How did I get from there to here?

Who knew blogging would take so much research even before I started? How did I end up in this foray into this interesting form of self-expression? After some coaxing from my mom (thanks, Mom) and some bugging of my friends ("Come on, it'll be fun"), I've decided to start a blog. I have varied interests and many opinions about how life forms around us. Some of those opinions, I do keep from those that know me in real life. So perhaps this is a way to express more than what I say to everyone around me. I don't really know. I guess I'll find out. I've tried to pull in a couple of my friends who also have interesting takes on life. We'll see what they think as we tackle this together.

There to here. I think back to high school. My mother made me take a semester typing class. I was so mad. I wanted to take French starting in 10th grade (my high school was only 10-12, you NEVER see that anymore), but, for some reason I cannot remember, I did follow my mom's advice and took the typing class. Darn good thing. One of the many good pieces of advice my mother was to give me. Fortunately, I was in high school at the cusp of the personal computer revolution. My dad, being an educator, well, we had an Apple IIe at home that I could write my history, English and government papers on. I don't even remember the word processing programs, but I do remember that I did not have to use a typewriter and worry about leaving space at the bottom for footnotes. The word processor did it all. Awesome!

There to here. In college, I tried using the Apple computer labs, but, much to my chagrin, the majority of the computer labs, and especially the ones open 24 hours, only used IBM clones and MSWord in DOS. I remember when I sheepishly walked into one of those labs and asked the student attendant how to work an IBM with MSWord--it opened up a whole new world. And my roommate still used a typewriter, though a fancy one where you could type an entire paper into its memory on a tiny little window and then print it out.

There to here. My first foray into the Internet included some listservs in my last year at college. I met people from Illinois, Australia, and around campus. Remember when "fleshmeets" were a big deal? Email was just moving beyond campuses. IRC was getting going. With a year overseas and the decision my boyfriend and I made to stick it out, email and IRC in "real time" were a big deal to us. Probably saved us a bit on the phone bills.

There to here. More internet exposure came with graduate school, when you could have internet hook up for free in married student housing. Basic html and basic world wide web pages were everywhere. I even worked on basic webpages, before they got all fancy with Flash and other fun applications. After leaving graduate school, my husband and I were hooked on email and internet surfing; we soon thereafter got our dial-up connection. There was hotmail and yahoo and then gmail. After dial up was DSL. There's work email, home email, personal email and email to keep my book writing emails separate from my blogging emails.

There to here. Then my mom, who still surfs on dial-up, and keeps track of all her virtual quilting friends through a quilting bulletin board (which I think is linked to blogs now, but I can't quite be sure) suggests that my husband, being the SAHD type, might be interested in blogging while the kids are at school. Or, maybe, I would be. So, my mother is really the blog addict. She follows some cool ones I enjoyed reading: I am Bossy, Metrodad, Waiter Rant, Sweet Juniper. I will never be that good, but she and they got me thinking. So, I tried to get my stay-at-home husband to give it a shot (nah, not his style). Then I thought about a couple of friends I know in this smallish Midwestern town that I live in. We often have definite opinions about lots of things from parenting, to nutrition for the family, to reducing our ecological footprint, to how the present politics affect us. Oh, there's been wine and Jane Austen involved as well. And we'd had discussions that would bring tears of laughter to our eyes. I thought, could we blog together?

Fast forward a few weeks later to my first post here. So there you have it. There to here.

Don't really know if we'll really strike a chord with any of you savvy bloggers in the blogosphere, or any of you savvy blog readers. But, we're crazy enough to put ourselves out there. This may last a while, or be hardly a drop in the bucket. Hopefully, we'll be mildly informative or entertaining. I'm just hoping for something not so deadly boring.