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This is a blog about a former Californian who moved from the mainland US to the state of Hawaii in the US.

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I'm not well. No, I'm not mentally ill, so get that thought out of your head right now. It hurts to look at the computer screen. It could be caused by the sudden rise in the local temperature or I could be allergic to something. Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, I've been suffering for two days so far. Hopefully, this will soon pass. But this is not what this article is about. Read on, my loyal minions.

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"Snowys" is a personal blog written by a Linda, who lives in a remote part of Australia.

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I have a confession to make: I'm a blogaholic. In others words, a blogging addict. After you get done laughing at me (or with me), continue reading to find out why I consider myself one. I can't put it into perspective for you if I don't give you a bit of background history, so here goes.

It all started after I moved to the Philippines in April of 2006, but the roots of it go back even further. I ran a BBS (bulletin board system) on a Commodore 128D for about six years, from 1992 to 1998. I always enjoyed the conversation aspect of it more than anything else. Dropping the BBS was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but my users had fled in favor of the Internet.

After my arrival in the Philippines, I spent most of my first two months taking care of personal business. Around mid-May of 2006, after letting my laptop gather dust for more than two months (since before leaving the US), I started using prepaid Internet dial-up cards. Those cards were expensive when being used during the daytime, only covering 20 hours each. I quickly learned to restrict myself as much as possible to the nighttime hours that were free. That's when my sleep cycle got screwed up so badly. It was already bad as I was trying to adjust to a radically different time zone. 15 hours difference to be exact.

After messing around with multiple content management systems, I decided to go with a self-hosted WordPress blog near the end of May. I had already checked out blogspot.com and wordpress.com and didn't like the restrictions they had in place. I'd already browsed several blogs and settled on using the WordPress software. I'd taught myself PHP and CSS over the years and I was confident I'd be able to tweak what needed to be tweaked. It was more tweaking than I expected but I think it paid off. Andy Beard gave me pointers along the way.

The first few months were the rocky months of blogging for me. I wasn't concerned about search engine optimization, attracting more readers, or anything like that. I just wanted to put my thoughts down as a journal of experiences. I read a lot of blogs to begin with and read as much as the time on my dial-up cards would allow. I eventually got DSL after my house was built and I moved in, but I still didn't get knee-deep into my own blog until well after the end of the year holidays. That might not have happened at all if it hadn't been for the comments in February of 2007 and both the Reddit and Digg attacks in March. My blog might have continued to languish in obscurity. I blame Paul Hunter, HMTKSteve and Matthew Jabs for my increasing popularity.

Since March, I have spent most of my waking hours reading other blogs, writing on my own blog, and even commenting here and there on other blogs. Since I read mostly via my feed reader (and a lot of that offline due to numerous power outages — thank God for Google Gears), I confess to being a lurker as well. Early on in my blogging history, I developed an affinity for helping other bloggers improve their blogs at the risk of ignoring my own. I'm not quite sure why that happened, but it did. A lot of what I do is behind the scenes. For some odd reason, there are times when I really don't want to draw attention to myself (hard to believe, isn't it?).

Why do I consider myself a blogaholic? I feel ill if I can't get on the net to read or write things related to blogging. I get angry when I'm subjected to power outages and DSL connectivity problems. I feel helpless when I can't help another blogger. Those are the signs of an addiction. Lorna Timbah suggested I was a blogaholic back on July 5th and I agreed with her. If what I write or do has a positive impact on other bloggers, or readers in general, then being a blogaholic can't be a bad thing.

My good, online friend, Hari sent me a message that started me thinking. I don't like to think too much about being personal, but his message made me think. He read my article about redefining my focus and noticed that my writings were headed in that direction before I wrote that article.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I do not have a niche blog. Blogging about blogging is not my niche. I'm focused on helping other bloggers (and I know some of you hate that word) in the blogosphere (and hate that word even more) both directly and indirectly, but that doesn't make it a niche. I believe the very nature of niche blogs doesn't allow their authors to "step out of character". When they do, they potentially lose credibility. I say potentially because some good writers can use their "blog personalities" to actually enhance their niches.

If you dig through the archives, you'll find of lot of personal information about me, as well as some personal humor.

They are just a few of the many, many personal articles I've written since the beginning of February. The truth of the matter is, I just haven't felt like writing anything personal lately. Perhaps it's because my daily routine has become just that, a routine. Maybe I'm just a boring person. Whatever the reason, I've decided that I need to return some personality back to my personal blog. I plan to write one or more installments of my autobiography this week, making notes for things that I may want to write about further.

I want to hear your opinions.

Do you think it's alright for the writer (or writers) of a niche blog to "step out of character"? Do you think it hurts their credibility? Am I stepping out of character by focusing on just a few topics, or am I simply expanding my reach beyond the personal? Does it sound like I'm "waffling" between a personal and a niche blog? Please take a look around and tell me what you think.

I put off writing this for three months because I needed to come to terms with my own memories. It's amazing how things that happened more than 30 years ago could still have a negative effect on me. I've over it now, but putting things into perspective was incredibly hard.

