At this point in time I am a rank beginner with no specific intentions or even ideas for my Blog. Everything is experimental while I try to pick up the basics —indeed, I have already been busy creating and deleting entries, trying to figure out how to include pictures, mainly, and integrate them into text; looking into the FAQs and Forums for possibilities, hints, advice; wondering what I might like to write about.
I’ve already kept a training journal for a couple of years as I prepared to ride a bicycle from San Francisco to L.A., with AIDS/Lifecycle, as well as documenting my experience as a Training Ride Leader. And I will very likely use this space for the same purpose. It occurs to me that this kind of format would also be ideal for posting useful information about cycling, tips on bicycle safety, maintenance, etc. But already I’m imagining this as something less utilitarian, less task-bound, more personal, a chance to explore and formulate ideas, observations, concerns, opinions. A useful discipline, a self-accounting, an attempt to tell the truth, the whole truth, etc., if I can find the courage, the desire, the time to keep it up. And somewhere between private and public: I hardly intend to be confessional and can hardly imagine who else could possibly care to read what I may manage to write? Well, experimental is the word. We’ll have to see what if anything develops. I’m going to close this introduction by attempting to load a foto.
That went pretty well, actually: I ended up pasting html code from Flick’r rather than uploading the jpeg from my computer (that sounds so matter-of-fact and blasé, but in truth it’s amazing that such a thing is possible); I don’t know if the image got “optimized” as is recommended, but I resized it by dragging the corners till it fit on the page; I sort of hoped I could run text around it, and I know I just need to learn how.
The foto I picked at random—really! but it now seems appropriate as a current image of me: in cycling gear, with my “trademark” red sweatband and mirror, on the top of Mt. Diablo which I had just succeeded in riding all the way up for the first time. The face, by the way, reminds me a lot of my mother’s: it may just be the wrinkles and the slight puffiness, the tension around the eyes. Family resemblance. I remember her as an older woman, and now I am advanced in age. But the smile is mine, I think, and the California jersey.
But that sounds like the beginning of another story. I still haven’t said much about me, and maybe it will have to await another writing.
