Full Circle

When we left Phoenix back in 1998 to journey across the US we had a desktop PC that we couldn't take with us. A friend from La Leche League mentioned that her husband had a laptop that he never used so she'd see if he'd sell it to me. That day I got my first laptop, and for only $100. That was before wi-fi, but I had already been hooked by electronic mail. Around the same time they invented something called getting your pictures put on floppy. They must have invented that just for me, I know it. With my old ancient laptop I would share my pictures, with some snarky remarks here and there, by preparing the email, saving it to send later, then shutting it down (because the battery wouldn't last two minutes). Then I'd walk into the campground office, usually disconnect their phone line to plug it into my laptop then start the thing back up and hopefully thirty minutes later it would be sent. We kept up this type of family communication regularly for years, until my Uncle Carl died. For some reason not getting his Fish Fry Friday updates caused something in all of us to stop. My Mom and cousin try to keep the groups (I eventually got my Dad's side of the family on board) alive but for whatever reason people just aren't sharing anymore.

Then along came weblogs. Now these were for writers, but I tried anyway. Lately I've gone back to my old style, pictures with comments, and I'm getting a lot of nice comments, but the ones that mean the most to me are *Thanks for sharing*. That feels really good, maybe because I don't have a big social circle on the road, or maybe it's because I didn't really hear that too much from my family, the ones that I thought would enjoy seeing my shit. It hit me that none of my original email circle reads this, which makes me now feel like I was bothering everyone and wasting their time with my babble, or maybe even annoying them. Gah! Now I know that the people that read this are here because they're actually interested. Thanks! Because of this I promise to keep improving.

My Uncle Carl always encouraged me to document our travels more permanently, so here's to you Uncle Carl. Thanks for the inspiration!