The story of how Fussy's NaBloPoMo idea mixed with more people and more ideas changed my world. Part one is "The Rest of the Story."

Long Long ago in a little city in Texas a girl was born. As this girl grew up there were two things she did consistently: Teach and write. We all know that a prophet is not appreciated in her own town so we cannot say that her younger brothers were appreciative of her teaching efforts. She did, however, find an accepting audience among her dolls.

She grew up, got married ... it was the dark ages ... before Internet. She often felt she had a lot to say but no one to listen – except her three kids. So she taught them. All I can confidently tell you is ... they all survived.

Then life changed and her husband grew tired of her constantly ignoring the fact that she had always wanted to write. He also grew tired of her ignoring her artistic abilities so he bought her a camera. In the summer of 2003 a friend gave her a web site. So gradually she learned to sit still and write ... and she learned about photography ... and she slowly became ruler of her own web site.

But still there was no one to listen. Well, ok existing family and friends listened occasionally. But let's face it ... mostly they are spoiled and expect the lady (yes she did grow up to eventually become a lady) to bring any news worth hearing to them. They were not inclined to bring themselves to her web site in order to listen. That's a slight exageration -- two of them have been good to visit regularly ... plus her husband ... so three she had three "readers"!

The lady was whining one night about only having Photoshop 4 and how expensive it would be to upgrade and my husband introduced me to GIMP – which I didn't have the patience to learn while killing various laptop pc's and reloading others. And now that I have a computer that could run it ... I still don't have the patience ... (oh oops ... I've switched from third person to first person or some such grammatical blunder.)

But I did look at various Google searches for various bits of GIMP help ... and I'm fairly certain that's how I met up with Schmutzie of milk money or not, here I come. (It's a good story so I'm sticking with it.) We have many things in common but hmmm yesterday I finally came up with this ... She's like Saturday Night Live and I'm more like I Love Lucy when it comes to how we present our lives. And if you read our blogs side by side, you would swear that we would have to logically have a large amount of dislike for each other. The truth is ... we hit it off pretty well, thank you. We give each other room to think and things to think about. We have a very "Internet coffee shop" kind of relationship. We "bump into each other" from time to time ... have quick chats to catch up and trade ideas ... and then we're off again.

We've discussed mind control (ADD type stuff), how we should or should not treat our readers (largely exploring this really interesting blog media and how we can end up affecting people in ways we never expected), and we've discussed various ways to grow traffic to a blog (she's been at this much longer than I).

Fortunately on one of our visits, I noticed that she was preparing to participate in NaBloPoMo. And since I had been trying without success to "do a blog" on my web site for over a month ... without ever developing any type of discipline, I was onto that idea in a flash!

And so November came and I was still trying to redirect my flock from the idea of getting news from me in emails towards the goal of them coming to me to get the latest. It was not going well.

In the mean time ... on November 2, Merseydotes of Elevated Umbrella got a brilliant idea.

I browsed through the list of participating blogs on Fussy's page and clicked through a dozen or so to see who was out there. I've picked five new blogs to follow for the month. These are blogs that I'd never visited before yesterday, ...

The Odd Mix picked up on the idea and sucked me into his mix on November 6th ...

And somewhere along the way Lane of Pink Elephants created the NaBloPoMo randomizer ... and my reading life got very rich.

and now ... what is the results of all of this? Well that's what we're going to spend the day assessing. But it's pretty obvious what the morals to the story are: The smallest days of your life have seeds that bring forth big things. And, in a galaxy far, far away but somehow linked to you by the smallest little single link on the Internet, someone is creating ideas that can change your life forever.

Stay tuned ... the dog wants out, I need breakfast, and we have yet to analyze the ramifications and roll the credits ... we Have to roll the credits! All of this will be added below this post and before the entry about Mary-LUE.