Welcome

Welcome to my blog. Please join me on Our Rainy Journey. I hope you enjoy it. I plan to write about things on the journey of life that interest me. When I wonder if you may be interested as well, I shall blog about it.

I want to explain my choice of a name: I wanted pluviophile, but it was taken. Pluviolover was not—close enough. I am a pluviophile, which is a lover of rain; someone who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days. I will indeed be writing about rain and my reaction to it. I will not do that often, but if you’re curious, do look in.

Additionally, I want to write about the importance of how we feel; about happiness and laughter, the human condition, and the dark side. I want to write about love, art, pain and suffering. And I want to write about rain, walking, and doing.

I also want to write about my more current, albeit brief, experience as a writer. I believe that we are all writers, we are all in this together, and we learn from each other. Writing has been, and is, a discovery for me, inside and out.

While I consider myself to be happy, I am enigmatically intrigued by our human nature and enjoy dark poetry and exploration of the human condition, especially as it applies to the dark side of our nature.

Recently, I had the opportunity to decide where I wanted to live. I chose the Pacific Northwest, in western Washington State. I have been here about a year and I love it, so far.

I like music, rain, romance, comedy, adventure, mystery, and fantasy. Oh, and food. Second oh, and beer. I like food and beer. If there is ever a longevity study on survival rates for people who live on stout and Italian food, I plan to volunteer. Third oh, I should not forget coffee.

While politically active and opinionated, I’ll avoid talking about religion and politics. I’ve had numerous discussions and debates over the years on both topics. I can’t recall changing anyone’s mind or having my thinking altered a smidgen. I was given the gift of the opinion of others and I’ve learned from that. I appreciate the people who do write on those two topics, but I shall not contribute.

I am new to the blogosphere. I have read that posting on my blog only a time or two a week is a good start. I will do what I can. However, there is a challenge that some of my friends are tempting (daring?) me with: the A to Z Blog Challenge during the month of April. I believe I will do that. It will mean posting on my blog every day, topically assigned to a specific letter of the alphabet, in order. My theme will be all of the above. Let me see now, A is for….

Bloom Later

This little ditty I found made me think.

“I regret nothing in my life; even if the past was full of hurt…I still look back and smile. Because it made me who I am today.”

I support and encourage others to write their memoir. Other people encourage me to write mine. I should, but I haven’t. I’m thinking about it. I’m not sure how I will do that. I have to wonder, though. Would that experience get me to “look back and smile?” Would I discover what is was that “made me who I am today?”

Another meme I saw was,

“When a man dies, that particular vision of life that is his, and his alone, dies with him. Therefore, it behooves every man to tell his story, his unique vision.”

The value of such writing is ironically unselfish. Any story about me is not for me, except that in the discovery process only I would experience the memory for it what it is, and the story for what it was. It is, as perhaps all art and writing should be, for the reader and the looker. Would anyone ever ask, “What was it about him? What was he like? What did he do?”

Being born shortly after the end of the Second World War has placed me at the front of the Baby Boomer generation. For years I have lead my generation into a crowd. There were, and still are, many of us. We were there in the 1960s, enjoying the music and revolutionary attitude of the time. In the 70s we had our young adult experiences. Our children were born in the 70s and 80s and are called Generation X. In the 80s and 90s, we did our thing made the world what it was for us. Those were our career and adult growth years.

As we crossed the Y2K panic, some of us started to mellow and to wind things down. The millennial century found us touching career capstones and looking ahead to watching grandchildren grow and experiencing our own retirement. Now, tossing about age numbers from the fifties up to being septuagenarians, we remember that we have ‘been there and done that.’

Anyone of any age, but especially those of us over the age of fifty, should be thinking about writing memoir. There is bountiful assistance available through books, on line resources, ghost writers, or from friends and family. We should be writing and telling them our stories so that our unique vision lives on, long after we do.