by Pa Rock
Shameless Typist
Today marks my 5,000th posting to this blog! Although it is only my 4,848th day of writing the blog, there have been days when I felt compelled to post multiple times - and the grand total of all of that effort has now reached 5,000 individual entries!
I began this effort on a warm November evening just a month or so after moving to Phoenix, Arizona. The new feeling had begun to wear off of the big city, and I was sitting at home feeling a bit lonesome. That evening on a whim I decided that I would learn how to blog. Unfortunately, I proved to be a quick learner, and within an hour or so had named my blog and posted the first entry. The exact date was November 4th, 2007, and that is important because that first entry was entitled "Obama '08," and it was my rationale for supporting Barack Obama's presidential candidacy - and exactly one year later, on November 4th, 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.
Now, in recapping the achievements of this blog, I guess it would be worthwhile to note that it has stretched through four presidential administrations. The Ramble was around for over a year of the George W. Bush presidency, all of the Obama and Trump presidencies, and now is still up and functioning as the Biden turn in the White House gets underway. Pa Rock's Ramble has been around to witness a lot of history - and has commented on a fair amount of it.
I've always had an interest in American politics, so a lot of what has appeared in Pa Rock's Ramble has mirrored that interest. I also like to travel, and a host of travel adventures have turned up in this forum as well. I have blogged from Arizona to Missouri, from New York City to Portland, Oregon, from Alaska to Hawaii, across the Caribbean - including Cuba, and out into the Far East. I blogged every day of the two years that I lived and worked on Okinawa, and I posted entries from South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Guam. I have posted entries from computer labs on cruise ships - which charged by the minute for the privilege, and it was in one of those cruise ship computer labs where I introduced myself to the person sitting and typing next to me - American novelist E.L. Doctorow.
One time - at the computer lab in the Dragon Hill Hotel at the US Army Base in Yongsan, South Korea - I was denied access to my own blog because that base had decided it was "hate speech." (I've been accused political bias, but "hate speech" was a first!) In order to meet my daily self-imposed deadline, I went to the Base PX, bought a small laptop, and found a wifi-hotspot in the city where I could get access to the internet. Another time, when I went into the hospital for heart surgery in 2013, I had my son, Tim, pinch hit for me on the blog while I was out of commission.
It took a lot of effort, but the blog kept running!
As an avid reader, I began posting reviews of many of the books that I read. I also used Pa Rock's Ramble to collect many of the things that I had written in the past. At one time in my checkered history I was part-owner of a small newspaper and one of my duties there had been writing a weekly fictional column called "Doin' the Sales with Rusty Pails" - a first-person account of a wizened old bachelor and his oddball friends who attended auctions and got into lots of mischief. There are fifty or so "Rusty Pails" pieces scattered in the archives of this blog.
There was other fiction as well including several short stories that I crafted over the years. One that stirred some attention was a tale about strange things that were happening around a trailer (double-wide mobile home for you snobs) that I lived in for awhile in Phoenix. It was serialized fiction, and I thought that was obvious, but when I got to the part about hearing a sneeze coming from beneath the trailer, Tim immediately called from Kansas wanting to know if I was okay. Then a day or so later his sister called him worried that "Dad has a homeless person living under his trailer!" Then a cousin from Missouri emailed saying how much he was enjoying "the story." I was surprised and pleased to know that people were actually reading my work - even if they were just relatives!
But other things that I wrote were getting read as well - far beyond family. I penned a piece about Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords a year or so before she was shot and several others were killed at a "listening" event in Tucson, and on the day of the shooting more than a thousand people pulled up that posting for information on the congresswoman. Several years ago I also wrote a piece about the Agofsky brothers, whom I knew, who murdered Noel, Missouri, banker Dan Short, a friend of mine. That posting continues to draw more readers and comments than any other piece in the history of this blog.
The Ramble contains lots of personal accounts of things that have happened in my life, stories about my kids and grandkids, as well as a fair amount of family history. Beginning last month I have incorporated a fairly regular "Ancestor Archives" feature in which I sort through all of my old family files and notes and then profile a different ancestor each week. If all goes as planned, at some point I will collect those under a separate cover, have them bound, and then distribute to relatives and a few local libraries.
So that is roughly where this is at - thirteen years, three months, and a few days after that initial piece about presidential aspirant Barack Obama. I've written quite a bit about family, politics, society, and things that interest me - and for the time-being I will probably keep on typing - but I seriously doubt that I will be banging out the blog for much longer. Time grows short and there are too many other demands. I have bird feeders to tend to and grandchildren to see!
Thanks for stopping by and listening to an old man prattle on.
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