Brown-Eyed Girls

Actually, this post should be tittled - musings about blogging.. but hey, this one should get more hits. These aren't the ones I planted last year, these are new ones procured on sale from Canadian tire - mine are nearly open, but still not much to photograph, although I did take a picture anyways.

Back to musing about blogging. I started blogging because two of my brothers were blogging and I guess I wanted to join the club. When I started, I had these aspirations about creating these wonderful mini essays on important issues - but the kind of time commitment that entails would have limited my posting to oh say - once every 5 years if I remembered how to post after that length of time. In fact, its the ease of posting from Picassa coupled with my purchase of a digital camera that has allowed me to keep blogging for just over 3 years. Someone might notice that the archieves here only go back to November 2005, but in actual fact my first blog entery is dated June 10th, 2005 - and is located on my MSN space blog that I have finally given up writing in - because for the last 2 years I've mostly written - please go read my real blog. For the most part, I blog for my own benefit. Occassionally, I blog to share pictures with folk I know - but all along - I write whatever is in my head and not likely to come back and haunt me - save for the occasional proof that I really do better when I have access to a spell checker (but using it through Picassa has tended to crash my attempts at blogging and while they likely fixed that bug years ago - after losing a few too many posts - I just am out of the habit of checking.) [So... I don't fel the least bit guilty if I'm currently boring your to tears, since mostly I expect that folk look at the pictures and ignore my writing] In fact, blogging has accomplished something that all my grade school teachers failed to do.... get me to willingly keep a journal of sorts. Wouldn't my grade 8's have a laugh to know that I secretly had sympathy for their journal loathing, but it was one of the best tools I had for getting writing out of them and as I continued in school - I actually came to appreciate journal writing. At least in Gr. 12, Mr. Ellis had us do really cool things with journal writing. The one that stands out in my mind is the day that he played the song Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers and then told us to write about whatever thoughts the song had inspired in our pretty little heads. I have no idea where my grade 12 journal is - I most certainly haven't thrown it out - but as to which box it is carelessly filed, I have no idea. Little did he know, I would spend my final year of highschool playing that song on my guitar and singing it over and over while dreaming of moving to Thunder Bay. My heart still soars when I hear that song - and here I am headed ever closer to the NW passage myself. Maybe I should give just a little bit of credit to Mr. Ellis - easily the coolest English teacher I ever had - for pointing my footsteps in this direction at some point in my journey or at least for exposing me to Stan Rogers.

I'm well aware that I account for a stunning porportion of the hits on my blog - partly because I use it as a bookmarks folder and flip to it when I want to visit various places - particularly other blogs - but also because I often find myself flipping through my archieves - sometimes just for fun and sometimes when I want to find a particular picture that I've moved to storage and sometimes just for the trip down memory lane. Its good to remind myself about those rare times I've escaped the vicinity of my computer to places where there is wind and trees and stuff. I also like to read the statistics on my blog - particularly the keywords that have led people here - lately mostly flowers and provincial parks - but occasionally stranger things. There are a few pictures that get a lot of hits too. One of the more disturbing is a picture from a childhood sleepover - I don't know what keywords got folk their as it comes through google images usually - but the picture itself is more interesting for the 80's paraphenelia than it is for the sake of a bunch of kids in their pj's. There are constructs, jelly bracelets, bracelets made of plastic lacing, an alvin and the chipmunks sleeping bag, a national geographic picture book, some fisher price toy and a 110mm camera.... and 5 kids making stupid faces at the camera, which is amusing enough.

Okay.. enough musing for one day... it all sounded better in my head when I was musing about it in the first place while walking the dog... now it just sounds goofy.