Well, I'm bloggin', yes, indeed, and I'm bloggin', for all to see...

Just recently I discovered how to change the appearance of my blog, Gullible’s Travels. Anyone with half a hundred technology IQ could have figured out how to do that a long time ago. I’ve been blogging almost a year, and I finally found the template site. I’m a slow tech learner.

So, I changed the template, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t recognize what I wanted until Beth at Switched at Birth started messing with her template and look, which is really classy and not overdone. The thing that always impressed me was the quote under her blog title: And in the midst of Winter, I found within myself an Invincible Summer. Albert Camus.

Is that classy, or what? I mean, she reads Camus and dreams about conversations with Aristotle, for Pete’s sake. And she’s a very, very good writer, so if you like writing done well, and photos of luscious seafood dinners, visit her site by all means. She lives in a long leaf pine forest in Florida, up there near Pensacola—just a ways north of the manatees.

Then I went searching some other blogs I follow, to see if there were any more inspirational quotes or succinctly worded descriptions of their blog. There are links to all of them over there on the sidebar on the right, if you want to check them out. Tell ‘em Gullible sent you. This is what I found:

Fig Mince. This cool dude lives on an island off the eastern coast of Australia and has an eye for the ironic and outrageous, all cleverly posted at his blog. This is his own description: Bitz and pizzas of trivitudinous krap and komment. You gotta go there!

Wayfarer Walk: This could only come from the mind of Walk. Yep, that’s certainly true. Walk lives in Oklahoma, and his sense of humor must be home-grown because it reminds me of the song from the musical Oklahoma! You know the song, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. Okay, so it’s not the title that describes Walk’s humor, it’s the third line of lyrics, “…the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye…” (Wait a minute. If you led an elephant into a corn field to measure the height of the corn, there wouldn't be much corn left untrampled to measure, would there? But, I digress...)

Walk and I have this cyber-understanding. You know the old saying, “throw a monkey wrench into the works?” Walk and I each have an infinite supply of monkey wrenches that we heave at each other constantly. He has another blog, and it’s called:

Romantic Walk. Now, he really does write and post some beautiful romantic pieces here. Not too long ago he asked readers to post their favorite all time romantic movie scene. He started with the beach scene in From Here to Eternity and the final factory scene in An Officer and a Gentleman. A reader suggested one from Love is a Many Splendored Thing. My monkey wrench arrived with the scene from Old Yeller when the dog defends two characters from rabid wolves.

Then, he started posting love quotes. A suitable monkey wrench arrived from yours truly. If you want to read it, click on comments at the end of his post, and all will be revealed. And as long as we're on the the subjects of comments, be advised we bloggers live for them. They sustain us. They nourish us. They encourage us to produce more of this stuff. They are like great big atta-boys. We love them all out of proportion to reality. So, please. Leave a comment.

Daddy Scratches. Daddy is a thirty-something work-from-home music journalist in Boston, raising two young kids with his wife Wonder Woman. Under his blog title is this: Your front row seat to my nervous breakdown. Cool and funny stuff at Daddy Scratches. Besides, it's fun to hear a grown man cry.

Half-Assed Kitchen. This is a cooking/recipe site that bills itself as: Eh…it’s edible.

Paper Cut Screams. My cyberpal Shaddy just started her blog and already found the template section, the one that took me a year to figure out. She also is finding a new sense of responsibility to her readers, and very soon she will discover the weight of that responsibility to produce. She writes: I’ve learned that I can make any day worthy of my efforts if I take time to put my impression of it down in my own words. Now, that’s classy, too. I'm waiting for Shaddy to stop minding her manners, and let loose with her sense of humor. But then, maybe Shaddy thinks because she's posting stuff for the WHOLE WORLD to read, she must strive for literature.

And that brings me to the blog of the year, which is the award The Pioneer Woman recently won, along with a couple others for her blog, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, who doesn't care one whit for literature or minding her manners. Ree, said Pioneer Woman, writes of her life that flew from black pumps and fashionable clothing in Los Angeles, to being the down on the ranch wife of Marlboro Man, and the four children that followed, in Oklahoma. How does she title her blog? Like this: Plowing through life in the country…one calf nut at a time. I love her blog. I love her recipes. I voted for her in the Bloggies contest.

Thus inspired by my favorite blogs, I decided I needed something to dress up my blog title, a great quote that distilled the philosophical essence of my very own blog that’s posted on the web for any and all to see, to be enlightened by it, and to grasp the whole meaning of life as I know it. It’s up there, under the title Gullible’s Travels. See it? It’s a great one from S. I. Hayakawa, that scholar, university president and U.S. Senator. He must have known I’d need it when he said it: I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose.