kellogg bloggin' Hits 2500

I began keeping this blog in October, 2006 and here it is, December 9, 2013 and I'm still at it.

This blog actually began on my refrigerator.   I had read about web logs (blogs) in the NYTimes.  At that time, we didn't have access to the World Wide Web in our home, so on August 24, 2004, I started writing "logs" and printing them out and posting them on our refrigerator.  I called them fridge logs.  I posted my last log on the fridge on January 2, 2005.

My guess is that I quit posting fridge logs in 2005 because I entered into a difficult time with my health.  I had just found out I had chronic kidney disease and some time around February I lost all my energy and fell into a deep depression for a few days and confined myself to my study and watched movie after movie after movie.  I was spent.   I'd been pushing myself too hard, even though I had decided to drop the Copia Lecture series and had tried to ease up in other areas of my life.

To this day, I think I was suffering from the long term effects of spinal meningitis (Nov., 1999) and from the after effects of the summer of 2004 when Molly was seriously burned in a camping accident and all that caring for demanded of our family.

Thinking back, it was a great help when I was able to used sick leave and, with a physician's approval, reduce my teaching load in Spring, 2005.  Even more, I think I did a great thing for my health by accepting the role of Snug, the Joiner in LCC's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."  Not only was putting on the play a lot of fun and not only did it get me moving around and exerting myself in a creative and really fun way, I loved the part of the cast I worked with the most.  A group of us were the Mechanicals, responsible for the hilarious play within the play of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and we had a lot of time together in the dressing room between our times on the stage.

I was, by far, the oldest member of this part of the cast, and so I got to enter into the world of what people thirty years younger than I were watching in the movies and got to find out about all kinds of other interests they had.

It stimulated me, perked me up, made me happy, and helped me get better. So did the four Shakespeare plays I was in over the next several years.

Still, I didn't return to regular writing and the creation of kellogg bloggin' until over a year later in October, 2006.

At first, I wrote a lot of stories of memories of living in Kellogg or of things going on with my Kellogg friends.  At that time, I had ambitions of writing something bigger than a blog and I spilled out all kinds of things that were on my mind.

At that time, I also wanted to get thoughts and reflections down about books I was reading and movies I watched and so I wrote about these things.

In November of 2006, I bought my first digital camera, opening up a whole other means of expressing myself on my blog.

I also had a great time reading others' blogs and made some really good blog friends and I'm sorry this has petered out.  I loved those early blog days of finding new blogs, making new friends, and reading what others were thinking about.

I loved it when my sisters and I did sibling assignments.  I think we did 150 of these and I would sure be into resurrecting that idea.  I'm remembering, too, when we had some blogging sessions together, when we were all at Carol's dining table and wrote blog entries at the same time, laughing, wondering what each other were doing, seeing who could post the best clip from a Rocky movie or the funniest memory or YouTube video.

I'd say the biggest change in my blog between then and now is that I don't think of myself as very intellectual any longer and I don't have any ambition for writing a book or something.  That could change, but now my blog focuses primarily on my recording of Three Beautiful Things a day.

I've not had any problem with depression since about April of 2009.  I can't believe it after suffering with this for so long.  Does the recording of Three Beautiful Things have anything to do with this?  I don't know.  But, I have to believe that this habit I've formed of seeing the good in each day has done some good.

I hope I'll get back to writing some pieces on my blog that more reflective and that tell stories.  I enjoyed that, but I think I'm in a period of transition about what's on my mind and how I think about things and and how I want to write, so it might be a while before I spill stuff like that out again.

I like posting pictures, still, so much that I have one photoblog at Tumblr and I'm thinking of starting another of pictures I've taken over the last three years of people holding hands.

So there it is:  my brief blog history.  I thought entry #2500 would be a fun time to reflect on the past seven or eight years of fridge logging and web blogging and look at some of the things in my life that brought this project about.