Loose Leaf Notes

My blog is a year old. It was born on March 12, 2005 at Blogger.com. Five days later, with the encouragement of friends and fellow Floyd bloggers, it took its first steps and made its way to Moveable Type. Below are excerpts from some of Loose Leaf’s first words:

March 12: How’s It Working For You?
The last thing I said to my husband, before turning out the lights last night, was: “All I want to do is write, but I feel like I have to invent the printing press first!”
The Good News: Putting up my first blog was easy. In fact, I inadvertently created 3 of them. The Bad News: It took me 5 hours to post my picture in “About Me,” and in the end it wasn’t me who did it. (Thank you to Nelson Pidgeon, my tech support webmaster). Posting blog messages is easy and I quickly understood how to make links. I have a rudimentary understanding of how to post pictures now, but I haven’t done it myself yet. Too busy doing other things. Such as: figuring out how to delete the other 2 blogs I mistakenly set up. Read more…

March 13: Do you feel like this?
The Poem: It starts out as a sensuous pleasure, the right chemistry of words and feelings at play. But then comes the daunting work of putting it all together…digging deeper for the details…editing out the unnecessary…laboring over every line break…all done with an underlying urge to get it all just right. If you can persevere though, the effort will often lead to a satisfying climax, a sense of completion, and an excitement to share it with others. Funny how every creative process is like birth, marriage, or sex. Read more…

March 14: The People I Want To Thank
Ed was the first person who coaxed me to sit down in front of a computer for the first time. It was a scary sight. EEK…I would practically jump up on the chair, as though I had seen a mouse, every time I lost a page or got to a new one without knowing how it had happened. I acted like a high-strung, wimpy, school girl handling a live rodent when I inevitably lost control of the computer mouse and was not able to align its movement with what was happening on the screen. Ed, who was not daunted, provided my first introduction into the world of virtual desktops, folders, and files. Read more…

March 15: Spring Fever
Sitting in the office of my Chinese Medicine Practitioner, whose practices include cranial sacrum energy work, acupuncture, bone setting, and herbal infusions, a newcomer and acquaintance inquired, “You’ve been coming for a while. So, do you feel better?” I laughed. “You know,” I answered, “you might come here to cure fatigue and be cured of mistrust instead. I can’t be attached to what needs to happen first with healing.” I added, “For me the cure is not the goal – but progress is!” She understood, and I was used to her type of question. Read more…

March 16: Question for Other Bloggers
10:00 a.m. – Are you familiar with the impatient weight in your fingers when you have a post “copy” to “paste” but have nowhere to paste it? And what did you do with your time when you couldn’t get on the blogger.com site all of last night and so far all morning to post today’s entry? I cleaned off my desk (or made a dent in it) and sent in an essay submission to “The Sun” magazine. If my submission is successful, should I thank blogger.com for being unreliable? What nice things have happened to you, due to the fact that the server is down? Read more…

March 17: Moving Day
My first blog was born on March 12, 2005. Five days later it took its first step. With the help of my friend, Doug Thompson, I have moved on to another server, faster and easier to use, I am told. Coincidently, on the day my blog was being set up at this new location, the blogger.com server that initially hosted my blog was inoperable for nearly 24 hours and no one could post during that time. I’m sure every blogger knows how frustrating that can be. (See yesterdays post.) Is it also a coincidence that the rebirth of my blog is making its debut on St. Patrick’s Day? Was it a coincidence that my parents named me, the only one of their 9 children who has taken an interest and our Irish heritage, Colleen, which means “girl” in Gaelic? Read more...

March 18: Tools of the Trade
I don’t even want to mention notebooks. I try to buy them in different colors, so I can tell them apart, but it seems that I start writing in one, and then prematurely go onto a newer one, until soon they all look the same. I have scraps of paper with words scribbled on them in every room of my house. (Some people actually use file cards?) Here’s one that just says: “Things that make me have to put on extra deodorant.” An idea for a new list or a blog entry, I suppose. Below it is written, simply “105,000.” I struggle to remember that it’s probably the suggested mileage # for changing the timing belt on my CRV. Some of the various sized scraps of papers have web addresses or phone numbers written on them, and others seem to have expired, which means that I waited too long to do something with them and now I can’t read my own writing anymore. Read more…

March 21: My Normal Abnormal
My Asheville, North Carolinian, potter son, Josh, who is also a closet super-hero, turned me on to New Castle Beer, a dark but not Guinness dark beer made in Great Britain. Around the same time he showed off – what he would call “flash treads” or more informally “kicks” – his new pair of New Balance sneakers. For about a year after these incidents, whenever I was in a restaurant ordering a beer, I would ask for…“a New Balance, please.” Someone would usually laugh. Someone else would look confused. The mix-up is understandable, if you know me. More recently Josh hand-built a treadle wheel, a pottery wheel that you operate like an old model sewing machine, with your foot. I kept calling it “the tread mill.” Read more...