Friday Four

1. I'm on the mend. The baby got sick during the last couple of days of our recent house-hunting trip to St. Louis. By coincidence -- or so I thought -- I came down with a cold the next day. Whatever it was, it wasn't your average cold: I felt awful all day yesterday and ended up having to nap for part of the time my sitter was here. I had a fever last night, but it has broken. I'm not 100% yet, but feel much better and am counting my lucky stars that I avoided the trifecta of (1) travelling with a baby, (2) the baby being ill, and (3) being sick myself. I now think that I contracted whatever virus the baby had.

2. One day, I hope to make the trip to Old Blighty to see Arsenal play. Needless to say, an account, by another supporter who did the same, made me smile:

At the ground you follow the advice of the supporters club. Arrive at Arsenal tube stop and walk past Highbury, visit the shops and vendors, hit up the pub, buy a new kit at the armoury to commemorate the visit, check out all of the history around [Arsenal Stadium]. Ok, people are entering the ground, you're too excited to wait. You push against the people in front of you as if you are going to miss kick-off, which is in an hour. A steward gives you a look as if you are an annoyance, rather than just a rookie, inexperienced like the first time you bed a woman.

My wife's of Irish descent, and a trip to see her relatives in Ireland is inevitable. Perhaps, while we're so close, we'll make a side trip to England.

3. Some time ago, Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic posted a "family portrait" of the Mars rovers, Sojourner, Spirit, and Curiosity. Madrigal goes on to elaborate on the relative sizes of each. It is interesting that our first rover weighed only 23 pounds and traveled a total of 330 feet, while the current rover weighs a ton and is designed to last at least 23 Earth months.

4. Scott Berkun offers some interesting thoughts about different kinds of writing. Among them:

Some bloggers confuse publishing with keeping a diary. It's not the same. No matter how open a blogger is about what they will share, they will write about those things differently if they are writing for other people (blog) vs. writing just for themselves (diary). I've kept a diary for over 20 years. It's where I go to safely explore my own thoughts and feelings free from judgement by anyone else. If I wrote those entries knowing other eyes would see them I'd write differently, and lose some of my intimacy with myself.  While working at WordPress.com I was writing so much in so many different places, including keeping a separate journal with notes for the next book, that I didn't write in my diary often. I missed the power I got from just writing for myself.

It's tempting to call his blog post an "anti-blogging manifesto", but it isn't, any more than sprinting is "anti-marathoning". That said, writers who blog would do well to consider what he says in relation to how blogging fits in with their other writing.

-- CAV