First Blog Post - finally!

My new website is finally live, and that is my cue to start my blog.  It was supposed to be completed by the time we left on a road trip from Indiana to Maine to visit my brother, but I have managed to put it off.  Aside from the fact that I was sick with the flu and bronchitis for two weeks, which was a legitimate excuse for being slowed down, specially while I was travelling from Tasmania to the USA, the truth is that I’m afraid, which is something I try to be mindful of, and avoid as much as possible.  But talking about your life is one thing, actually writing it down is a whole different story, one of many that you hope people will be interested in hearing even after you’ve accidently pressed the wrong button and sent out some rant about a wildly inappropriate subject.

I have been writing since I was a teenager and developed an unspoken agreement with my French teacher that she wouldn’t embarrass me by calling on me in class, and I would use the time productively by writing and then be OK with an F at the end of term.  Other students enjoyed reading my stories and then, in a moment of teenage angst, I burned all my writing and rarely had anyone read it after that.

Still I kept writing and wondering if there was something I should actually do with it until recently, when something shifted.  This blog is now something I just know I have to do.  It’s like a freight train that has been building momentum up a long, slow hill and is just about the crest the top and start on a runaway course over which I have no say or control.  Hopefully it’s heading towards the “brilliant, successful blogs this way” sign, rather than the “crash and burn” one.

One of my biggest challenges has been a less than satisfactory relationship with the digital world.  I spent twenty years operating a massage practice and being thankful that it was something that could never be taken over by computers.   But then I found myself living in Tasmania and owning my little tourism business and discovering that the world of computers and websites and SEO’s and Facebook was one I could no longer ignore.  One of the best quotes I’ve read lately was by Mignon McLaughlin “What you can’t get out of, get into wholeheartedly” and I knew it was talking to me. Still, it sat on my desk for at least a year before I succumbed to its message. 

Something finally shifted a couple of months ago when I was forced by various unexpected blessings in disguise to step up.  My new website was one of them, and also thinking, falsely, that my desktop computer had a virus so I finally had to start using my laptop. I had bought it with the proceeds of a small business grant program, knowing that I needed it, but every time I looked at it, it gave me the same sort of pangs induced by an untouched weight set or yoga mat in the corner of a room. 

Now I’ve reached the point where my relationship with my laptop is finally starting to gel and we can go on the road together.  We have had a rough start, like meeting the man you end up married to for thirty years and anyone watching you dance together for the first time wouldn’t have given the relationship a week!  

But that relationship’s still going, nearly 32 years later, as we set off on a road trip across Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey to visit our niece, before heading north to Maine.  My website can wait a few more days, and hopefully those reading will ignore the naivety and ignorance of a digitally challenged author and be patient, knowing that a relationship that started out with so many awkward missteps actually has a chance of being a keeper!

Check out the new website at www.islandtimetours.net.au  It’s not fancy or sophisticated but it’s mine, and I pretty much understand it, which to me is a daily miracle!

Thanks for listening…

Rosie