How I Discovered Blogging

I had heard of blogging but I hadn’t really paid any attention to the phenomenon and I really didn’t get what it was all about, and I didn’t really care. It didn’t seem like at all like something I would ever end up doing. But one day last year I was trying to find a dermatologist to go to and I was googling all of the various names that I’d come across. This was one of those nights when one google led to another and suddenly I was in a googling frenzy.

Since I was googling doctors, I googled my roommate from college who is a doctor in Ohio and whom I haven’t seen in a few years. Then I googled another doctor who plays in an orchestra with me, and I came across a blog that was written by a friend of hers. I thought “this is incredibly nosy and absolutely none of my business and I must stop reading this immediately!” because it contained a bunch of rather personal stuff. But since I had already started with the googling, it was kind of too late to be un-nosy. My bass player colleague who is a doctor was mentioned by her full name in just one of her friend’s entries that I know of, and it showed up on Google. So just for the hell of it, I read a few more entries and then I thought I was done.

But the next day I went back and read some more. It was pretty interesting to read, and then suddenly I became completely hooked and spent a few days reading HER ENTIRE BLOG. It became like a book that I could not put down. The main things in my life at the time were ashes, sawdust, sweat, and additional tedious accounting work for the fire inventory, so reading this woman’s blog was the best escape ever! And it turns out that we both even had our thyroids taken out by the exact same surgeon. Weird and amazing.

After I finished reading the past two years of her life story, I started in on some of her friends. Then I started noticing that there is an actual blogging “scene” out there where the bloggers get together and meet each other. It seemed to me like this was some strange new alien culture that I’d stumbled upon and it was really quite fascinating. They are all so into writing, and it is interesting to see how different the writing styles are and the various ways these people choose to describe their lives. It is amazing and pretty cool.

I decided that it was time for me to make my own blog about the progress (or lack of progress) of my house. Then I wouldn’t have to talk about it as much. It is hard to know how much detail people actually want when they ask about the progress of the house. Now that some progress is actually taking place, it is much more fun to talk about, but it definitely wasn’t an enjoyable topic of conversation at the beginning.

I don’t know why this is, but apparently the cause of the fire is the single most interesting thing to a lot of people, even now, and they don’t really seem to want to know much about how it has affected your life in other ways. So if they want to know, it’s now here on this separate blog for them to read. And they can find out how psycho I really am. I'm not putting this stuff on the house blog because that is just about the house.

So the dates of the earlier entries are not the actual blog-posting dates. I decided to alter them to either the dates when they were actually written or dates that are closer to the events described. From here on out they will be posted as I write them.

So far I have only been a lurker on the blogs I read. Maybe now that I am an actual blogger I will get up the nerve to write some comments. Apparently bloggers love it when you comment. I have been too shy to write any comments so far, but I guess I had better start because some of these bloggers have stats and they know when you’ve been reading a lot but not commenting. They might think I’m a stalker or something.

I just realized a really excellent thing about having a blog. If my house ever burns down again, I won’t lose all of my photos because some of them will still be here on the internet!