March 2, 2009

So today I begin. The idea came to me some time ago when I wrote a few articles for a regional monthly magazine. I got burned out on it after my last piece- and have suffered writers block since. So 4 nights ago I was in my local gin mill and sometime blues music venue getting pleasantly inebriated and chatting with the bouncer who I discovered used to blog. I figured what the hell? It was time to do something besides get drunk, sing badly with the band on open jam nights or sit at home crocheting baby blankets for people I really didn't consider to be close to me or my life- (but it did give me something constructive to do so it isn't a total loss), and it might help keep me from obsessing over my latest disaster of a relationship.

40 something is when you realize on some level that life ain't what you thought it was gonna be like back when you were 18 and getting told you were lower than whale sperm at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in Navy boot camp. And while life hasn't been that low for me since that epiphany bright and early at o-dark-thirty some 20 plus years ago, it hasn't exactly achieved warp speed to the outer reaches of the Federation either. But I suspect that most of us are in the same boat and this blog is just my attempt to chronicle my small successes and fess up to the failures in the hope that I might learn something and maybe get a pass from the Almighty come judgement day, for simply trying to have a life and live that gift to its fullest- even if I don't get it right a lot of the time.

Spring comes hard to this area. Geologically known as the The Driftless Region of the Upper Mid-West, which covers parts of southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, Northwestern Illinois and Northeastern Iowa. This area derives its name from being unglaciated in a region that had many glacial episodes, going back nearly two million years to the Pleistocene Epoch. Having escaped the leveling effect of continental glaciers, the ancient land surface has been exposed to essentially continuous weathering and erosion. Several thousand feet of bedrock strata may have been removed during an overall span of some 243 million years. This erosion carved a series of deep valleys into the gently tilted bedrock formations with the Mississippi River Valley draining the entire region. * Thanks to http://www.jdcf.org/driftless.htm for that handy explanation :)

Which is why you will likely find pictures reminiscent of warmer temps, and colors other than white, gray and some color that can't be described which is created from a mix of snow, ice, sand, road tar, vulcanized rubber and other detritus that comes with winter around here, posted with my musings. Which isn't to say that there isn't something beautiful about freshly fallen snow and frost glistening on barren tree limbs- but only when viewed from behind a large window with a roaring fire or overly efficient central heating warming your body rather than twenty layers of clothing you must don in order to dig a path to the mail box in the hope that the SOS letter to your friend in Georgia will be picked up by our overly competent Postal Service, because the weight of the snow has caused a power outage so your computer is down and e-mails can't be sent. OK- maybe I exaggerate a bit there- but 20 below zero is still not my idea of comfort.