I have been roaming the shadows of GRIT blogs for a year. My first entry was on February 1, 2009, over on the GRIT Community Forum. Once I got my toe in the water, so to speak, the commenting expanded throughout the GRIT blogs. Some have wondered why I never explored the possibility of a blog here at GRIT. I never thought myself to be all that great at writing, but somehow it just happened along life’s journey. I believe it is a talent inherited from my Mama who from age 16 communicated regularly to pen pals all over the world. By the time she died, she wrote to more than 100 people, all with hand-written letters of several pages each.
I dabbled in writing during my High School years only because English class forced me into it. I always liked the logic of it with diagraming, but never really did well at the actual writing, so I built an avoidance to anything pertaining to English. Life bloomed into marriage, kids, dogs, cat, gerbils, fish, guinea pigs, rabbits, and work. Writing was far far away from any thoughts that crossed my mind. Somewhere in midlife, about 1995, the decision was made to improve my education by becoming a computer genius. That quest never came to completion, but it forced me to take a couple creative writing classes. Teacher Bob brought the dormant skills to life through his artful encouragement and creative teaching skills. Soon after my midlife college days e-mail was invented. I began writing about my real life stories, and, much to my amazement, folks seem to like them. It totally shocked me. I found that I liked writing about the things of life and continued until blogs became the popular thing. Naturally, I expanded into blogging with a couple blogs but still nothing spectacular.
One day while sitting in my favorite book store sipping a cup of brew reading magazines that I was too cheap to buy, a magazine called GRIT jumped out before my wandering eyes. After consuming the contents, I wrote down the website and scurried home find out what this website was all about. I soon discovered that my heart was in union with those that blogged on the site and continued to read the blogs for some months. As time passed I decided to venture forth and post an entry on the GRIT Community Forum about removing wallpaper. And along came Cindy. The same one we all know and love. She and I struck up comments and actually started an entry called Extreme Farm Sports that still resides there today. After that, I started commenting on Cindy’s blog, which expanded into commenting on almost every blog entry.
So, here I stand at the threshold of a new exciting adventure in the life of Old Nebraska Dave. I’m still trying to figure out how this published blogging stuff works. It’s just a little more complicated than replying with a comment. I’ll dust off my Kodak Easyshare camera and give this new challenge a run. I can’t guarantee the grammar will be correct or the sentence structure will be good, but if I have made you smile or even laugh out loud at the antics of a wana be homesteader, then I will have accomplished what I set out to do.
So if you’ve a mind to, y’all come back now, and we’ll do this again.
