Before I go much further, it seems as if I should spend a little time exploring where the idea for this experimental memoir came from. Somewhere along the way, a group of bloggers came up with National Blog Posting Month. The idea was for bloggers to put up at least one blog post a day for the whole month. I started doing this, and I believe its been a couple years since a day has passed without me submitting a blog post.

In some cases, the blog posts were very simple, a Wordless Wednesday post where I simply cross posted a picture from Flickr. There have been some blog posts where I’ve written about how I just didn’t feel like I had anything to say that day. It became a discipline, a writing exercise. Sometimes, the blog posts that emerged when I confronted the blank page were some of the better ones I came up. Sometimes, they were pretty bad.

At one point, I spent a little time checking to see how many words I was writing a year for my blog. I believe one year, it was over three hundred thousand words, or the equivalent of over six NaNoWriMo novels. If I doubled my output, it would be the equivalent of writing a novel a month, for every month of the year.

Now, writing a novel is often a bit different than writing a blog post. You need to develop the characters, the plot, the setting. You need a through line. Yet, I’d suggest that the same applies to blog posts. The character may simply be the author. The setting may be simply where the author goes, and the through line may be the niche the blog resides in, or some underlying thread that ties the blog posts together.

These thoughts led me to the next idea that brought me to the idea of this experimental memoir. I was attending some meetings at The Grove, a co-working space in New Haven, CT. The topic was about finding your story. For me, the take away was about living your life as if it were the great American novel, or at least a collection of great American short stories. This became an underlying thought for some of my blogging and led to the forming of the idea for this memoir.

When I mentioned the idea to my wife, she said that it made her think of Virginia Woolf. Back in my senior year of college, I discovered the writing of Virginia Woolf and loved it. I frequently go back to Mrs. Dalloway, or To The Lighthouse. If I could just capture a little bit of her magic in my writing, I would be a happy man. As I thought more about it other great writers came to mind, whom I alluded to at the beginning.

So, this memoir brings together several different ideas, and it is something that my blog writing has been leading up to. I’ve tried to be more descriptive in my blog posts of late, to capture scenes that would normally escape me and this bring me back to the story.

This morning started off much like yesterday, with a few variations. Our dog Wesley hopped up on the bed around 5:35 in the morning. He snuggled next to us, practically lying on top of me, until the alarm went off. Getting up was difficult with him next to me, but he spilled off of the bed and then followed me downstairs.

My bathrobe was hanging in the bathroom where I had left it Monday morning. I slipped it on, headed downstairs, slipped on some shoes and took Wesley out for his morning pee. I came back inside, had some oatmeal, but away some dishes, and visited a few websites, all in my standard fashion.

There was one difference. Yesterday at work, the agency provided pizza to the employees, so the lunch I had brought to work yesterday was still waiting for me in the office refrigerator, so I didn’t bring the little blue lunch bag I normally carry.

I did have the silver travelling coffee mug, which I fill with a cup and a half of black decaf coffee, my keys, two cellphones, and bag with my laptop and a collection of wires. One of the phones I have is a Nokia N900 phone. I received it as an early Christmas present nearly two years ago. It runs a version of the Linux Operating System set up for cell phones and I’ve had a great time writing programs for it, as well as writing blog posts about these projects.

The other phone that I carry is a work phone. It is an HTC Thunderbolt running Android. I have configured it as a social media device, which I use to post to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and many other sites. It is set up to support both my personal social media accounts as well as many work related social media accounts I support. Unfortunately, this results in my burning through the battery pretty quickly.

It is only recently that I’ve started carrying a laptop again. When I consulted and travelled to New York City, I would always have a laptop with me, either some machine running Windows, or, as money got tighter, some old laptop retrofitted to run Linux. These machines generally performed quite well for me, but they could be flaky as components died.

At work, I was editing videos and I needed something better than Microsoft Movie Maker for editing. I ended up with a wide screen MacBook Pro. Since then, I’ve been using it as I attend conferences which I seem to be doing more and more frequently.

Our house is on a fairly wooded lot and this morning, I walked out the front door, down the two cement steps to the stone and dirt patio, and then up three steps to the tarmac driveway. This is normally where my car would be parked. However, the October snow storm had brought down a large tree branch in the driveway. I had trimmed away enough of it, so that I could squeak my car past the large downed branch. I didn’t want to risk things, so I parked further up the driveway. In the morning, I walked up the driveway, past the branch, past the car my wife drives and up to my car.

When I was a kid, I learned to drive in a green Chevy pickup truck with three on the tree. I used that phrase recently and was surprised to hear that the people around me didn’t know the phrase. Put simply, it was a three speed manual transmission with the shift lever coming out of the side of the steering column. It was normally contrasted with four on the floor, for a four speed manual transmission with the shifter on the floor between the driver seat and the passenger seat.

The old green pickup truck was really more like two and a half on the tree which doesn’t rhyme, and didn’t really handle all that well either. You see, first gear was starting to go, and that made it all the more difficult to learn to drive.

This was in north western Massachusetts where we often had icy and snowy winters, and I learned to start that truck heading up an icy hill. It may be those experiences that led me to never really enjoy driving all that much, but to feel pretty confident in the driving conditions I confronted.

The first car of my own that I bought was a 1962 Volvo. This was a few years after college when I took a job in New Jersey. There were various problems when the carburetor died or the brakes failed, but those are other stories, and for the most part it was a wonderful car.

I went through several other cars, including a Toyota Camry, a 1960 Jaguar Mark II, and a Ford Escort station wagon. Each car has its own set of stories, and maybe I’ll tell them at some point.

When we moved to Woodbridge, Kim’s parents got us a black 1997 Nissan Altima, probably fearing for the lives of their daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter when they saw what shape the Ford Escort had deteriorated to.

The Altima is a workhorse and everyone I know who has had one has driven them forever. The black car, as we refer to it, to differentiate it from the Grey Prius that Kim drives, has around one hundred and sixty thousand miles on it. On a normal day, I put another fifty miles on it heading to and from work. It gets surprisingly good mileage of around twenty eight miles per gallon. While it shows its wear and too often has too much junk in it, it is a very comfortable car that has served me well.