Let me say right off that, for those of you who would be writers but aren't sure how to go about it, you will find wonderful help in the Ursula LeGuin essay "Talking About Writing" (page 195 of The Language of the Night, a collection of LeGuin's essays edited by Susan Wood). I mention this up front because, while I am confident that I will have your attention at least as far as the end of the first sentence, I am less confident that you will still be with me at the end of this one.

So, I figured I had better get that piece of information out there. Later, I will tell you how to make your own glass cleaner, superior to any brand-name variety, and at a fraction of the cost . . . and those two things might be the only things I know that will be of any interest, certainly of any use, to anyone else.

Now, you might think from the forgoing that Ursula LeGuin is one of my favorite writers. Well, she isn't, although she is very good. LeGuin did, in fact, write one of the few "I-couldn't-put-it-down" novels I've read (The Left Hand of Darkness). Actually my favorite authors (I believe bloggers are required to inform their readers of such particulars) are John Steinbeck (only his so-called 'lesser fiction' such as Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, and Travels with Charley), E. B. White (Charlotte's Web, of course, but really his essays which are the writer's craft brought to perfection), and Sally Jenkins (the sports columnist - who in every column manages to think of something I wish I had been smart enough to think of myself). And then there is Jane Austen - to paraphrase Rex Stout, no one ever wrote as well as Jane Austen. Unless it was Edmund Rostand whose unmatched Cyrano conveys in 5 short lines the inspiring power of true love so completely that the words vibrate on the page. And then there is . . . well, the list gets rather long after that and so I'd better stop now.

If you have read this far, you may think that this blog will be about books; or, perhaps, about writing. Well, it isn't.

It's about other things. Principally, it is about satisfying a classroom requirement (CMSY129 - Howard Community College) to create and post to a blog. And having said that, I need to take care of some housekeeping here as one of the project requirements is to post a short introduction of myself -- here goes: I was born in 1953 and grew up in Washington DC back in the days when you could sit on the North bank of the Potomac and look across the water at corn fields in Virginia and listen to the Watergate (then a converted ferry-boat with a band) as it chugged up and down the river. I love boats, old ships, and the sea and so gravitated to the Coast Guard (all their ships are old) where I spent a happy and useful 30 years. I am now unemployed and back in school - it's kind of like being 18 again.

That's introduction enough lest I start telling sea stories and then you'll have to listen to me explain how I learned that when a volcano blows a 40,000ft plume of rock and ash into the air - the big rocks come down first.

So, a check mark for project item #4. If you are still reading, thanks for your support and I'll leave a post on your project blog.