The Vagaries of Blogdom

So I return from yet another epic training weekend, this time in the hinterlands of Galena, excited about sharing my latest discoveries in cutting edge training with my eager readers in the vast blogosphere.....but first I sit down to check my email to see what exciting opportunities might be coming my way, as per my good friends in Nigeria. After deleting the usual 89 emails from Swimfan (sorry kiddo!), I notice with some curiosity that I seem to have an inordinate number of new fans of me and my blog, all very eager to meet me and expressing a lavish amount of admiration for my “talents.” Now, while I’m used to having such praise heaped on me for my triathlon accomplishments......this seems a bit excessive.

Things quickly become clear when one kindly soul takes pity on me and informs me that unless Mr. Idiot Trucker Dumping Rocks On My Car and I met up for a “very special reunion,” that I might want to check and see what pictures are lurking on my blog. And let’s just say that when I did, well, the fact that the Guiness Book has already contacted me for a world record in “deleting pictures in warp speed from one’s blog” – that should tell you something. I hardly even realized that one could find such pictures for free so easily. Apparently, instead of being happy that I was bringing his stellar cement truck photography to the world, the person who had the site from where I linked the picture SO resented my usurping a smidge of his bandwidth that he substituted that picture for one much more unsavory. Downright smuttish, even. I shouldn’t be so unsympathetic though - perhaps it’s an issue for him, having so many people linking from his pictorial in the Cement Trucks Today periodical that it crashed the lone server in all of Oklahoma? I hang my head in shame, for disrupting the Cement Truckers Unions’ sole source of entertainment.

Before the quick deletion, however, the errant picture did help me achieve a very rapid rise in popularity among the denizens of Slowtwitch, which was certainly fun while it lasted, though now that I’ve sworn that as penance I will only post benign and happy pictures of ducklings and puppies, I think my newfound popularity will sink like a stone.

But most interestingly, I’ve also expanded my fan base beyond just the triathlon world – inexplicably, I seem to have struck a chord (so to speak) among fellow music lovers and musicians. I’m not sure how they intuited that I am in fact a classically trained pianist and have played the flute for years, but suddenly I’ve been invited to join all sorts of intriguing websites, with titles such as “Girls Who Blow,” “Women and Their Pipes,” and so on. I mean, clearly those are sites for current and former flautists, right? Right?