Dumpster Diving on Blogger.com

Giggling and looking over our shoulders, we went Dumpster diving twice, once near here in Lemoyne and once in California, both times coming up with excellent items, which we gave away or, believe it or not, sold. We joined the crowd to visit a thrift store on the main street of Ventura just on its opening day, and Nancy found a unique (but good) looking pair of shoes that she wears every week now. There's treasure and trash everywhere.
Click on the "next blog" spot at the top of this or your blog page, and you will find, as you explore, strangers' viewpoints and experiences, both delightful and dismaying. I wonder what is the mechanism for choosing which sites show up, since they do seem to follow a theme each time: travel and thought, gardening and nature, or, heaven help us, Mommy Blogs. What is dreadful about pictures of munchkins with food smeared on their faces, looking up brightly at the camera? Or a hundred entries about someone's wedding followed by their rapid reproduction, all on sunny days of boundless possibility, tightly wrapped in a greeting card aesthetic? Come on, most of us are poor writers or philosophers on our best days, but you've got to have something to say!
And then, you find the treasure. One lady in Vancouver, WA, is so sharp and funny she ought to be improving TV fare (she indicates that before family, her ambition was in that direction). Her latest piece on her husband's overenthusiastic response to her desire to pursue ballroom dancing had my sides hurting. And she's right on with the photos and illustrations, which add to the mayhem.
Another young lady in South Africa, in her autobiographical blog, is wise beyond her twentysomething years. Some young writers whine about being lost and directionless, but this tart-tounged lass has no doubt about her worth and the lengths she goes to to prove it.
And today, I ran across one with no profile, so I can't tell you more than that he seems to be a British or Irish expat, is studying Dutch, and has been to and taken alarmingly beautiful photos of mountainous south-cental France. He's also pursuing Buddhism. He makes you want his life; his writing is of that ice-clear type that pulls you in. You don't skim it, you re-read the sentences. Only your very favorite authors do that. That's his photo above, of a cliff on the Mediterranean coast which has been carved by nature to resemble a ruined castle strewn with gargoyle carvings.
It's worth digging through the trash to find something like that.