You Found Me! Welcome to 2018. Another Blog With My Head in the Clouds

And just like that, it is another year. Poof! 2017 is a goner and I welcome 2018 with fanfare, confetti, fireworks, and bottle corks!

It's hard for me to believe that I've composed blogs daily since 2008 and every time I think this is a hobby to retire, I realize I can't. Writing, for me, is ritualized in scribbling final thoughts before I go to bed each night (ones I want to capture into my elixir of memories for no particular reason, but for the fact it helps me to clear my mind..

To the left, you'll see the links from the first 11 years of blogging - there's one for each day, too. That's 4,015 entries thus far (ridiculous). Ah, but it's the way I scrapbook my life and I thought, "Why not keep my heads in the clouds for another year. My posts are a great way for aCUMULating thoughts, so CUMULOUS CRANDALL was chosen for 2018 to organize my mind. I like having my head in the clouds and, given 2017, I feel the need for more  creativity, imagination, speculation, dreams, fantasies, and divine intervention to keep this never-ending story alive.

Cumulous clouds are the puff-daddy, Michelin-tire looking chunksters that float lows to the ground and sometimes make funky shapes that humans personify into creatures (Hey, that looks like a rabbit. Oh, that one looks Aqua-man, one of my mother's broken toes). They're not wispy, but voluminous. Enough of them building together eventually leads to a thunderstorm (that's when they are cumulonimbus). They are the fair-weathered friends of the sky, and that is the goal for the 2018 blog - to provide fair-weathered wackiness to process the brewing storms and the calm that follows (life as I see it).

I did think about scratching this hobby of mine, but I don't think I'd be able to fall asleep if I didn't have my Jerry Springer final thought for each day. I've grown accustomed to my digital writer's notebook (and I need to talk to Ralph Fletcher about an idea I have...or maybe his publishers).

Finally, a word on the Frog above. Frog attached himself to me when I was a classroom teacher at the Brown School  in Louisville, Kentucky - and that pond will never disappear. He wears a necklace representing the Norse God, Odin (who had two crows traveling the world to learn all there is to know - they came back to whisper the secrets of the universe in his ear). Frog ain't no Odin, but he's another 4-letter word curious about everything around him. He has is aviator goggles to keep him focused and a Rolex watch to channel Chitunga's organizational skills.

And her it goes.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I wish each and everyone of you the best that life can offer (and for some of you this morning, I'm sure that will be more water and aspirin). For me? Time to hit the gym...cookies and ice-running didn't do much for me in Syracuse this holiday.

May the clouds be with you.

(and note: the video is a nod to the departure of Carrie Fisher and Tom Petty, who departed in 2017. It's also an applause of what is possible, as the music of the Project Citizen promotes. Finally, as always, it's an ode to the family...one that continues to grow and grow and grow. Free Fallin' is a brilliant song, but on violin it is slow. Ah, it's what I have for this year!

2018! Here I Come!