Looking back, maybe learning

I saw this over at Judi's and thought it was a good idea. I've been running short of those lately, so I thought I'd steal it. January is a good time to sum up the previous year, and I'm taking the first sentence from the first entry of each month of the year.

January, February and March -- blogging black out.

April -- I wanted to start this entry with a picture of the Bride of Frankenstein captioned, "It's Alive."

May -- Silliness has power -- tremendous power when used well.

June -- I just returned from taking the womanchild over to her boyfriend's house.

July -- blogging black out.

August -- Step One. You sit down and open your blog.

September -- Right now I am without license and car.

October -- It's been a hell of a week.

November -- One of my daily pleasures lately has just been looking out my front window late in the afternoon.

December -- I've been back at work for a week now.

Well, this revealed that I lead a pretty boring life, which really isn't news. What I did learn from it is that I don't start my blog entries well. There's a little ditty in Florence King's autobiography, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, that I can barely remember, but its meaning stuck me. Very poorly paraphrased... Grab your reader right from the start, hold them close, don't let them depart. Apparently I didn't learn that lesson too terribly well, but I did enjoy looking back through my last year of blogging.

You know it hurt to go without blogging as long as I did this last year. I missed the connections. I missed finding new blogs and new writers and new lives to discover and explore. I also learned that while this is just a blog, it's a practice in writing that helps me write away from my tiny sector of this public forum. The more I blog, the more I write elsewhere. That was definitely worth noting.