This is a long, rambling story about how my little doggie avatar came to be. Please bear with me.

When my daughter was in Middle School, I made a point of listening to her music. As she advanced to High School, we got into the habit of listening to her albums in the morning before I drove her to the place she would get on the bus that would take her to school. I discovered that I enjoyed a lot of her music, music by secular artists that I got to know through those sessions together. I discovered that I really enjoyed Jewell, the Wallflowers, Smash Mouth, and Blink 182. However, I thought it was important to do my own exploration of modern popular music and to look at Christian artists.

At the time, most of the CCM played on my local Christian radio station was drivel, and I had not developed an appreciation for modern Christian music. I figured there must be some artists out there that I could relate to, and so I dis a search on the internet. I found three, Sixpence None the Richer, Sara Groves, and Jennifer Knapp, and ordered representative albums to listen to.

When I heard Jennifer Knapp’s Kansas album, I was blown away. I instantly became a fan, bought all of her albums, and even went (with my daughter) to see her live in concert. Ms. Knapp was touring with Jars of Clay.

But then Jennifer Knapp dropped off the face of the earth. “On sabbatical” was the official story, but I really wanted to know about it if she ever came back. So I joined an online forum of Jennifer Knapp fans. I did not really fit in with the primary demographic of Knapp fans, who tended to be younger than me and female. Furthermore, I am a very shy and private person. I don’t talk much in social settings and I don’t have a lot of close friends. I determined that my online interaction would be very limited. I would present a very tightly edited version of myself.

I thought of the 1993 New Yorker cartoon. Two dogs are sitting in front of a home computer. One dog has his paws on the keyboard. He is turning to the other and saying, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

That seemed like the ideal approach. Speak my mind, share my thoughts, but leave out personal details. That way no one could judge me by appearance, by age.

And so, I chose my little doggie to be my avatar on the Jennifer Knapp forums. I now use it almost everywhere I have a presence on the ‘net. And the meaning is, “Judge me by my words, not my appearance; by the quality of my ideas, not my personal circumstances; by the courtesy of my speech, not the details of my life.”

I love housework. In my household, I am responsible for washing the dishes, running the laundry, cleaning the cat boxes, washing the bathrooms, and taking out the trash. B. cooks, vacuums, and makes long-term household decisions. The wonderful thing about housework is that it is right there in front of you. You can see what needs to be done, you do it, and it is done. The feedback is instantaneous. Two or three times a day, and at the end of dinner, I’ll walk through the kitchen and see the sink full of dishes. It is real easy to empty the dishwasher, put the dirty dishes in, if the dishwasher is full, run it, and then wipe down the counters and other surfaces. Ten or fifteen minutes of work and you have a sparkling kitchen. Immediate gratification.

The other thing I love, and will do when I am sad, is to arrange books on the bookshelves. Folks in my household take books out and then leave them on surfaces when they are bored with them. I very carefully put them on top of the books near where they should go. When I have a need to work out the frustrations of life, I go through and line up the books, filling in the ones that were taken out in their proper sequence (alphabetic by author for fiction and topical for non-fiction) and line up all the spines. That takes a little longer than cleaning up the kitchen, but the result is orderliness. It is very satisfying to be able to impose order on some small portion of ones environment.

I just got through doing both of those chores. I feel much better about life.

I have a number of sites that I use to upload pictures., mostly because folks have shared pictures with me and I needed to become a member of the site to share their pix. Of course, when I needed to share my pix, then hey! I was already a member and it was just too easy.

Snapfish fals into that category. One of my family members sent me some pix, and it was just too easy to share back. Here are some of my pictures on Snapfish:
Larry’s tour of memorials over Labor Day

One of the cool things about Snapfish, is you can share your friend’s pictures. Here are some of Gracie’s pictures on Snapfish:
Gracie’s photos from her Woman’s Retreat

I use ImageShack when I am uploading individual photos or images to share on websites and forums. Here are three examples — my weight history since March 2007, and a couple of shots of my BBQ grill.

One of the wonderful things about ImageShack is that I can either embed a thumbnail, or the actual image. If I choose a thumbnail, I can choose whether to have the image size on the thumbnail. Little geeky pleasures.

I have also use PhotoBucket to share individual photos.

I really love online conversation. I have often maintained that each individual human person is a whole world, and their thoughts, opinions and character can profitably be explored with endless interest and delight. I’m very pleased to have made a number of online friends with whom I can share any level of conversation.

Now, it is sometimes fun to have a debate. There is the excitement of competition, the challenge of matching your wits against a worthy adversary. The thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat. But in the final analysis, debate is a game. It is more a matter of scoring rhetorical points than seeking any kind of truth or any deep emotional sharing. The very last thing you want to do in a debate is to share what is really on your heart, because that opens you up to attack where you are most vulnerable. If you share your heart with a determined adversary, he will rip it out of your chest and stomp it on the ground. Game over, he wins. In a debate, you are well advised to filter out and ignore any facts presented by your opponent which do not support your narrowly stated position.

It is much more fun to have a conversation. In a conversation, you and your correspondent earnestly seek an understanding of the other’s point of view, highlight points of agreement, and identify points of disagreement. Having identified divergent points of view, a conversation will gnaw away at those differences and seek an understanding. Furthermore, a conversation recognizes that there are multiple levels at which communication can occurs. You may be discussing a set of facts, but your emotional reaction to those facts is sometimes a significant component in the communications. And, since a conversation need not be a competition, it is the most natural thing in the world to acknowledge both the facts that your correspondent is sharing and the emotions that your correspondent is expressing, thus validating your correspondent’s thoughts and feelings.

In the end, it is the sharing that provides the chief delight of conversation. In sharing what is on your heart, you get to know them, and they you. You gain the wonderful rewards which come from exploring the mind and heart of your correspondent, and they, too, receive a similar reward.

I am nuking the archive that was rolled into this blog when the Squirrels moved the MLM blogs over to WordPress. I had been using using the old blog for Bible study notes, but all those notes need to be rewritten, and there is no reason to inflict the pre-alpha version of my Bible study onto an unsuspecting world.

It is not clear what this blog is going to be. I’ve got other blogs which serve as diaries, recounting odd events that I will want to remember, or that I want to share with my friends. (E.g http://www.xanga.com/lclough23, and http://lclough23.blogspot.com/ ) Of course, the problem with that is, when stuff happens, I’m too busy to write, and when I have time to write, nothing much is going on.

So this blog should be something different, somehow. My current plan is to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Not a very elaborate plan, but simple plans have always worked for me.

Stay tuned.