I believe it’s very important, when it comes to a personal blog like this one, that I stay as transparent as possible so my readers know without a doubt who they are dealing with. It just adds that much more of a personal feeling to the posts, don’t you think?

My readers shouldn’t have to guess as to who is writing these posts so I have always made it a point to never attempt to cover up exactly who I am or what makes me tick.

I believe it’s very important for myself as a blogger to let my readers see what lies beneath the skin so to speak, to let them know how I think and what I think about. To know that underneath this happy-go-lucky exterior I present to the world at large, there’s actually a very serious and intellectual type who thinks on all sorts of different levels. A sensitive person, someone who ponders the world and it’s people and all the havoc they can create and how that havoc affects the people around them. Someone who can gaze upon a sunset or sunrise and be enthralled by a long past memory that sight invokes.

These are the things that I believe a blogger should ensure his or her readers understand. Do your best to let them know exactly who you are and what you’re about. Provide your readers with a way for them to relate to you, an example that will help them see the real person behind the posts they’ve been faithfully reading all this time. Once you manage this, once you tune in your readers as to who you really are, then a whole new world will open up for you and your small corner of the blogosphere. Only then will your readers laugh when you laugh and cry when you cry. They’ll feel your joy and your sorrow as if they were sitting right next to you. And they’ll take the time to let you know they care.

And all because you let them see the person behind the blogger.

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• Severe nausea: This will stop you every single time but there’s a catch…it has to present 24 hours a day, every day, without exception and it has to get steadily worse as each week goes by. Kind of like having a bad case of the stomach flu forever. In my case, I should finally be getting surgery for this before the month of October is out and once the recovery period is past and gone, I’ll no longer have this excuse so I’ll have to think up another one.
• Medications: A lot of them. You have to be able to take at least ten to a dozen pills a day (repeats of some are allowed) to qualify for not posting. And you have to be oversensitive to any medication that isn’t Aspirin or Excedrin or the generic equivalents. Once again, in my case one of those is a minimum dosage (10 mg) of an anti-depressant which is used for chronic pain control and although it’s very effective in doing this there’s an inherent problem—anti-depressants make me depressed.
• Depression (see previous):  Although artificially induced, I stand (sit, kneel, crawl) amazed on how badly depression really is. My god, how the hell do naturally depressed people manage to function at all? I mean the best things I could possibly think of was on the order of dark- moldy- rotten insects eating my brain, images of dead and rotting things unmentionable and bananas (okay, so I have this thing about bananas…I can’t stand bananas). I stopped taking the things…I feel much better now.
• Fighting off the cats: True enough as strange as it might seem. We recently rescued a small female and added her to our family of felines and she’s driving our 3 large males absolutely crazy. Being pounced upon by this little female creature from feline hell and the results thereof is nothing compared to the fact all three of them have been following her around waiting for her to…er…ripen, shall we say. Then they have to come crawl all over me making whimpering noises and staring at me with their wide eyes saying “Make it stop!!”. So far, they’ve only managed to destroy about 1/3 of all our possessions.

Update: Upon arriving home after minding the quilt shop for the day while Laurie was off doing her thing at one of the local farmer’s market, I found a message on the old answering machine left by the Boston VA (W. Roxbury facility). It seems I’ll be headed down to Boston for surgery on the 28th of this month…finally! Hopefully this should solve the first item on the above list and although I’ve been told that I’ll still have to take the medication that (somewhat) controls the massive over production of stomach acid, this operation should at least significantly cut back on the nausea I’ve been experiencing 24/7. I’m actually looking forward to it.

Rats…I seem to have posted. Have to stop that.

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Also apparently, he took the fine weather Ireland was having with him when he left (selfish ain’t he?) and all his friends had to tell him while he was gone was complaints about the lousy weather or so he says. Of course, when he arrives back from holiday a few days ago, he brought all the fine weather back with him. Now he thinks all his friends are a bunch of liars, malcontents and whiners.

And unfortunately, he seems to be having trouble shifting his mind back into gear. Maybe you all should go help him with it.

You know…I actually missed the old duffer.

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A lot has happened since I first began this endeavor especially in how my health or lack thereof has changed my life over the past 3 years and, for better or worse, these changes have reflected in my writing; making it rather harsh sounding at times but one thing that always remained consistent (besides the inconsistency) is that I’ve always remained true to myself. You’ll never have to worry about whether or not I’m trying to be something other than myself.

Okay, enough of that already. So what about this makeover anyway?

Now I know I’ve changed themes from time to time while I attempted to make heads or tails of where I wanted the blog to go vs who I was vs whatever else and, of course, I wanted the looks of the thing to reflect that—whatever it was. It wasn’t until I finally wised up to the fact that it wasn’t where I wanted the blog to go rather than where the blog was leading me that I started to find my place in things. So for the past several months I used a very plain but very powerful theme for the site called Blog.txt and, as time went on, removed all the “baubles” and “bling” from the sidebar that created more of distraction than anything else. This included the text widgets that contained info from certain off site social networks that, unfortunately, would end up grinding my site to an almost complete stop when these particular networks became choked or went down altogether. It’s not that I’ve become less social in nature, it’s more of the keeping site loading times as short as possible so readers don’t become frustrated with the waiting. One of the top reasons that I (and a lot of readers in general) end up not revisiting a site is those unreasonably slow loading times and I wanted to avoid that at much as possible.

