Ma ka hana ka `ike

Kyle and I came back almost a week ago from our most excellent two week holiday to Hawaii, and as I predicted pretty much all the trees are bare now. New Jersey is nice but so much colder than the islands (even though it's winter both here and there), and since the time difference is the same as that between New Jersey and the UK, I've also been experiencing a degree of jetlag (part of the reason why I'm blogging in the middle of the night).

When we first got back I had this idea that I would get all my photos uploaded to Flickr and then write a big blog posting describing my most favourite parts of our trip. In a way this "review" part is my way of finishing my holiday. But sorting the pictures out has turned out to be a much bigger job than I'd thought (I don't know why, since it's always taken me forever after every other trip) and didn't want to post the summary of the trip until I'd done that, and meanwhile there are other things I wanted to write about that are happening now.

Basically I've been suffering from blog constipation. I suppose I have this dumb idea that I have to do everything in "proper order", which in this case means posting stuff in strict chronological order. And for some reason today was particularly demoralising and I was beginning to feel really fed up with the whole process (added to that, I got kicked out of my lane partway through swimming this evening, to make way for a class - gah!).

Then this evening Kyle and I watched "The Daily Show", which had Arianna Huffington on as she's promoting a book about blogging. (She's the editor of a political blog called the Huffington Post, which I've never read.) Aside from being good fun to watch, she suggested that blogging can be about just writing what you think now, without overanalysing, and think that's what I needed to hear. Also I've been thinking about a Hawaiian phrase that I've been turning over in my mind for the last few days: "Ma ka hana ka `ike" - literally, "in the work, the knowing", but meaning "one learns by doing. Participate!".

So: I will finish sorting my Hawaii photos and I will write a bit about the trip. But I'll try not to let that get in the way of writing about other stuff in the meantime (I guess that's some kind of lame epiphany).

Ok, and now I'm off back to bed. Sweet dreams!

Green Lady with Snake

I've finally discovered how to set things up to allow me to post photos from my account on Flickr directly to Blogger. I had kept going around and around in circles, looking up FAQs on both sites without any success, but the solution turned out to be embarrassingly straightforward - I'd simply failed to click on the correct link.

So this is a test post. (The picture isn't significant - I saw it last year in some rubble dumped behind my house and was intrigued by the green lady with the snake, I have no idea who or what she is.) I've had to do quite a bit of tweaking of the HTML generated by Flickr for the post and I'm not sure that it's worth the effort to be honest, but I'm happier now at least I've got it to work if I want it.

The autumn leaves were falling, hearing Nature's calling

It's November 4th and the autumn leaves are falling here in New Jersey. While most people here are electing the next president, I'm writing the first post for my blog. Not being entirely sure of what's involved in the whole blogging enterprise, I've decided to fall back on columnist Guy Browning's advice on "How to blog".

So, welcome to ironic button: No manifesto. No agenda. No content.