January 17, 2018 - Wednesday
8 degrees/cloudy skies/windy
Pentoga Road

I'm sitting here this morning, my mind a complete blank. Maybe it's time to take my quarterly break from writing, just a day or two, possibly three or four. One day is the carbon copy of the next and day in and day out, it's difficult to write separate, unique, daily entries. 

I've considered taking time off to write a book and that's been a thought for the past twenty years. In fact, I even had a contract offer fifteen years ago and decided I didn't want to make that commitment. 

I wasn't running away from the obligation, but felt as though I didn't have anything important enough to say that might hold a reader's attention for more than a page or two.

Meals on Wheels Alaska Style

I've considered republishing a few of my oldest newspaper columns, some dating back to the late 70's. 

I was teaching and we grew vegetables to sell to the tourists. The owner of our local paper loved my ten acre truck farm and asked if I would consider writing a weekly column. 

Why not? After all, it paid five dollars a week. When one is making $7,000 a year as a school teacher and supporting a large family, five dollars a week is big money.

More importantly, I was a professional, published, writer. Hemingway would have nothing on me.

One could learn many modern day tidbits by reading the gardening column: how to blanch one's sweetcorn in a dishwasher, or, the proper method of using a modified salt shaker to sow radish seeds. 

Locally, I became the go-to guy for gardening knowledge. I read those columns now and simply shake my head. The advice was somewhat solid, the writing horrendous.

Another opportunity came along and I moved on from gardening to pen The Good Side of Life. I loved that column and wrote for over twenty years. It came from the husband's view of raising four boys in some of the more rural parts of the country, ala Erma Bombeck. 

There was more than one opportunity for the column to really take off, but when it came time, I shied away. I didn't feel it was all that well written and besides, I was a school teacher. It's what I did.

When my thirty-year marriage to the boys' mother ended, I could no longer find anything humorous to write about, so I quit. Period.

The blog and the millennium arrived around the same time, give or take a year or two. I was in Alaska and began writing daily so Mom and Dad and my grown sons could would know what I was doing in the wilds of the arctic circle. I began adding a few pictures here and there and the blog took off.

I haven't quit writing or snapping pictures since.

I've thought about shopping around at various UP newspapers and try to peddle a weekly column, but then I'd have to give up writing the daily blog. People aren't going to buy a daily newspaper if they can get the content online for free. Besides, I'm not sure I really want to be all that obligated. I write because I want to, not because I have to, and that's what makes it fun.

If two hundred people read this in any given day, I'm happy. If that number drops to a mere two, that's fine. I'm still getting to do what I enjoy.

Writing.

So with that in mind, it's time to put out the GONE FISHING sign for a few days and take a break. 

Meanwhile, it's time to get Sargie's lunch packed and breakfast ready.

After all, a man's work is never done.

So are the tales from Pentoga Road...