To blog or not to blog?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a while now.

Whether ’tis nobler to suffer what readers there may be to peruse posts by yours truly?  (Well, mostly truly.)  Or to zap another bag of popcorn and get my nerd on with a STAR TREK Blu-ray marathon?

Tough call.

It’s tough on several levels for me.  For one thing, there could be technical challenges and I’ve never been really great with electronics.  (Pausing here so the laughter of anyone who knows me – and so knows what an understatement that is – can die down.)  I don’t do well when I have to think too hard about technical stuff.  I even get nervous around single cup coffee machines.

But if this is being read, it means I overcame those hurdles!  (Or many of them, anyway.)  And hopefully the smoke will stop wafting out of my ears sometime soon.

Another hurdle is to choose a theme – I mean, blogs are supposed to have a focus of some sort, right?

Food seems like a popular subject.

Trouble is I’m not widely known for my taste in food or my ability to prepare it.  (Pausing again for laughter from those in the know…)  In college, I was referred to as “The Triscuit Queen” because dinner often amounted to my standing at a kitchen counter putting cheese on crackers.  Um – spraying cheese on crackers out of a can, actually.

And I’m not embarrassed about that.  I’m really not.  But I’m also pretty sure that leaves me slightly underqualified to write a blog on food.

Hm.  Gardening, maybe?

I’ve done okay with a few little bamboo stalks propped in a pot of rocks in my apartment.  But since I don’t have any other plants – or a deck or yard to fill with them – that topic might get exhausted pretty quickly.

Wait!  I do have a vase of fake red flowers in a window – it totally confuses hummingbirds which I have to say can be fun.  But that probably doesn’t count.  (It also probably suggests that a blog about how to have fun should remain way, way down the potential topic list.)

Alright.  Home decorating?  Well, I do have a vase of fake red flowers in a window that…

Yeah, no.

Fine, so domestic pursuits are pretty much out.  Maybe I should try a more personal approach:

Hey, my name is Amy and I’m forty-eyyyy…um…  (Shoot – not really feeling the “personal” approach already, but…)  I grew up in Northern California but have now lived almost half my life in Southern California where I work as a paralegal.  I love traveling, movies and the Stanley Cup Champion Los Angeles Kings.

“Amy, come on dowwwwn!  You’re our next contestant!”

Too game show or dating site-like,  I think.  Maybe I can find stuff from my life to share that’s true but not quite so factual.  I have diaries to draw from that date all the way back to grade school – but I’m afraid they’re pretty disappointing.  Like I thought my oldest diary from 1976 might hold some promising literary material.  Maybe some delightful and revealing insights into the mind of a girl just embarking on her teens?

Not so much.

Here are some of the more scintillating entries:

“January 3 – It didn’t rain today.”

“March 12 – I’m getting my room pretty well cleaned up!  It looks nicer now.”

“March 15 – If my writing looks funny it’s cuz I sprained my pointer finger playing baseball in P.E.  Well, gotta go.”

What remarkable and thrilling glimpses into my youthful mind!

Remarkable too to keep turning the pages and discover that absolutely nothing whatsoever appears to have happened to me between April 3rd and May 30th – and after that, not for the entire rest of 1976.

Really?  Our nation’s bicentennial not worth a mention?  No more meteorological bombshells?

Truth be told, there are hints enough of the grown-up daydreamer in just those few childish lines – not to mention in the lack thereof.  The pointer finger healed nicely, but I still struggle terribly with neatness.  And while I’m happily distracted by Blu-rays today (once I finally got the player hooked up – truly not kidding about the electronics thing…), just one good Tiger Beat Magazine would have been enough to divert me from diary-keeping back in the day.

But maybe it’s genetic.  I was equally underwhelmed by our family collection of post cards written about a century ago by my great-grandmother and her mother.  They lived a short distance apart in Oregon and wrote little notes back and forth.  I had thought what an incredible opportunity this was going to be to get into the heads of two of my ancestors!  To find out what life was like for them, how they got along, and what they cared about!

Welllll, here’s a sample:

“Dear Mabel – Bought a dozen chickens today.  Love, Mother.”

Wow.

Like I said, I felt totally let down.

I tried to think of some reason why a paltry poultry purchase was considered big enough news for a card and a stamp.  Was there more to it?  Was I supposed to be reading between these lines?  Maybe it was some kind of code!  I checked with my dad.

“Dad, is there any chance your grandma was a covert government agent embedded in Dufur, Oregon?”

After the polite appearance of consideration:

“No, Sweetie.  No, I don’t think so.”

Well, it was worth a shot.

What I had to remember was that these ladies came from a different age and, even a few miles away, they didn’t have the same communication options we do.  My modest-living, turn-of-that-century kin couldn’t chat on the phone; they couldn’t hop in the car and cruise over for a visit; and they certainly couldn’t post a quick selfie of “me and the chicks.”

But my great grand-relatives still wanted to connect and share the little goings-on that rounded out their lives.

I’ve been lucky enough to get to round out my life with lots of traveling.  And among many other things, I’ve become hugely fascinated with the Roman Empire and how far it reached back in its day.  I’ve been awed by the age and beauty of the mosaics that are sometimes unearthed in what’s left of Roman towns and villas – complex patterns, images of animals and people, mythic scenes – all created by arranging individual little colored pieces of tile.

Each piece being a tessera.

I’ve been thinking how these tesserae that make up mosaics are kind of like our lives.  Little moments in time – some sparkly, some plain – that laid all together amount to something personal and unique.

I’d like to share some moments from my life.

And I’ll get started right after that TREK marathon.  (The original series, of course – although I don’t want to get behind so, you know, maybe just Seasons 1 and 2.  And I’m not embarrassed about that.  I’m really not!)