14th Year on Blogger

In the age of YouTube and social media, blogging seems to be a thing of the past, but I began this blog on this very week of April 2005. Hard to believe that was 14 years ago. My youngest daughter was about to turn 2. In a couple of months, she'll turn 15!

So happy birthday to my blog!

Nolesrock is an online persona I created during the days of message boards and chat rooms. I was very active in talking college sports on ESPN-hosted forums in the mid-to-late 90's and that's where I came up with the moniker. It stuck and so my online usernames have usually been some variation of Nolesrock. Don't believe me? Look at my Facebook URL from when I first joined in 2009.

www.facebook.com/nolesrock

Here we are 14 years after I started blogging--mostly about spirituality, music and life. Then I landed a job in 2011 as a part-time journalist and freelance writer. The blog was loaded with newspaper articles I had written in my short time on the Island. Then it went nearly dormant. My posts these days are few and far between, but when something strikes me, I blog about it here.

Most of my thoughts and ideas go down on paper in spiral notebooks I call "My Journal" which I've kept faithfully since 2012. That's when life turned upside down--my own doing--after my wife and I separated. The fall of that year found me living alone on Fort Myers Beach and my wife and kids living 7 hours away in Tallahassee.

There are good times and bad times filling these blog archives. There are rants, raves and tidbits of wisdom sprinkled in here and there. There's a lot of spiritual wrangling and questions. There are a few attempts at answers. But life happened in these 14 years, some of which I captured in writing here.

I fancy myself a freelance writer still, but most of it is just ramblings and musings I write by hand in my journals. I have a few novels I've started, including one that is finished, if only in rough draft. I haven't written professionally in a couple of years. That is soon to change.

But I will keep this blog as long as Google sees fit to keep Blogger around. It's been a good run. Stay tuned.