Next blog

Every once in awhile while I'm noodlin' around I'll hit the Next Blog button at the top of the page and drop into someone else's world, if only for a few seconds, just to get a taste of what's out there.

Flipping through the pages at not quite Coverflow speed on iTunes, just enough to see the general subject at hand, a photo, or the language it's written in.

Sometimes this linear meandering ends abruptly, as the Next Blog button disappears.

Other times it moves along briskly, and you realize one cannot scratch the surface of the surface of the 10,000 new weblogs that are generated DAILY. Not that you would want to.

One more thing. Not to end on a bummer note, but the mother of a friend of a friend is losing her battle with cancer this week. I don't know the friend or his mother, but I'm familiar with their story, and my friend is going to be with them on this sad weekend. So my thoughts are with them.

Connections

Since November of last year I've reconnected with a bunch of old friends via The FacceBoooooook (that's Italian for Facebook), and boy it's been fun. Really. Both K and I have been lucky to have had the experience in life of growing up in multiple places (that was the hook that got me and K talking when I first met her) since our dads both worked for the US Govt (military and Foreign Service). So besides my cousins who are all over the world now, I've got friends from 2 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, 2 high schools, college, grad school (the failed attempt), the bike shops, architecture school (the successful attempt), the career, my riding buddies, my neighborhood friends, and the friends that we have come to know by what our kids do (and where they are schooled) who are all, in some way, back in touch via FB. Pretty amazing, and the memories have been flowing.

The old fashioned (that is, e-mail) way of communicating, however, yielded an interesting exchange this last week. My packrat freshman year in college hallmates started sending out scans of pictures, missives, screeds, and other such gimcrackery to a select few of us, just to stir up the old recollections and for a few yuks. Two weeks ago, totally unrelated, one of my hallmates when I was an R.A. in college started commenting anonymously on my blog, making reference to some people and stories that made me realize it wasn't spam. The guessing game began, and it was fun for a while, but I figured that since these comments happened on the same weekend as Homecoming, there may be a connection. A quick conversation with my sister in law, who was also AT homecoming, yielded the answer, and just for fun I posted one of the pics that my friends had sent me last month.

Turns out that some guy who raced at DCCX with me (though I didn't see him, since he passed me once in the first lap and lapped me somewhere near the end, though I must have seen him twice, from behind) recognized the pic as the BROTHER OF SOMEONE HE WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL WITH. Some quick email correspondence confirmed this, and I'm still shaking my head at the coincidental events that yielded me:

1. A reconnection with a couple of college friends that went beyond the "friending" process on FB.

2. A new acquaintance who I will now see every coupla weeks in the fall at CX races.

3. One more person who reads this blog, for a total of 3 readers!

When I was a kid I watched this BBC show called Connections. Not that this is nearly that complex, but still...