Three Years of Blogging

(image from the web)

In a few days, October 27th to be exact, this blog will celebrate its third birthday.  On that date in 2013 I began a blog to keep friends and family informed on an upcoming trip to Mexico.  Many trips and 757 posts later, the blog is still going.  For its anniversary, here are some random thoughts about my blogging experience.

If you look in the right hand margin, you will see the blog list of blogs that I read.  It has been months since some of the authors have posted anything .  Writing regularly on a blog is definitely a time consuming hobby, and, for people who have a busy schedule, it is easy to let a blog fall into neglect.  I guess that is why retired folks such as I make up a fair share of the people who write blogs.

When I travel, I diligently try to write a post on a daily basis.  There have been times after a busy day of sightseeing when I just wanted to to go to bed, but I have often forced myself to stay up and write a review of the day's activities. 

In between travels, my life is fairly mundane, and it is not always easy to come up with topics for blog posts.  Sometimes I will dig out old slides or photos and write about trips from the past, but sorting out those slides and scanning them to the computer is an even more time consuming task.  Frequently I resort to writing about my flower garden to the point where I feel as if I am authoring a gardening blog.

Perhaps part of my interest in blogging stems from my old fantasy to be a published author.  Back when I was a teenager and a young adult I attempted several times to write a novel.    One attempt, during my early years of teaching, actually reached a length of several dozen chapters.  It was set in "Riolindo", a fictitious Central American country on the brink of Revolution.  The main character was a naïve American who was studying at the university there.  Of course, she becomes entangled in the nation's tumultuous events.  In retrospect, I think the quality of the writing was more akin to a turgid "telenovela" than to anything of literary merit.  Nevertheless, I would take my manuscript, handwritten on a legal pad, to school, and there were a couple colleagues who eagerly awaited the next chapter of my soap opera.  I eventually became frustrated with the project.  I did not know where to take the plot, and the legal pads ended up in the trash.  I digress, but I think blogging offers the would-be writer the opportunity to publish and be read by an audience without the fear of a rejection slip from a publishing company.

There are plenty of political blogs out there, and it was my intention for my blog to be apolitical.  However in the last few months, the bizarre Presidential campaign has tempted me to veer the blog off that course a number of times.  I hope that you, my readers, have not been put off by that... either because you are on the opposite side of the political fence or because you are simply sick and tired of reading about politics.  The good news is that the campaign is nearly over, and tomorrow I depart for Mexico.  Although I won't rule out a post about the election results on November 9th, the blog will be back on course, dealing with the travels of this retired teacher.