"What's the Deal With Blogging?"

The deal with blogging for me is to sort of memoralize a thought, reflection, observance or rememberance. My hope is to be a bit creative, to remember what it was like to be creative. Work and kids and bills and all that adult stuff leaves little room for creativity. And so even though you enjoy work and kids and adult stuff sometimes you look up and say to yourself, "Can't I be creative anymore?" or "Didn't I used to get drunk more often?" One big problem is that I really want it to be perfect. The grammar, the syntax, the vocabulary, the images, all of it is just wanting to consume me, but.......the work and kids and all that adult stuff only leave a very small amount of time and so its incredibly imperfect. I can't write something particuarlay well without lots of drafts and there ain't no time for drafts in blogging. In the brevity lies a terrific challenge--get out a quality thought, reflection, observance or rememberance. It's like "Iron Chef" with words and sometimes you get a little grease on yourself, whatever that means. So, for the few blogs I have done thus far I try and do them in my head and then quickly compose.

The other day before I started doing this I wondered aloud to myself what fun creative things I do that sort of say who I am and I thought, "oh, I like to work in the yard and I'm really good at it." Then I thought of our "new" house and how the beautiful lawn I inherited died upon our moving in and how the new side yard was atrocious and how I didn't have a garden spot yet and so what about at the old house. Well, my plan was to revamp the front of the old house this summer, but then we moved and so well the front of the old house was very lackluster and unimpressive, so what sort of yard working, creative person am I? Then I remembered the backyard at the old house and while it wasn't where I wanted it to be, I thought it was probably a pretty good example of what I like to think I'm good at. See the backyard when we first moved in:

And here's what it looked like about the time we moved. You will not really be able to notice the 9 cubic yards of gravel that I brought in via wheelbarrow. My old out of shape body couldn't do that now. It's not looking so good for the new yard. Anyway, here's the old yard after I had a couple of years with it:

Interesting footnote: I took a cutting of the pink rose pictured above before we moved. I brought it to the new house in a pot and planted it on the fence. It's up the fence and starting to hang off the other side. So, that's a good start and that's the deal with blogging.