And I’m sure you all have noticed the new look of the blog, it’s fairly obvious now isn’t it? The new theme is called “Amazing Grace“, named after that grand old hymn by the same name and one of the very few that I’ve always loved myself (it’s the Gaelic/Celtic blood in me that does it and it should be played on the “pipes” as is proper). And no, it’s not the reason I chose the theme nor have I caught a bad case of religious fervor (God forbid). It’s simply because I like the overall look of the theme, the rotating images in the header and the nice wide content area. That plus it’s one of the only 3 column themes I’ve found where the 2 sidebars don’t distract from the content just by the fact of being there. It’s also one of the only 3 column themes that I actually like that still retains a personal feeling to the thing but that’s strictly subjective on my part so I’ll be curious to see if the folks that drop by feel the same way.

Now I’ve been using this very same theme over at my new tech related site called Green Mountain Geek since the beginning however, since I seem to have come into possession of a fine premium theme (more on this in the next post), then I do believe I’ll wrap that theme around GMG in the very near future and keep Amazing Grace right here at home.

There are things to be done yet as there always are in the case of a site makeover like this. Such as inserting my own images into the header from photos I’ve taken over the years to take place of the default ones that came with the theme itself. I also have to come up with another Archives page since this theme doesn’t incorporate an archives template as some other themes do. For the latter it’s just a matter of finding an archives plugin that doesn’t make 100’s of queries to my poor database just to generate the thing. I’ve got the old site down to a whole 12 queries for the main page now so I don’t want a “heavy” archives page hanging around. And I’ll be spending some time weeding out those very old miscellaneous type posts that don’t really serve any purpose other than taking up space that can be used for something a bit more, shall we say, productive in nature? But that part of it isn’t all that critical so I can take my time with it.

I can’t honestly say that anything will change as far as the type of posts I’ll be writing, my tag line doesn’t say “Consistently Inconsistent” for nothing you know. I’ll be forever wandering from one path to another, exploring down different avenues of thought and, of course, getting ornery from time to time. It’s my nature to just be myself after all. But, as always, I welcome folks with a smile or at least a virtual one, and an invite to come on into the kitchen for a cup of coffee (or whatever) and talk awhile. So for what it’s worth, here I am (still) and here I stay. Hope you enjoy your visit.

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This blog has received it’s share of (mostly) non-official awards and recognitions, Lord knows why, but never has it received such as a recognition as this…

The “Dog’s Bollocks” award! An Irish flavored recognition if there ever was one and as far as I know…I’m the first. Now that’s special alright.

The award and the subsequent logo is the creation of one K8 the GR8, daughter of Grandad, (scourge of whatever Irish county, town and/or village he happens to live in or at least that’s what his blog depicts anyway) who is known to be “…not as green as she cabbage-looking”. Personally I think she looks rather like a youngish, Irish (very), red-headed type female, somewhat rebellious in nature and quite pretty actually in my opinion but self images being what they are and all that…

The first time I noticed that she had called my blog the “Dog’s Bollocks” was on a meme she stuck me with (which I’m a bit behind on getting done actually) as a “description” following the link to Just Thinkin’. And although my lineage is rather heavy on the English, Scottish, Gaelic end of things I simply had no idea what a “bollocks” was (but I had a damn good guess) so of course I had to look it up. It was then I became worried:

1. (UK, vulgar) The testicles (sometimes used in the singular) Yup, I was right.
2. (UK, vulgar) Nonsense or information deliberately intended to mislead. Uh… 
3. (Ireland, vulgar) An idiot, an ignorant or disagreeable person. Whut…huh? I am not!  
     “Don’t mind him; he’s only an oul’ bollocks!” So this is an award?

Looking at the above definitions, this seemed like recognition of a rather dubious nature at best. But upon asking her about this the dear lady thankfully set me straight (probably had a good chuckle over it as well I’d imagine):

Dog’s Bollocks:
Lit. Canine Testicles Uh…not the last time I looked…
Adjective phrase meaning excellent, or being of excellent quality. Usually applied to workmanship or build quality. Now that’s more like it! 
“That car is the dog’s bollocks mate”

I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt and going with the Adjective phrase rather than the literal definition in this case. Makes me feel better anyway.

Of course I had to ask K8 if there was a logo of some kind that went with this fine award (I just had to have one you see) that I could proudly hang in my sidebar and in a day or so she whipped me up that most excellent logo you see above and in the sidebar along with 2 of the previous ones which were all I managed to find.

I am a bit concerned about the SOB award I received from ( the ever wonderful) Liz Strauss before this blog…uh…”evolved” into what it is today, whatever the hell that may be. It’s not that I’m not the same lovable, ‘community oriented’, ‘help your neighbor’ type of guy that I guess earned me that award in the first place but let’s just say I’ve let more of myself come through within the last year or so—tends to add a bit of crust/grit/salt into the mix shall we say. Perhaps I wouldn’t qualify as an SOB these days…or at least not in the “Successful and Outstanding Blogger” way she means it too be, who knows?

Either way, I’m proud to hang both on on the “wall” here at “JT” (Man! I just love having my own acronym!). Kinda’ shows me that I’m still able to be diversified without alienating one set of folks from another. I love being able be myself without folks tossing yesterday’s veggies in my general direction.

Thanks K8! I’ll endeavor to live up to being a “Dog’s Bollocks” as well as an “SOB”. It’s a hard job indeed but someone has to do it. And I promise to get that meme done. Shouldn’t be hard seein’ as how complaining is one of my specialities.

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