About blogging

I’ve blogged since 2011. I stumbled across blogs a year before, and thought “I’d like to do this.” I worked out Blogger and began, July, 2011, with a tiny kitten I’d scooped up in a parking lot in Pittsburg, visiting artist friends at the Three River Art Fest. My exhibiting days were retired; I was eight years the fiscal officer of my township.

The first year I spent recording family history, and doing a little more genealogical research. I was in awe of my father, abandoned by parents and relatives and by age eight essentially holding together his little family of five siblings. I learned his history from my mother; my father never spoke of his childhood. I thought my children would be interested, but they weren’t.

I loved my mother, and her mother twice as much. That grandmother was the only grandparent I had, and her history, back at the turn of the previous century, was as difficult as my dad’s. They could have exchanged stories, were they friends. They weren’t.

A few people followed the blog, and the stories of my forbearers. Then in the summer of 2012 my sister and I took on the care of three of my youngest daughter’s four children. The adventures of two teenagers and a ten year old took on a life of its own. Folk came over to see what was happening and many stayed.

I do like to write, and even taught freshman English at the local community college, until I was divorced. Having two children to support, and a house and car to pay for, I opened the Help Wanted section of the paper and saw accountants and engineers seemed well paid.

I applied for both sorts of positions and for a BS at a local college. I held my own well enough to be hired as the controller of a local electronics company, finished an accounting degree a year later. It was Moxie 101; I don’t know if it would work in the new world. I held the job almost fifteen years. The company was sold twice over, the economy was tumbling, my sister and I were fooling around with weaving; it was time to move on.

Jan and I were weavers for twenty years, until she quit to be a quilter and me to get a new hip, and work part time for my township.

Now I have 1,142 posts on my blog, and a hundred or two I’ve deleted. My writing improved over this time. I’ve learned to keep posts to five hundred words, or so. Say it and exit stage left works best for me. If rambles don’t advance the narrative, delete them.

I follow one statistic; view count to comments. I’ve settled on comments of ten percent or more of views as a decent blog, with something of interest. (That’s the statistic on the post page; it’s the one I’ve made sense of. A bit lazy, too.)

My other rule—let every comment stand. I do not delete comments because I may not agree, or moderate and not publish a comment at all. That’s censorship. I like the exchanges that go on, some as long as a string on Facebook. But if it’s spam, no quarter. Report and delete. Take that, blackguard.