The Great Blog Experiment

I did say this blog would be an experiment, and the experiment continues. There are some things about blogging that are different from facebook and sending personal emails, notes, and postcards, so this is part one of the results…

1. Blogging is a bit like teaching a large class. The audience is really broad, and while ‘liking’ a post on facebook is low risk, public commenting on a blog is well…public and a bit intimidating. This means I only know a little bit about who is reading…anything! This all feels a bit egocentric. Thankfully, many of you are discovering that responses by private email still work – and several others are not shy !
   
2. Scanning back over the posts, there is definitely a theme in the photos. Tramping around on cliffs by the sea is not the ONLY thing we have done, but it is the thing I most wanted from this trip. This is good. I think I might take more of the photos and stories and turn them into a book when I get home. This is a satisfying and happy possibility for an exceptional and long awaited adventure. Rolling this up into one comment, the discipline of writing things down every day or so has been fun.
   
3. When you know you can choose one story and one photo to share on any given day – but only one – it focusses your thinking in a different way than posting photo albums to facebook. Blogging can be a practice in thoughtful framing while fb is a kaleidoscope of images. I love the positive discipline imposed by the blog stories – and also the spontaneous honesty of the fb albums…
   
4. The blog posts automatically to fb, twitter, and email, so that it reaches out to everyone at once. Blogging is more inclusive, and that has been a satisfying success. We’ll see if it also helps with reconnecting the pieces of my life back together when I get back home.

Anyhow – those who are reading – thanks for reading! Those who are chatting back to me – thanks for that too!

Today was our last full day in Ireland…another sunny one…and a bit of heavy mileage covered so we are tired and ready to give up the car and move to France!

The photo is from Kenmare – they call it Cromwell’s Bridge – but it has no connection whatsoever to Oliver Cromwell. A Folly. …and nearly impossible to walk over, by the way.