Staging a blog

Jul 7, 2013

1. Chronicles
I’m continuing my exploration of the new Fargo outliner and Trex server, and I’ve started a new test blog over at anton.smallpict.com. At first, and because I was in Cleveland at the time, I labeled that blog the Cleveland Chronicles, and I wrote an essay about visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art.

I’ve owned clevelandchronicles.com for a long time, thinking it would be a great place for a writing project if I ever moved back to that city. It’s a nice title for a publication about Cleveland, and it naturally ties in with the Zuiker Chronicles that is my family heritage.

Since I’m using Fargo to blog about other items, and since I’m back home in North Carolina, I’ve stepped that blog away from Cleveland Chronicles. But Fargo is really a joy to tinker with, and it’s quite easy to write blog posts in an outline system, and I’m about to embark on a project in Cleveland, so maybe we’ll get to use that domain soon enough.

2. Fashionable
Friday was a ScienceOnline workday, but Karyn and I took a break from planning the $20.14 from 2,014 donors before 2014 campaign to get lunch and sit on the patio at Guglhupf. We were deep in conversation about the upcoming Climate and Oceans events when another friend stopped by the table. She introduced us to her colleague and lunch companion.

“Anton writes the mistersugar blog,” she said.

I explained the meaning of mistersugar, and listed the variety of posts that make it to this blog: science and travel and food and family.

“I’ve blogged about a lot of things through the last 13 years,” I said.

“You’ve never blogged about fashion,” my friend said.

True enough — I wouldn’t know where to begin, or how to live down my many fashion mistakes over my lifetime.

3. Tattoo
My time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the South Pacific was a defining experience, and it’s given me many stories to share here in this blog and in my daily life. But, I realized sometime in the last few weeks that I’m a bit tired of talking about Vanuatu. Or, more accurately, I’m concerned that most of my writing and storytelling relies on that experience as a canvas.

Yet, over the last year, I’ve been contemplating getting the mistersugar pig or the tamtam illustration tattooed somewhere on my arm, a mark to remember the Peace Corps experience and a prompt to tell others about what it allowed me to become.

I’m at this interesting adolescence: growing out of one stage in my blogging life, maturing into another.

What kind of blogger I’ll become in this next, I don’t know. But I’m ready.

Anton Zuiker ☄