Another tag?

I'm sitting in my house, the sun shining bright outside, the BEEEEEP! BEEEP! BOOOOOP! of the tractors jangling my nerves, a million emails to return. I'm wearing a soft (really!) blue hand-knit wool sweater that I bought just outside the town of Beer, England on my first big trip. It doesn't feel like it nine years have passed since I spent a month touring the lovely little towns, museums and countryside of England.



Like all good trips, it passed in a blur of beautiful accents and of course I vividly remember places like Burghley House. I was really happy I kept a trip journal for the majority of the time. I'm not a scrap-booker, but collecting, cutting, and taping little bits and pieces into the pages helped to cement some of the smaller memories in my mind. Flipping through the pages, I remember how amazed I was to be seeing more of the world at seventeen than my parents had at forty. I wasn't the least bit smug, but saddened that all their hard work had never translated into anything for themselves, beyond our families' necessities. I've never been able to properly express my gratitude for their graduation gift (round trip plane ticket from LAX to JFK to Heathrow and back, purchased by non-travel-savvy people, thus ensuring maximum fleece-age).

These days, our more recent trips have been for work, family and the odd bit of dental work. I think about writing here as my own little online scrapbook, sans the bits of paper and dried flowers under tape. As I peruse my (much loved!) list of links, I realized something: As much as I enjoy them, other than Peter, Chiada, Desiree and Joy, we don't have much in common other than our love of writing. I hope by joining up with the Indie Bloggers I'll have some success finding some non-topic based sites with a sense of humour and without any twee tickers or the like. Not that I have anything against people who put up tickers or pastel-colored cartoons or the like. In theory. So here's to a new chapter for Chock Late...wish me luck.