Is Less Really More?

Sometimes I scan around a few fiber arts blogs, and do so at my peril. They are just so full of whatever those things are that line the side margin - stamps? - and cutesy labels and long, long lists of their favorite blogs (mine is rarely on the lists) and wonder - should I be dressing up my blog? Quite frankly, I don't even know how. It's like rocket science to me. I wonder how they find the time to read all those blogs. My farm chores would never get done and I would do no knitting or spinning. I have about 4 or 5 that I scan every day, and I am quite loyal to them, even though they are rarely updated daily. I sincerely want to know what's going on in their lives, and care about them. I know that the few readers I have care about me and my farm, too, and I feel a happy obligation to update. It was Auntie Jan who started me on the blog habit. I made a blog after stumbling on Leslie Shelor's Greenberry blog and was inspired by it. I thought, wow, what a powerful electronic literary genre! But I didn't keep it up diligently and Jan would nudge me to update your blog, update your blog. I have some ancestors who did amazing things, fought in the Colonial Wars, lived on the true frontier, helped to found this great country. My great, great Aunt Adeline travelled over great distances in a wagon to dig up her Confederate soldier husband and bring him home to Georgia, etc., but I know nothing about them personally. It's lost to history. I visited her grave site in Sandersville, Georgia, where she is resting between the first husband, whose remains she carried home, and her second husband. What a story. I want to write it someday, but it will be filled with details from my imagination, not fact. If I were still in school I would write a paper on women and their blogs. My Master's thesis had to do with the journals of frontier women captured by Native Americans. They wrote about their experiences once they were "rescued" (some didn't want to be rescued - typical of women they made the best of a bad situation!) There were very few bells and whistles in these journals, and hardly any pictures, but still they were very, very powerful. I am a real dunce as far as internet skills. I still can't figure out how to put text next to the pictures - I let the pictures do most of the storytelling. I go back and forth with myself about how candid and honest I want to be in my blog. My mother once gave me a good bit of advice - don't write anything down that you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of the NY Times. It's so easy to "tell it all" to the keyboard and screen, and hope the people who read it are kind and giving...but that is not always the case. So I am trying to temper my writing with the hard earned wisdom of age and experience, and still leave a legacy of writing that will tell the family members who come after me what I tried to do here, on Maggie's Farm...even if it doesn't have lots of cutesy stamps and labels in the margin, and a comment counter!