Off On My Blogging Adventure!

Finally! I have screwed up my courage, and am jumping into the wild waters of the blogging adventure! I’ve made stabs at it before, but always on simple sites where all you do it type in your thoughts… and they do the rest for you. I was signed up with WordPress months ago by my daughter, Taryn… and every time I tried to read and understand the way this is all done, I chickened out! Finally, however, I have taken a deep breath, and am plunging in!

This reminds me of the rush I used to get when I jumped off Red Bridge into the Similkameen River – depending on the level one jumped from, it was a drop of anywhere from 20 to 50 feet. I loved standing out on the end on the bit of 2 by 8 sticking out from the bridge, gazing down into the rushing deep gray-green waters flowing down from the glaciers in the mountains to the west. The first couple times I stood there, I ended up backing up carefully, clinging with relief to the structure of the old wooden covered bridge, my knees weak.

But finally, with trepidation, I walked the couple feet to the end of the board, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and simply stepped off. What a rush! My tummy flew upwards as the rest of me dropped. It felt like the bottom had fallen out of the world. For a moment I felt as though I were in slow, slow motion. And then the free-fall was over. My toes, pointed down, sliced into the water, and my body followed, the sudden iciness of the river contrasting with the desert heat of the valley around me.

Down, down, down I plunged through a dark green watery world, and then, suddenly, I was shooting upward through the bubbles of my downward descent of a moment earlier, upward toward the rays of sunshine filtering through the river’s waters, brighter and brighter until my head broke through the surface, and I rolled onto my back, gasping, drawing in deep breaths of fresh air, and then rolling over and swimming to the shore. Scrambling up the banks, I ran out onto the bridge, out onto the tip of the board – and stepped off again! In fact, the summer I turned 45, I jumped off that bridge 45 times! I’m sure I broke the grandma-jumping-off-the-bridge-record for all time!

Well, maybe this blogging business isn’t quite the same, but for me the adventure of trying something new is always a rush! I am truly looking forward to it… and to figuring out all the possibilities related to blogging from a site that lets you do your own thing… I’m brushing up on my html and learning CSS and looking forward to figuring out all these tags, and categories, and design and media and other possibilities… and how to put my website and my blog together!

Last night I took a deep breath and started working on all this… and this time I didn’t back up and decide to play it safe again by clinging to the “ready-made” blog formats! So here I am, actually stepping off and plunging in! And yes, it’s a rush!

Perhaps it was sitting outside in the gazebo last night, with a mighty Okanagan mid-summer thunderstorm roaring around me, that this time gave me the courage to go for it. The sky was dark, great flashes of forked lightning streaked across the sky, intermingled with huge flash-bulbs of sheet lightning that lit up the whole sky, and all tumbled together with great crashing rolls of thunder and sudden downpours of rain, splattering the summer desert-dust, filling the air with cool freshness after weeks of summer heat and dryness! In fact, as I write, this morning, the thunderstorms are here again, and as always happens when we get these summer storms, I’m dying to get out there and dance around, and laugh and shout. There is something incredible about the joy of a summer storm!

And there is also something incredibly joyful about learning to do something new. Blogging, here I come!

Date August 19 2008