Jed the Dog in a Leafs Jersey
So it’s new year’s eve…day…(what’s the right way to say that?). Since my last post a few things have happened with my online dabblings. One of those things was an online identity crisis. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but essentially this problem stemmed from my obsession with categorization. Obsession may be a bit strong, but when I got the urge to write outside the theme I mandated for this blog in my head, my first thought was: ‘time for a new blog!’ I already had this topic-centric blog, and then I had my slightly newer Tumblr blog which I originally saw as my personal blog, but now see as my place-to-stick-random-things-I-want-to-share-ADD-style blog. So besides the run-on sentences, and saying ‘blog’ excessively, what would be wrong with having a third blog? My third blog would be my legitimate personal blog, and then I would have all the bases covered right?
Well, maybe. I went to work on WordPress to put together another blog, but I couldn’t find a theme I liked. Now you may ask, ‘what’s the big deal?’ It shouldn’t be that big a deal, so you’d be right, except that if a blog is the way I’m choosing to express myself, I sure as heck want the blog itself to look the way I want it to, just like I want what I write to read the way I want it too. And I was already very happy with how this blog looks, but I couldn’t use the same theme for two different blogs. That would just be weird.
Soon after this frustration began I got caught up in a conversation concerning a friend’s business endeavours and how they’d like to increase their presence online. Their ambitions were high but their experience with the internet was limited, so I took a look at what they were looking at and did my own research. I came up with an idea that we’re all really excited about, so now it looks as though I may be involved in this very cool new project (which I’m not going to talk about in any detail until it has actually hit the ground – sorry!). But from the experience of planning this new project I’ve learned (or rather, am in the process of learning) something very important: that strict categorization can be… well restrictive. It’s limiting! And it can be downright boring sometimes.
All of this is to say that I am overhauling my mental mandate of what this blog is about. This is mostly for my benefit. I do enjoy having the readers that I do (few in number as you are), and I hope you enjoy the change, but if you don’t – well, tough cookies.
I’ll still write posts on rediscovering the internet, but not all the time. Writing is too cathartic for me to limit myself to a formula so narrow.
Lunar Eclipse 2010 about 15 minutes in
In that spirit, I’ve included a picture I took the night of this past December 21 sometime around 1:45am. You may not have stayed up that night to witness the lunar eclipse, but don’t worry. I’ve got you covered. The quality isn’t great, but if you click on the picture it’ll take you to my Flickr account where I’ve got a series of 14 photos of the eclipse from roughly 1:20am to 2:30am. Lunar eclipses are fiendishly slow, not like their speedy solar cousins. It took nearly an hour for the moon to just become eclipsed, and at that point I went to bed. If you want to see what the un-eclipsing would have looked like, just cycle through the pictures in reverse order (and don’t forget to view it through a mirror’s reflection to complete the effect). And if you want to learn a little more about the eclipse, I highly recommend the Bad Astronomy post on this topic.
Continuing the topic of catharsis, there are few living creatures that perform this function better than my brother’s dog. Jed the Dog, named after two-term democratic President Josiah Bartlett of The West Wing television series (here’s a clip for your viewing pleasure), is unnaturally cute. He may look just normal cute in these photos, but if you ever have the pleasure of meeting him in person (i.e. in dog) you would be confounded by how there is virtually no action he can perform without being awesome in some way. In my experience just thinking about Jed can make troubles drift away. You may not have the pleasure of seeing him in person, but you can click on the picture I’ve included at the top of the post to see a few more that I’ve taken. Maybe his cuteness can help reduce some of your stress or frustration too.
Enjoy, and happy new year!
Redbudd 