Long ago, back in another portion of my life that was much different from the life I have now, I was at the tail end of my first divorce, free and busting full of new ideas. I had a house all to myself, my first home PC (a 386SX, Windows 3.1, 20mb hard drive, 4mb’s of memory and very early version of MS works) and a great desire to write. And so I did.

Time went on and my life continued through another marriage and yet another divorce, life teaching me all the hard lessons I needed to learn, the learning hard at times and still I was writing. Then, shortly before I moved to Vermont…I stopped. My life in the fast lane had come to an end, my folks were getting on in age and needed looking after and life was busy pushing me in that direction even though I didn’t know it at the time.

For over a half a decade I was without a PC and when I did finally have access to one the desire had fled. Responsibilities were heavy and my days were filled with exhaustion and heart ache and there was little spare time to be had as it often is in these cases, but the one thing I had kept from that previous portion of my life was a battered old manila folder with the only existing copies of those stories.

Fast forward to just a bit ago, third time’s a charm they say and in this case, they were right. The folk’s had passed on, I began to take care of my health again and within a very few years I had moved to Newport, VT with my wonderful lady and that battered old folder came with me–and she found it.

She read those stories of mine, read them again and did something that was completely unexpected; she typed all 15 of them into her computer and when she was done, she gave me the copy so I would have them once again in mine after all those years.

My father had been of the opinion that these short stories/articles should have been published long ago but of course that never happened. Who had the time? And although I haven’t written any more of these “stories”, my desire to write eventually surfaced once again and with the coming of DSL to the more remote places of Vermont, this reawakened desire to write has taken the form of this blog instead.

But it’s time I believe for these past writings of mine to see the light of day and I can’t think of a better place for them than as a new series on Just Thinkin. Give them to my readers to peruse through and enjoy or not as they may.

Now, when I say “stories” I use the term very loosely indeed. Some actually could be termed stories while others might be called articles while still others might be classified as opinions. One thing is consistent though, many of these old writings of mine are satirical in nature, poking fun not at religion or God or stereotyping anyone, not at all. I’m poking fun at people in general for if you can’t laugh at yourself then you’re certainly not living life to the fullest.

I’ll be converting these writings to posts one by one and some are actually long enough to publish in separate installments so I’ll have fun with “part 1′s” and “part 2′s” and the like. They’re not great, hardly professional, full of too long sentences and bad grammar so they won’t win any prizes but I hope they at least provide some enjoyment.

I’m working on the first one now.