Intermezzo

It's pretty obvious to the readers of this blog that gardening is my thing. But it's not my only thing. We have eight cats that we share our lives with and there is also considerable space taken up in our house by volumes of books because I love to read. When we have a nice day and we're caught up in the garden, we'll take off with the GPS and do some geocaching. And while it's not very time-consuming, I work as a dental hygienist one afternoon a week.

Oh ... and I blog.

I've been asked many times why I do that. One said to me, "If you're going to go to all the bother of writing a blog, why don't you write a book?" Yeah, why don't I? Well, first of all, I'm not good for a plot. I know not all books have plots, but those that do stand a better chance of selling. I write essays. (Isn't that what I write?) I write essays interspersed with journal entries that are among the drivel that means nothing to much of anyone except my family.

I have always said that I hate writing. Editing is what I love to do. You write it, I'll fix it up. But then I wrote a few things* because I was asked to, and several people said to me, "You should be a writer." I think they meant that I should write and get paid for it. Wouldn't that be nice!

Then my daughter e-mailed me one day late in December and said, "How about a blog?" Hmmmmmm...

When I first heard the term blog several years ago, I thought to myself, what a silly-sounding word. I learned that it was a contraction or abbreviation of web log. Move the 'b' and toss the 'we'. I looked at a few of them and wasn't particularly impressed or motivated to have one of my own. Most of the blogs I read back then were there simply because someone gave away web space and others felt like they had to fill it up. I filed the word in the back of my mind, so that I would know what people were talking about when they mentioned them.

Fast forward to January of this year and the e-mail from Kara.

I originally started writing this to keep a record of what was going on in my garden throughout the year and as a way of keeping our girls informed of what happens around here on a daily basis, now that neither of them lives at home. Since I don't work that much anymore, nor am I taking care of the two of them, I want them to know that I still have a life, and that I'm not sitting around in my bathrobe watching soap operas and eating bonbons.

But anyway, once I got started writing and posting to this thing, it was like a new addiction. I couldn't stop. I always have had a lot to say and nothing much stops me from saying it. I generally think out loud, unlike my husband, who is a man of few words and who thinks about every single one of them before he speaks.

While I have since discovered many, many excellent blog authors out there that I enjoy reading, I still don't aspire to be a great blog writer myself. I too am filling up web space simply because I can, and it fulfills something within me that I can't entirely explain.

So this is my version of a blog, for my girls and whomever else deems it worthy of taking a few minutes to read what a middle-aged gardener, kitty-lover, reader, geocacher, dental hygienist, and most importantly, wife and mother, has to say about stuff.









*Today's Cacher : January 2005, "Divine Appointments" ; March 2005, "The Best Cache I Didn't Find" ; May 2005, "A Spooky Little Bug" ; June 2005, "Fancy Meeting You Here" .