This is the tenth birthday of blogs!

Yes, according to the Wall Street Journal (which had a lovely picture of a cake shaped like a computer…I think it was a real cake, too!) it has been ten years since the blog or weblog was invented. It is so new that my spell checker insists it isn’t even a word, although the American Heritage Dictionary disagrees. Blogs seem to be inherently trivial, since they are a log of what you do or think. Just a sort of online diary, but with lots of people peeking. The first blog was truly a web log, in the sense that it was a log of what the author had recently read on the web. Some blogs have themes, like politics, others are based on a single person or subject, like the blogs of our friends (see links on the left.) A wedding or a new baby is a popular reason for a blog, so no one feels left out, no matter how far away they live. We discovered that a blog solves the problem of accidentally telling some detail to one mother and not the other, or telling one BEFORE telling the other. Now you all have an equal opportunity to see what we are up to. Well, at least in regards to the house. Unlike some people, we don’t put EVERYTHING we do on our blog. (Tries to look innocent.)

We now have a slightly better idea when our house will be finished. They will start in a week or so. About two weeks after that, they hope to do the framing (the wood that holds up the walls.) The framing takes a day and a half or two days. That sounds awfully fast, doesn’t it? Maybe it is sort of like a barn raising. After the framing is finished, it should be about 90 days until we get the keys to our finished house. So, hopefully sometime in November. I don’t know if I can wait that long! We have two boxes packed, and counting…Maybe I should make a sort of tear-off calendar, like an advent calendar for grownups. Of course, it would help if I knew exactly how long it would be… Strange bit of trivia: Some holidays not only move around the calendar, like Easter, they can’t even be predicted. Some Jewish and Moslem holidays start when the moon or a specific star is first SEEN in the sky. Given the slight wobble of the earth, atmospheric distortion, and weather, the exact day cannot be predicted. So the official date isn’t known until someone actually spots the sliver of the moon in the sky over Jerusalem. Fortunately, this is not a part of the world that experiences a lot of cloudiness. I don’t think I could handle such an unpredictable holiday, just imagine having a house full of cookies and baklava sitting around for another day and trying to keep the kids from eating them!

Amish barn raising near Mount Hope in Holmes County, Ohio