I love blogging, but when I sit indoors for most of a week the blog-topic light bulbs don’t even flicker in my brain, much less illuminate an interesting idea.  Cerebral power outage is the best way to describe the situation, despite the fact that this week I had many e-mail conversations as well as coffee with the other two “Blundering Bloggers,” a name inspired by the fact that we spend a lot of time stumbling in the dark.

Given my lack of inspiration, I turned to others’ blogs.   I haven’t spent that much time looking at blogs, but I follow up on friends’ recommendations, and when I do I love what I see.  When I first heard about blogs I was still working and my source was a school librarian who announced that blogging was something kids were starting to do and we adults needed to understand this trend.  I remember the superintendent calling our attention to an elementary teacher who was writing a blog to his students and praising this effort, but at the time I was underwhelmed about the whole concept.  Not much was said after that and the school district soon moved forward in a different tech direction. Now blogs are more prevalent than fleas on a cat.  But instead of looking at them with disdain as I might have 10 years ago, I find myself delighted to peek through this window into other people’s lives.

I began my descent into blogomania by subscribing to the other Blunderer’s blogs: travelnwrite and Education and Community.  From there I tried out The Pioneer Woman, which tells about a home on the range (a working cattle ranch), and the life of a city-bred wife who is one of its inhabitants. (I dropped this one after awhile, because I got tired of the frequent commentary about her cowpoke husband’s hindquarters.)  I followed up on another recommendation for The Daily Coyote, which tracks the life of a woman raising Charlie the coyote, who was dropped on her doorstep when he was 10-days old.  It is more accurate to say that it has been following the life of the coyote over the past three years, rather than the life of his caretaker.

Yesterday I received a link to a blog about the life of Navajo artist Quincy Tahoma by two authors of an about-to-be-published book on this topic.  The blog features his art, information about life on the Navajo reservation in the early twentieth century, and descriptions of his artistic accomplishments.  Another friend told me about a couple, friends of hers, who are writing as they travel by car around the U.S. for a year, which for them is a transition period between selling their home and moving into a “continuous care retirement community,” a change necessitated by the wife’s illness.  Their blog is called A Year not in Provence.  And finally, I learned that this couple had a blogging granddaughter, who set a goal in second grade of reading all the Newberry Medal winning books before fifth grade and met it.  She has written book reviews of these and all the other books she has read. Her grandparents say they are happy to have me read their blog, since their granddaughter has 71 followers on hers, ten times what they have, and “that’s the only hope we have for catching up to her popularity.”