Blogs and Bloggers, Part 2

I ended my last entry with a question. I only got two answers (thank you Maggie May and Z.) And although I wrote about the how part in my post, I never answered the why.

I saw myself as the Samuel Johnson of the family. I had written regularly to my children when they were away at college or living abroad, I had friends and family in various parts of the country and in Europe who received regular letters from me. As technology reared it’s ugly head, I substituted e-mail for some of the letters, but whatever medium I used, there was a lot of repetition involved. I was typing the same news over and over again. That was when it struck me that a blog was the ideal method for communicating with everyone in one fell swoop.

There were two byproducts to this decision. Firstly, sheer annoyance. I had notified friends and family (with the exception of two elderly in-laws who, it seemed, would never use the internet, although my brother-in-law eventually became a wiz at e-mail.) I gave out my URL and slept soundly knowing that friends and family would be following us via my blog. Wrong. I would write a post about our re-modeled basement and there would be a dozen people who asked if we had ever recovered from the water damage, if I wrote about a visit from the family out east, someone (many people) would be sure to wonder when we last saw Al’s family. So, yes, I was annoyed, but I could not go back to my old ways. In fact I eventually started two more blogs, one to assimilate all the news I gathered from my classics classmates at Bedford and a little gimmick I picked up which showed a daily photograph of my everyday life and which somehow got stuck at a photo of fried potatoes.

The second byproduct was a yearning to find some English blogs. Somehow or other I had found two, both by elderly English gentlemen, well, one is four months younger than me, one several years older. I e-mailed them both, asking for some recommendations. I e-mailed them a second time. They never replied. I’m not sure how I came across the results of a competition for the best world blogs, including the category of English blogs, which was won that year by Little Red Boat. Hurrah, I had my foot in the door and I went from there. You know how easy it is to jump from link to link.

Just a little more to say about blogs, but you will have to wait. Bate your breath.