GOING TO CALIFORNIA--ANY SUGGESTIONS?

I am a long-distance runner who was laid up most of last year with a knee injuries, which is pretty boring because it seems that most runners get laid up with knee injuries at some point during their career. I've done 9 marathons and my 10th is the bucket list race--the Big Sur Marathon on April 27. This is ridiculously exciting to me because I've never been to California and we're taking two weeks after the race to tour, focusing on the area between Paso Robles and Healdsburg, including San Francisco. The training is going well, did 18 miles today with a couple of running friends, which is the farthest I've run since doing the Hartford Marathon about 15 months ago. So tell me, any Californians or experienced travelers out in blog land--any place off the beaten path where we're going that you'd recommend? We'll be doing a bunch of wineries and so forth--but I'd love a native point of view. Also, any runners out there who have done Big Sur. We can swap stories about doing Boston, NY, Marine Corps, Philly, and Steamtown. I believe this is what blogs are for.

February 17

A BLOG ABOUT EVERYTHING

I swore I was never going to write a blog. I had no desire to add to the ponderous cloud of millions of semi-literate solipsistic navel-gazers suffering a preening desire to broadcast their deepest thoughts and silliest ideas to the swarming on-line masses. Heck, I’m a professional writer. I do content for professional vehicles like marketing brochures, and magazines, and corporate websites—content that benefits from the helpful filters of editors, publishers, and lawyers. Blogs to me were nothing but an amateur hour of thin research, turgid chest banging, and intemperate ravings.  Then I self-published my book. And learned that there’s an audience for the stuff I write—and publishers need audiences.

I didn’t expect much from my maiden publishing experience, but it seems that hundreds of people downloaded my book, so I guess there’s an appetite that I seem to be feeding. Do note that I made it easy for them, since my book is currently FREE (though I expect not forever).

Thus….welcome to my blog! My book, which is described here, is a book about everything, hence the name of my blog. It includes life experiences, lessons learned, advice based on lessons learned, informed opinion, and entertaining bits of miscellanea. This blog is more or less a continuation of the theme of my book, and, I would hope, a source of entertainment for you.

The purpose of this blog, aside from the cynical promotion of this and future books, is to connect with my readers, since I currently don’t have other avenues to do that. I don’t do Twitter because I’m too cheap to buy a smartphone and too busy to feed a website, though that’s a possibility down the road. I’m thinking about a Facebook page, but that’s so high maintenance. I guess the blog is it for now.

I welcome your thoughts and comments on my books, my blog, and whatever is going on in that brain of yours. I expect to update content regularly, so check back often, you never know what you’ll get! To kick this thing off, let’s stick our toe in a little controversy.

WHY ARE REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS SO CRAZY AND WHY DO PEOPLE STILL VOTE FOR THEM?

Do they know that you don’t cut the federal budget and trim the deficit when lotsa people are out of work and the economy is growing in slow motion? Don’t they know that when interest rates are historically low that the government can easily afford to fund infrastructure projects that will employ people and rebuild this crumbling country? Don’t they know that even if the government wastes a lot of money, it puts people work, puts money in motion, boosts demand, and makes the economy grow and grow? Don’t they know that Obamacare is a tentative step in the right direction and that a single—payer universal health care system is an even better thing and a lot cheaper than making uninsured poor people go to expensive emergency rooms and stick insurance companies with the bill that you and I pay? Don’t they know that banning abortion will NOT stop people from getting abortions and could end up killing or mutilating those who get them in the so-called “back alley”? Don’t they know that setting up Maginot Line-type structures along the Rio Grande is not an immigration policy? And I can go on…What do you think?