Why I am here

Going into winter I start thinking about what I will read on those cold dark days next to the warm fire. Spring, summer and fall are a time of action. I am too busy to dedicate much time to reading. My reading exploits lean toward research and education (the immediate gratification kind). Ahh but winter is the time to be able to pore over books purely for enjoyment. I have a list of books all set for the winter and will likely stumble across a few extras that will squeeze in front.

What I really need is more blogs for my blog-roll. This is where you come in, yes even if you have never commented before. First, I want YOUR blog address--nothing else. If your blog is already in my blog-roll *where I hang out* then (and only then) please suggest your favorite blog that you think I will like. I Want You!!! You should be getting a visual image of me pointing my finger right at you.

Why am I here? Many reasons really, but mostly I want to capture these moments so I might better learn from them. I also romanticize that my great grand children might want to know who I was.

I would love to have read either of my grandfathers journals they didn't keep during their lifetime. My grandfather Horace was an amazing artist, inventor and landscape architect. During the depression he held a patent for Formica. Dupont had a similar patent of inferior quality. Horace sold the patent to Dupont for $1000 and provided for his family through those troubled years. He also pioneered many methods for coloring cement still in use today.

My grandfather Gustav immigrated from Germany at twenty five. With only the clothes on his back he eventually became a pillar in his community. He engineered and invented many things to make his life easier on his milk farm. I wish I had the plans for the smokehouse that he built. As a teenager I went to stay a summer with friends of his. Their patriarch employed Gustav as a machinist in one of his first jobs in America. I saw the respect and esteem he commanded even a generation later.

I don't feel like I live in their shadow but they set the bar pretty high. I know how curious I am about them and my namesake Karl, Gustav's father. My descendants will have one of those weird records of a little family, their family, struggling to make a go of it off a little slice of the Ozarks.

Of course that is not the only reason I am here but it is surely one that kept me blogging after my original reason proved for naught. Pablo and Danielle kept encouraging me to keep going which really made all the difference.