It is unlikely that I have shared any great words of wisdom in all the posts that I have composed. However, writing has helped me get this far in life with a reasonable perspective of the world. Writing has focused my life and that of my wife. Writing has helped us live a life that is respectful of others.
My wife, Glenda, and I have had a wonderful adventure. It is even better because I have written down much of it. Some of life has been hard with sleepless nights and stressful days, but there have been plenty of enjoyable times. I have made some mistakes along the way but I have also stood up for a lot of things that I believed were important, both in Canada and here in the United States. Sometimes doing that was not easy and certainly not rewarding monetarily, but having the courage to do the right thing is how I was raised. I am proud of it and I am unlikely to change.
I am writing this post at a time (November 6, 2024) which is likely to be the beginning of a crisis that will test all of us. I fought hard to save our country as we have known it. We did not win. The kinder, gentler me says we will have to see what it looks like four years from now. I feel almost as defeated by politics as I did in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected. I moved to Canada in the summer 1971. The move was motivated by cheap farmland, not politics. We lived there until 1987, when the pull of home and family became too great. I did my first webpages in the early nineties. It was an easy transition to blogs.
The following was written in November 2023 on the nineteenth anniversary of my Typepad blog.
I started blogging on Typepad on November 23, 2004. It was just over nineteen years ago was about the new Windows computer I had just bought after working nearly twenty years at Apple. I had been using Radio software for blogging but I found it limiting compared to Typepad so I switched and somewhere along the way Radio died, and I stayed with Typepad even while expanding to other platforms and sites that I manage myself.
For a number of years, I did a post on View from the Mountain every morning. Some were short, others far too long for the average reader. I found early on that writing helped me figure out complex problems and often removed some of the emotion from tough situations. While my Applepeels blog here on Typepad had a huge following back when people were more interested in arguing about computers than politics, the size of the audience never mattered.
I sometimes think I just wanted to write down things so I could more clearly "remember" them. For whatever reason, I am still writing, and some folks are still reading so with luck perhaps I can make it to the twentieth anniversary of the blog.
If you look at the unfinished but extensive index, you see quickly that this has never been a single topic blog. It has always been whatever pops into my mind. That's not likely to change at this point.
Several years ago I tried to come up with a list of favorite posts. It was a feeble effort but the best that I could do at the time. I also have list of over sixty articles that I like on my Muckrack Profile. I now tend to post some of my longer articles at my Oracokewaves.me blog. I feel like I have more control there.
If you are reading this, I want to offer my sincere thanks. If you have been reading for several years, I trust you have enjoyed what I happen to write
I have included a favorite fall picture from the coast. In spite of its View from the Mountain title, the majority of posts were written along the NC Coast
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