear a sweater, if it gets wet they won’t stay warm anyhow.

Open Mic Night

2009-10-10T21:30:00.000-07:00

Well I now believe I can truly say 500 words about almost any subject. They might not be the best words or even coherent words but that doesn’t seem to make much difference in this world. This became apparent to me tonight as I went to an open mic night.
Yes it was the magical world where anyone with the gumption can get up and do or recite anything that comes into their head without so much as a worry whether or not is makes any sense or it truly talent. Granted, most of the performances tonight were truly a show of some talent, not superstar but at least better than you would expect from your usual person.
At first the performances were preplanned and well thought out giving us some good entertainment as we munched on the usual party snacks. Among the snacks were sandwiches, fruit, cookies, chips, and the like. What made this a little different was the coffee side of things. Instead of a typical open mic night this was billed as a coffee house style open mic night. There was a full coffee bar as well as tea, hot chocolate, and water. No sodas were served since this is not typically a coffee house style beverage. This coffee house atmosphere also affected the outcome of the crowds reactions. Snapping was the favored approval of the performances whether they were great or just entertaining. There was a good bit of ribbing from the MC of the evening especially toward his relatives and friends thereof. The overall feel of the evening was one of lighthearted amusement and relaxation.
The crowd that showed up was not the crowd that said they would show up. Instead it was about fifty fifty. The timing of the event was likewise not quite as expected. People showed up anywhere from twenty minutes early to an hour late and the actual performances didn’t start until well after it was time. No one really seemed to notice that nothing was going quite according to plan an so it really didn’t affect anyone’s enjoyment of the event.
It’s curious why people go to these events in the first place. There are the obvious performers but aside from these there are a few groups that like to go. Among these are the performers who don’t want to admit they like going up there in the spotlight but after they do keep going up. Also there are the friends of the performers who just want to watch and be entertained. Somewhere in the mix there are those who want to perform but just can’t seem to drag themselves up to do anything but occasionally get dragged in by someone else who knows it. In the background there must always be a planner or two. They may or may not perform but they love the thought of people being able to get together for a good time and love to be the ones who can make that happen.
Wherever you fit into this group everyone seems to have a good time.

Blogs

2009-10-09T21:05:00.000-07:00

Writing a blog is a matter of taking your thoughts and making them legible to others. There are so many blogs about every topic imaginable that I thought I would take the time to make a blog about every topic imaginable in roughly 500 word segments. The length of the blogs comes from the fictional and once very interesting character, James Qwillerin, from the Cat Who series. I already have a gardening blog where I blog about the going on’s of my garden and gardening attempts. I also have a blog, though not very often updated, about solar projects and advice. Another of my blogs, also not very often updated, is graphics I have worked on, mostly program renderings and ideas. It started out with me wanting to blog about rubber balls.
The thing I find most humorous about blogs is that they tend to end up being about the reader more than the information itself. For a blog to be popular it has to grab the reader’s attention and hold on for dear life lest it loose readership and fall into disrepair (not being updated at all). On average the gardening blogs I have seen are updated every four to five days depending on the blogger. The actual updating of a specific blog can be as often or spaced out as the blogger likes or in most cases has the time for. I have seen blogs updated as often as four times a day and as infrequently as once a month. When I first started blogging it was once every six months, almost to the day. Pitiful and alone it sat for quite a while. It still doesn’t have any readership to mention. I think it possibly has one person a week if that check it out.
The solution some have come up with is to have multiple writers. This is one of the reasons that so many blogs are only about one very specific topic. This keeps the writers from taking liberties and promoting themselves over the blog. Self promotion is one of the main reasons people blog in the first place. Other reasons are to take a position on a topic, to promote a product or service, to keep friends in the loop with what’s happening, or some are merely doing it to make a few extra bucks with the ads (see ads on the right and bottom). This blog is a little bit of A, a little bit of C, a little bit of N. There really isn’t one thing that I’m trying to accomplish but I wouldn’t be writing anything if I didn’t want you to read it.
As far as frequency goes, I will be trying to write one blog of about 500 words each day until either I die or get tired of it. If I die you won’t see a post about it. If I get tired of it well, ditto. So is the way of the blog.