Late in 1973, while my father was working in Hawaii, both he and my mother decided to move the family to the island he was on. In February of 1974, my mother packed up me and my siblings along with a niece and a nephew (both sisters were single mothers, but this isn't their story) and flew us over there. The house wasn't sold — it was put up for rent.

We arrived on Kauai and I started back to school at the tail end of my 8th grade year. The closest town to where we lived was Kapaa, but we lived in a rural area called Kapahi (the house later was tagged with a house number for Kapaa). It was about two miles from the school, which included Kindergarten through the 12th grade. I recently looked for it via Google Earth and it's no longer a school at all — it was probably sold to some land development company — and the school was broken up into parts like other major schools. Obviously, the population grew quite a bit in 30 years.

Within one week, I got into a fight with another teenager in school. I didn't even know he wanted to fight. He said, "You like beef, brah?", and I had no clue what he meant. It was Pigeon English, which was commonly used by people there at the time. I have no idea if that's still the case. Anyway, it turned out that the only reason he wanted to fight me was because I was a "haole". Originally, it meant "stranger or foreigner", but as time progressed it became synonymous with "white person". Although the local people of Portuguese ancestry were as white as we were, they weren't considered haoles.

My family went to different beaches frequently, nearly every weekend. My father liked to go fishing and sometimes some of us would get stuck with him (but on a different day). I knew how to fish, but I found it incredibly boring. I made some friends in the area we lived, but they weren't close friends by any stretch of the imagination. We spent most of our time swapping comics. Comics cost 15, 20 and 25 cents at the time and I usually got four or five every week or so. As I wrote in Comic Book Memories, I became an avid collector.

In the latter half of my 9th grade year, an older girl (I was 14, she was 16) took a liking to me and shortly thereafter I got jumped on the way off the school property by four guys. I saw two of them and not the other two. I got knocked down and kicked all over my body. I have no idea whether the two things were related because the local troublemakers didn't need a reason to beat up a haole. Being a haole was enough for them. When I reached my 10th grade year, I decided I'd had enough of punks and fights and started cutting classes and hanging out with a group of other haoles. Since we weren't allowed to leave school property (closed campus), we had to find unique places to hide from the school officials. That's when I learned to smoke. Not marijuana (although I tried it once) — just cigarettes.

Somewhere along the line, and I don't remember when each happened, but the two sisters with children, two brothers, and another sister headed back to Coolidge, Arizona, to live there again. I don't remember all the reasons, but only the youngest sister was still going to high school — the rest were grown. By the time my mother grew tired of all the bigotry and problems associated with that at the school, there were only my parents, two brothers, one sister, and I living there. We started as 13 people and ended up as six. As I wrote in Live in Hawaii? Nope, Never Again, I would never choose to live in those islands again. If the attitudes and bigotry have changed, which I doubt, it might be different story. One of my readers even accused me of bigotry because I wrote what I wrote. I asked readers, Am I a Bigot?, in response to the accusation and drew many more positive comments than I anticipated.

In November, 1977, everyone except my father packed up and left Hawaii. He still had a job there. He worked in different places in Hawaii for a few more years before moving back in with the family. His job required him to work in places far from home, and no one held it against him.

I could literally write a book about all the events that transpired from February 1974 to November of 1977, but that's not something I'd like to do. It's no wonder that some of the girls in high school were fond of me (and there were many — which probably contributed to me being singled out for fights so much); take a look at my junior and senior yearbook pictures:

I'll pick up the story in a future post. I don't want to ramble on too much at any given time. I only had 10 months remaining before I went on active duty in the military, and that's the beginning of another chapter in my life.

I just pulled up the definitions of "blog" from Dictionary.com. Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English defines it as "an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called [Weblog], [Web log]."

Okay, but is that all it really is, a collection of thoughts? I remember seeing some of the first weblogs. They were pretty simple web pages without any interaction at all, nothing more than online journals on standard pages. Some of them chronicled personal things while others chronicled the evolution of certain software applications. All of a sudden, and I don't know when, the "blogosphere" exploded into being when blog-specific software and services were created.

I think blogs have turned into a lot of different things and I don't think they're limited to any single scope. Some blogs specialize, some are professional, and some are incredibly personal. Some are a mixture of things, like mine. All of them have one thing in common: Interactivity. Even the ones that have commenting turned off are interactive in some way, even if the interactivity is severely limited.

In recent months, some blogs have gotten so far out of hand in the way they're being handled that certain entities want to craft a standards of conduct. It won't work because there won't be enough agreement between enough bloggers to make a difference. It doesn't matter — I think readership is the decisive factor at the end of the day.

The last I checked, Technorati stated there were over 70 million blogs out there. I wonder how many of them are actually active. I've come across a few that haven't been updated in more than a year. Wouldn't you consider those abandoned and remove them from your numbers? I know they haven't been removed from the numbers because one of them I had marked as a Technorati favorite by mistake.

What are some blog objectives? Do you want your blog to be popular? Do you want to make a lot of money? Perhaps you want both. I know that both popularity and profitability can go hand in hand because I see it being done by a whole lot of people. Perhaps you really do just want to share your thoughts.

