Mementos of Blog Entries Past

Last month Greg helped me find a reasonable site to compile my early blog entries into a book (we ended up just going with the site affiliated with Blogger itself) and I ordered a compendium of my first year of blogging, using the calendar date as my cut-off.  This nicely coincided with our move from Mobile, Alabama, to Clearwater, Kansas.

When the book arrived, I was tickled.  I've been wanting to save my blog entries for some time now - if nothing else, just as a hands on keepsake of earlier times in my life.  I'd tried printing them off at home, but the results just lacked finesse.  The book is far from perfect, but it gives me a fairly nicely finished product that should last for most of the rest of my lifetime, at least!

Since the first year's efforts came out so nicely, yesterday I sat down and ordered the second year's compendium.  In doing so, I reread all of my blog entries for that year - our first year here - and I was struck by how much more philosophical I was in my blog at that time.  There were many fewer photos (which wasn't necessarily a good thing), but much more mental interaction with books, current events, cultural trends, and ideas.

And, having looked back, I rather miss that focus on this blog.  So I'm going to try to recapture some of those concepts in the next couple months.  We'll see how it goes.  My life is busier these days, as I've come to know more people in the area, assumed a few community obligations, and developed larger, more extensive gardens. I've become more aware of how important photos are to many readers.  (For me, photos often lead to discussions of the subject of the photo, rather than to miscellaneous musings.)  In those earlier entries, I often didn't really know what I was wanting to say until I'd actually written it - a fun exercise in self awareness, but rather time consuming too!

Lastly, I can get rather political, which is not the focus of this blog, but is a big part of who I am.  If you, as a reader, don't agree with my politics, please use this as a forum to (civilly) discuss the areas we don't agree with, rather than as a reason to get mad and quit reading.  So many important cultural trends seems to be falling under the "political" umbrella these days.  I'd love to hear your side and have a chance to talk back and forth.   Maybe we can all learn a bit from each other!  That's always my hope.

I'm looking forward to stretching myself again.  And I look forward to being stretched by my readers as well!  Thanks, in advance, for working with me on this one!