Turtles, Ducks and a Heron

From that one day a couple of months ago when I was so trigger-happy with my camera. But it was really cool-looking!

There were more turtles out than I have ever seen at the same time, before or since, and it seemed like they were all sunning themselves.

These were sitting on the tubing which is somehow connected to the dredging of the lake-- a LOT of turtles were on the tubing that day.

The ducks and the turtles didn't seem to mind each other much.

And this is as close as I could get to the heron I saw.  I was afraid you wouldn't be able to see it at all, but this picture came out OK.

Blogessence

I started this blog for a couple of reasons. For one, I had dreams of Becoming A Writer, and I figured that if I had a(n at least nominally) public forum in which I expected myself to express ideas in a comprehensible format on a regular basis, then I would be forced to work on my writing on an equally regular basis. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of writer I wanted to be, so the first blog descriptor lines that I used (“whatever I feel like writing at the time”) made perfect sense.

And yet, there was a further sense of purpose, even from the beginning. My first posting was about the death of one of my uncles, and how I mourned not just his passing but the passing of my chance to become closer to a man who had taken it upon himself to connect me more firmly to an extended family which—reflecting the attitudes of my own parents—wasn’t quite sure what to do with its first old maid in a generation. I wanted to express, even though in most senses it was too late, my appreciation for his making me feel even a little more at home with my family. As I continued to write, I found myself gravitating to subjects which help me figure out how to make myself feel at home even in the unexpected--you may laugh, and I actually don't mind, but it's still true-- as I say, the unexpected circumstance of being a grownup who needs a home, but who has neither of the most usual prerequisites in my home culture: a husband or a house of my own.

I come from quite the line of wanderers; I feel a keen wanderlust myself; and yet I feel equally a keen pang of longing for a true sense of home, which in some ways I have assuaged by blogging about what I think a Proper Home could and/or should be like. And realizing that I was doing this is partly what led me to my current blog descriptor, which (to finally answer N’s question) comes from the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews, in the New Testament, and is one of my favorite scriptures ever.

[And I would love to blog about being an Incredibly Mormon (not to mention More Than Faintly Victorian) person and living in a larger society which "gets" me, in some ways, better than my Mormon subculture does, but that will have to wait.  This posting that you're reading right now, since I promised it in the last posting, caused a long-ish, unplanned pause in my blogging, which I do not wish to repeat.]