So, what the heck is a blog anyway? Why, it's anything you want it to be.

I went back to part 1 to make some minor corrections and add three pictures of me when I was young. Take a look when you get a chance. I'm not quite done with the years prior to 1974, so bear with me. There was one serious incident that I remember:

When I was still a very short child, I was using a bicycle as a form of ladder (I didn't say I was a bright child) to get over a corrugated tin fence in my front yard. The wood braces were on the other side and my side was smooth. I put my arms over the fence and put my hands on the top support brace. The bike went out from under my feet. I wasn't weak. I held myself above the fence by grasping the top wood brace on the other side. The top edge of the tin was barely touching my armpits. I knew that if I let go, I would be seriously injured. I was frozen in fear.

The whole situation was odd. Only one person in my family, besides me, was home at the time. My oldest brother (about 10 years older than me) was in the den at the back of the house with the TV blaring loud enough for me to hear from the front yard. I couldn't yell for help. Like I said, I was frozen in fear. I remained there, frozen on top of the fence, for what seemed like eternity (although it turned out to be less than 30 minutes). All of a sudden, my brother came out of the front door of the house, walked over to where I was, and lifted me off the fence and put me on the ground. He didn't say anything. He then went back inside.

In 1973, my mother gave me a scolding because one of my sisters thought she saw me walking down the street, with a friend, holding a cigarette in my hand. The guy I was with, who was 12 years old like me, was the one who was smoking. He smoked at home, so it was no big deal to him. It shouldn't have been a big deal to my mother even if it had been me that my sister saw. At the time, both my mother and my oldest brother smoked. I was constantly exposed to it. The reason I even mention this is because I believe that exposure is what got me started smoking later on. I'll talk about that in the next installment.

In the meantime, here are a couple of more pictures from that time period:

Blog Appreciation:

Edward Wolf (a pen name for a professional writer) has three blogs that he contends with. Ask, Believe, Receive is a blog where anyone can share their stories of magical gifts obtained through asking, believing, and then receiving. His Pretty Women Blog is designed to highlight women as objects of art instead of objects of lust. The pictures are adult in nature, but not pornographic. The blog he started with is called Urban Iconoclast and it's where he publishes his thoughts and ideas as well as information on books that he's written. Get to know Edward. He's a unique kind of hermit.

My About page is probably one of the longest you'll see of any blogs that you encounter. It contains of lot of my personal history, but it isn't in full detail. Most people wouldn't want to read more than that in one sitting. Since I have absolutely nothing to hide, I figured I'd get into my autobiography to the best of my recollection. Perhaps when I become President of the US someday, it can be used by the opposition parties for campaign fodder. Perhaps I'll die a hero or a celebrity of some sort and this will be good information for posterity purposes. Who knows?

I was born at the Hoemako Hospital in Casa Grande, Arizona, USA, on November 28, 1960. The hospital has been closed for some time now, replaced by the Casa Grande Regional Medical Center in the 80s. I don't remember this, but my mother told me we lived on Dewey Avenue in Coolidge, Arizona, USA, until I was at least 3 years of age. My younger brother was 1 year old. The family moved to Palo Verde Avenue in Coolidge in 1964, after my parents bought the house from one of my uncles. The payments were in the neighborhood of $50 per month. The house had 4 bedrooms but only 1 bathroom. Imagine how hard that was with 5 boys and 4 girls living in the same house. My, how times change. The population as of the 1960 US Census was 4,990 people (by 2000, the population had only increased to 7,786). It's hard to believe how little it grew, considering it was only 70 miles from the largest city in the state with a population in the millions — the Phoenix metropolitan area). My parents live in that same house today, a house that was completed in the 50s — made primarily of adobe brick and wood.

My family lived in that house from sometime in 1964 through February of 1974. I remember very little of my elementary school years. I was in the 8th grade (called junior high at that time but it's called middle school now) when we moved again. I remember a teacher named Mrs. Goodwin in the 4th grade and the children that lived on South Main Street by the names of Bennie, Jerry, and Thea. Their parents' names were Ben and Jeri. Go figure. I remember a girl I had a crush on in junior high by the name of Melanie Collier. I remember classmates by the name of Terry Reed (male), Alvin and Wesley Moore (brothers), David Arredondo, James Higginbotham, something Saucedo, Kelly Taft (female) and, of course, Melanie Collier. Hey! I was only 13 years old when we moved to Hawaii in 1974. Do you expect me to remember everyone?

As I sit here and write this, I suddenly feel old and I'm only 46. The school I went to in the 3rd grade was torn down and replaced by a civic center. The police station that housed the city police, and the Arizona Highway Patrol officers that were stationed there, was moved from Central Avenue to Palo Verde Avenue (the same street my parents live on) and Arizona Boulevard (State Highway 87). Huge new tracts of homes have been built and more people are finally starting to move into the city.

I'll continue the story tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some early pictures of me. Don't laugh. Bow ties were popular in the 60s:

Blog Appreciation:

Hermie at One Day at a Time has an interesting family-oriented blog. He always includes tons of pictures with every story. Hermie and his family live in the Philippines. Visit his blog when you get the chance.