Writing Blogs

The other day I realized that I'm just about the only guy who regularly updates the family blog. Any of the other guys out there (not that they read this blog) write at least portions of their family blogs? Kristi writes a number of posts too, of course. Her posts are the more interesting ones; mine are very random while her posts usually focus more on activities that the family did. I do have a couple other blogs I write (but they are on hiatus for the time being until school starts to calm down a bit) though - psychology and politics.

I think one reason I write posts on here is because I'm a student. As busy as students are, we seem to have a lot of random times that we can do random things; I sometimes choose to write. I'm going to digress for a minute - those of you who know me know that I like to digress a lot. Kristi told me the other day that I'm one of the few people she knows who can actually interrupt themselves (i.e., start talking about one thing - jump in with another - then try to figure out where I was; I can always trace my train of thought from the new thought back to the original one though). That reminds of this one time.... OK, just joking. Back when my sisters started going off to college (a few years ago now) my parents started the tradition of calling them every Sunday. This tradition has continued over the years as we have expanded our families. We all generally try to call weekly - well, I guess I can only speak for myself. Anyway, my father also started the tradition of sending out his journal every week to all the children as a weekly email (I recently read in the Ensign that Pres. Eyring sends out his daily journal to all the kids and grandchildren). Kristi and I have adopted this tradition - partly because it is a way for us to keep some sort of journal - and send out weekly emails to our families. Traditionally, I've written the bulk of those emails with Kristi adding in her activities and correcting my multitudinous mistakes (there aren't that many mistakes - I just wanted to use a fun word and create a little alliteration). My writing the weekly family updates (more recently Kristi has been the one doing most of the writing) spilled over on this blog. This is the reason I do a lot of the writing here on our family blog.

Another reason is that there is nothing more important than family and there is nothing I like writing about more than family (well, gospel topics are tied with family for me). Writing is a bit of catharsis too, where even mindless drivel like most of what I write helps me process the activities of my life and my thoughts. Our brains are amazing and can remember many things but they are not perfect. We forget a lot if we don't write it down. I don't know how many times I've gone back and read journals and thought, "Oh, I'd totally forgotten that!" So I write posts on our blog. Some are written for others to enjoy (or at least tolerate) and some are merely written for the benefit of myself. If I hadn't written so much (and almost as it happened) about my trip to Wales, many of the memories would be gone (I believe that they would still be in my brain somewhere, I just wouldn't have access to them in this life). If I hadn't written about shrieking squirrels or screeching hawks, those memories likely would be at most ephemeral. So I blog.