Entering the world of The Blog

Well, here I am after sweating and waiting for this web site to (mostly) finish (you know how that goes; there will always be little edits here and there, and oh, I do think about a new page I’d like).  And now I have a blog that I don’t quite know what to do with.  Right now, I’m just hoping this first one lands in the right place and does what it’s supposed to do!  So this is a test blog.  (The next one won’t be a test.)

The one thing I do know about blogging is that I won’t use ugly four-letter words.  Whenever I’ve seen them on other blogs (one popped up just yesterday on a whimsical knitting blog, of all things), I find them so troubling: don’t these bloggers’ employers see how they are writing?  I want my Sunday School teacher and my high-school biology teacher to feel good about what they read here.

While this new web site was being constructed, I kept thinking of wonderful, music-related things to blog about, but didn’t.  There were new things I’d discovered about the string hand in autoharping, and then the source of melodic variations, and then how to hammer the dulcimer with dynamic range, and then something about cooking or knitting or….  I resisted the urge to blog because the timing seemed off, entering posts with dates well before the new site became public.  I didn’t want anyone to think they had missed a pile of musical life going on around here!  But now….now I need to stay in touch because I have a blog, despite all the other writing on my plate–books, monographs, workshop handouts, a handwritten letter to someone who wrote to me about an ad she saw for one of my books,….  But maybe that’s a good thing.  The writing, practicing and composing I do all require a lot of solitude, and blogging is a way to “get out of the house” and write in a way that’s a little more carefree and fun.  (Oh, yes, I’ll get to those autoharp and dulcimer thoughts eventually.  But first, I have to reduce my workload closer to that of one person.  Now that the new site is up, I’ve hopefully whittled the load down from five to four people.  Three may be another month off.)

Hmmmm, I try to go to Starbucks once a week to get out of the house for a change of scenery.  Maybe now I can enjoy coffee and blog at the same time?  Maybe tomorrow?  With something you can really chomp on?  Until then,….