Sidetracked Charley

It has been a dozen years since I began my first online journal on the now extinct Y!360. It was more than a blog and less than a chat room. And in spite of my proclamations to the contrary more than a social network. I made some long and fast friends and some not so fast as it were. And as Yahoo brought it to a close we followed each other to various other social platforms to stay connected. I came here because of its blog capacity and not its social networking. It took me a while to miss my ethernet friends that migrated to Multiply and then to Facebook grumbling all the way. I miss Y!360 still. It was a unique experiment and not everyone's cup of tea. But those of us that loved it have not been quite happy with anything else we find. And too many have learned to grumble all too well. When the dictators come out and think they can reshape the social platform and those on it I escape to the quiet of my forest - my blog - where I can do what it was I first sought the blogos...

Those that know me are probably totally mystified with another new blog. I already have, just here on Blogger, two others. Creative Journey is about my art and the creative process. Travels with Charley is now devoted almost entirely to political issues here in the United States and more specifically in the Mountain West. It did not start out as that, but was sidetracked. Ergo the name of this new blog. I am very easily sidetracked. Maybe that is the creative mind or the fact that I ran with scissors as a child. Today we call that Hyper Active Attention Deficit Disorder (HAADD). And I was happy that research has shown we don't outgrow it. Means I am not crazy. As we did not medicate scissor running kids when I was a child I did learn some discipline. I can focus but sometimes for just limited periods of times. But it is best for me to always have a wide variety of tasks or interests about so I can shift from one to the other. When painting I frequently work on as many as four at...