Ch-ch-changes

Working on revamping the template here a bit, so don't be surprised if things are changing around for a bit. Going to see if I can come up with a banner of my own design, for one thing. I just did one for my new family history blog, so I expect I can come up with something for this one, as well.

They Read It!

An excerpt from this post was read tonight on the Open Source radio program's Blogsday 2007 show. It's near the end of the program and edited ever so slightly for radio audiences, but it was just unbelievable to think that something from this little blog, something that I wrote, would be picked up for general consumption.

The show itself is just an incredible listen. It's fascinating to read/hear what other people are writing about and get just that tiniest glimpse into other lives. It also makes me think about what motivates people to blog. I know that for me it was nominally to write about my knitting, but it's also been an interesting and challenging way just to make myself write. I enjoy the way it stretches me to try to write something that will be of interest to others. I've always been a bit of an essayist, but I see so many other writers out there who are much better at it than I and it inspires me and challenges me to push my abilities in this realm.

A really good blog post isn't something that I just sit down and zip out. I will typically spend a couple of hours thinking about what I want to say and how best to say it, because I know that other people will be reading it and I want to do the best I can to give those readers a little insight into what's going on in my head. In some respects it becomes a didactic exercise - how best to release my inner academician - but it's also something more, a part of something bigger. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think that blogging serves as a mirror of Zeitgeist.

Taken collectively, the blogosphere offers an incredible look at not just the "big issues", but also the tone and shape of our mundane lives at this point in time. And while some people may conflate "mundane" with "boring", I think it's anything but. Okay, perhaps PhD dissertations about life in the "post-modern" world tend towards the dry and self-important, but people's real lives are vibrant, tragic, joyous, tear- and laughter-filled, and sometimes deadly dull and boring, and I want to chronicle my little piece of that, for whomever wants to read it.

That someone felt it was worth reading to the world, well, that's just about the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me.

Off the Needles!

The end was in sight this evening, and I decided that it would be helped along by a little blast of knitterly energy. So I got up and showered in time to make it to Chicks with Sticks night down at The Yarn Sellar with this bunch of rowdies.



Actually, there were more rowdies than these, but I was a man with a mission and didn't pull out my camera until the very end of the evening. My diligence paid off, though.



Thanks to Julie for snapping the photo. Tomorrow I shall be washing and blocking, but it stretches out very nicely and should be perfectly shawl-sized. This project has been a labor of love and has been my sole project since April 26, but I'm glad that I shall soon be able to let it go, as I've put quite a bit on hold over the past month and a half.

Gobsmacked

I can't think of a better word to describe my reaction to this comment, which I received today:

Hi Mel,

I'm writing from Open Source, a public radio show based in Boston and distributed around the country.

Two years ago, we started what's become a yearly tradition for us called Blogsday. Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates "Ulysses" as an evocation of the world in a single day (in Joyce's case, June 16, 1904), the idea is to create a mosaic portrait of the blogosphere by reading excerpts of blog posts written all over the world on the same day, for one night, for one hour, on live radio. This year, we chose this past Tuesday, June 5, to collect posts from, and the show will air Thursday night from 7-8pm EST.

I'm writing because we loved this post, and it's on the shortlist to be included among our Blogsday Best of the June 5th Blogosphere collection. Congratulations!

....

I won't get my hopes up too much that my post will be included, but it's just staggering to me that it would even receive this much recognition. I still plan on listening to the show, though. Just in case.

One More Thing

I have before mentioned Glenn Greenwald's political blog on Salon.com. If you're not a reader, I highly recommend it, as I find his writing to be very insightful and well-reasoned. Today's post has a quote from Gen. Wesley Clark that is particularly worth reading.