Monday, May 10, 2004

Fumbling, fumbling

For a guy who's been online since the Prodigy days of 1991, I'm appalled at how baffled I am by this whole blog process. Oh, well. I'm a quick study and I expect I'll figure it out soon enough, but I hate feeling stupid.
For a professional journalist, I've got a poor track record as a diarist. I kept a journal regularly through high school and a few months into college, but all subsequent attempts have faltered in the face of expediency and a lack of committment.
Consequently, this may be the only entry I ever post here.
I'm a 58-year-old retired newspaperman, divorced and on my second marriage, living in a Midwestern farm town of 1,500.
My wife and I will observe our third wedding anniversary this weekend, although we've been together more than eight years. She's 19 years my junior, but advanced for her years. That's a good thing, since I refuse to feel my age. She's a newsie, too, and is assistant managing editor of a medium-size daily paper. Together we do freelance writing and photography.
I have two grown sons. The 36-year-old is a musician and has a recording studio in a major city in the Pacific Northwest and is getting married in September. His 33-year-old brother is a professional jazz musician whose physician wife is expecting their first child (and my first grandchild, since this is all about me) in late May or early June. It'll be a girl, a fact that was discerned by my ex, who is an ultrasonographer.
My wife has two kids from her previous marriage - a 19-year-old girl who just completed her freshman year of college with a dean's list GPA, and a 17-year-old boy who lives with us and is wrapping up his junior year of high school.
We also have a dog - a tailless mixture of golden retriever and Australian shepherd and God knows what else - who is the smartest animal I've ever known. Considering that my other dogs were not especially bright, that's not saying much, but she is startlingly intelligent and wonderfully good-natured.
So this is the cast of characters and a glimpse of my history. Now to wrestle with the graphic layout of this thing...


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