#1

Most of my writing has been sent via e-mail to friends and family in attachments, which increasingly no one is eager to open. I don't blame them. Last week I was receiving about 50 worm infested e-mails a day, about half with attachments.

So I'm thinking, if I had a blog home, I could just ask the good folks from Montana, Florida, Virginia, Illinois, Nebraska, Georgia, California, Washington and Michigan to check out my blog for the latest details on what I'm thinking or writing. I've put out a compilation of my poetry and essays, "Let me collect my thoughts," and this will be an extension of that. Web Logs are perfect for people like me who like to write but don't want to publish.

This past summer I created "Poetry Post" and tacked my poems on a utility pole in front of our Lake Erie summer home. People looking for yard sale information stopped to look and clearly were disappointed. One person did ask for a copy of the one about enduring February next to the lake. It convinced her even more that she needs to go to Arizona this winter. The power of poetry. Some of my verse appears inside notes cards of my original paintings which are sold at a sweet little gift shop in Lakeside, OH.

When the web was young and the rules more relaxed, I had a personal web page at Ohio State with several essays about life, and a complete recipe book as well as information about the literature of veterinary medicine. (Obviously, this would no longer be allowed.) It was a great learning experience--html codes and FTP and all that--all of which is now outdated, wasting precious space in my memory.

While employed, my rambling e-mails went around the world in various professional list-servs--I was a hit in South Africa and Thailand. When I announced my retirement in 2000, the biggest surprise was not the well-wishers, but the people I'd never heard from or knew who said they'd miss my e-mails.

So, I'm back in business.