[COMMENCE BLOGGING]
Sometimes I write. The result is never anything with a discernible message or any lasting significance, and it is usually at least 20% too long and unfailingly cluttered with too many adverbs. But I like doing it, and people tell me they enjoy reading what comes of it, if only in a "Well, it's this or refreshing Facebook again" kind of way. Since a stint of semi-regular productivity for a satire newspaper in college, I have more recently found outlet only in sending a lot of unprompted and possibly unread emails to friends, who seem entertained but likely wonder if there isn't a better forum for me to go about this, preferably one that carries less of a perceived obligation for them to respond.
Sixteen months ago, under guise of a military assignment for my Air Force pediatrician wife, the United States government deported us to Anchorage, Alaska. This was quickly identified as a comically poor fit for my sensibilities and hobbies, especially as we were finishing a third delightful year in Washington D.C., with its cosmopolitan charms like interesting restaurants and useful public transportation and people who do not talk constantly about fishing.
More than one person suggested I start a blog to document this likely-hilarious folly of Miscast Man vs. his Drastically Modified Surroundings, which was a pretty good idea if not for my unwillingness to learn how to actually go about getting online and setting up such a thing. Instead, I put a few thousand words and some pictures into a Word document every six weeks or so and sent it out as a mass email, which I determined to be the best way to flaunt my refusal to learn something new while simultaneously paralyzing inboxes with unnecessarily large attachments. I spent the better part of an evening coming up with the title of "Alaska Travel(b)logue" (totally worth it) and delivered it with the email subject line "Status: Sill Alive".
I did that until our daughter was born in August. It was a good stopping point, as I had made it through almost exactly one year of plowing through all of the good low-hanging "Isn't Alaska Crazy?" content, plus I was suddenly left with much less time to work on the thing. Having since established a loose routine for keeping the baby satisfied and again finding an occasional urge to write and distribute something, I figured I might as well do so in a way that is slightly less reminiscent of 1997.
I have now progressed nearly two months into a grand life experiment as a stay-at-home dad and only-part-time structural engineer; thus far it has been quite successful, but the newness and unfamiliarity of the whole thing renders my expectations for even the very near future fuzzy and probably mostly wrong. So it is difficult to speculate what the content of this might be, except to say that I will try my best to not just regurgitate whatever it is that I heard about on the tape-delayed broadcast of the Today Show that morning.
And so thus begins what I hope to be a fruitful exercise of posting on here like four times in the next few weeks, then once in May of next year where I say "Alright, time to get back into this thing!", then infinite silence.
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