Reflection

Dear Audience,

The Blogger Project has been an interesting experience for me; I hope it was for you too. Since the start of my blog I have written about everything from my opinions and stories to poetry and fiction. And to this date it has acquired a wide range of material. If you have enjoyed at least one or two of my pieces then my goal has been accomplished. If not, I’m sorry but my work here is done.
I hope that through this blog you have learned a little about me. At the very least you should have picked up on that I love deep snow, Halloween, my friends, my family, and the ocean. I also value creativity and the slightly odd. If you read “Nothing’s Happening” you would have also learned that I hate having nothing to do.
As a writer I avoid taking myself too seriously, because many of my best ideas come out of complete goofiness which I try to make sound serious. And that works for me; I guess that is “The Importance of Writing Badly.” I like everything I have posted; if I didn’t I would have changed it by now. And since I have picked every topic I have written about, you should have a fair idea of what I enjoy writing. By picking my own topics, I think this project has helped me to better etch out my identity as a writer.
I like the way the appearance of my blog turned out and it seems you do too. I have noticed that the template I picked has become very popular, but since I was the first to get my blog up and running and part of the -021 Café I feel that the rest are just copy cats. I consider it a compliment to my good taste, rather than a mark of non-individuality. I hope you will too. I like all the shades of pink and deep burgundy font. And I don’t plan to change it, unless I get completely sick of it some time in the near future.
I have personalized my blog’s template by changing the fonts and adding images, and I think it reflects me fairly well. I switched to an italic font a little while after starting my blog. I like it because it gives the implied feeling of being hand written. I feel that my page looks more personal this way. Plain text always seems a little cut, dry, and harsh, which is not something I want to reflect in my blog.
When I started this project I was actually concerned about what I would write about, but it was surprisingly easy. It was not very difficult at all to sit down and write once I got started, and our in class prompts always did that. I was also concerned about figuring out what all the codes meant; I still don’t know, but I learned that really don’t need to. At least I did not need to for this project. I have also learned some new genres of poetry and have experimented with them. In fact I have experimented with different genres a lot in this project.
I hope you found this project as interesting to read as it was for me to write, but now it is time to say good-bye to you, my loyal readers. I know it is a sad time for all of us. But this project has come to a close and I leave you now with my final piece from this project, the short story “Boot Soles.” This is the close, but do not fear. This is not really the end. It is only the end of a unit and the beginning of something else. And so good-bye to all my loyal fans, I hope you will read my written works again someday.

Mostly sincerely,

Melhouse

Boot Soles

“Yahoooo!” yodeled Daniel as he shoved his foot against the hard, burgundy brick of the chimney. Snow chunks toppled loose around him as the kinetic energy of the shove mixed with gravities pull and he half flew, half slid down the roofline in an avalanche of snow. His sister rounded the corner trudging through the knee-high snow just in time to see him vanish into the blizzard of falling snow disturbed from the blanket of twinkling white snow on the roof.

“Daniel!” yelled his sister as she stumbled through high snow to the place where the black sole her brother’s coal colored boots was sticking out of the heap of snow that had just cascaded off the roof. Daniel laid winded for a moment unable to think or move. “Daniel,” she shrieked at him again, her voice sounded muffled through the snow. “Joan?” He asked thickly unable to think.

“Yah, you alright?” She questioned him. He moaned. “I fine,” he called and began to try to shovel away the heaps of snow surrounding his head with his hands, unsure which way was up. Truthfully he felt cold, dizzy, and numb to the world. But nothing seemed broken. “Can you get me out?” His sister’s mittened hands grappled with his boot and pulled. The boot flew off and slipped through her grasp, landing and vanishing with a swoosh into the snow a few feet away, sock and all, as she toppled over. “Ugh, the stupid boot, are you okay?” He kicked his now bare and freezing foot towards the sound of her voice and yelled a few choice curse words into the snow surrounding his head. She responded by tickling his foot.

Daniel kicked and squirmed as he floundered. His head finally broke the surface. “Joan! Get away, I’ll tell.” “You are such a cantaloupe head,” she retorted and crunched to her feet. “If anyone,” she stomped the snow off of her, “is going to tattle it will be me.” She stomped off through the snow past the place where his boot had vanished in the snow. “Besides,” she added with twinkling eyes, “with all you foibles, there will be a lot to tattle.”
“My foibles!” he shouted struggling to keep his bare foot out of the snow. “You’re the one with the foibles, you always foible fun, snow, and cantaloupes. You’re so foibled, you’re a foibler--”

“Am not,” she retorted she yanked the door open and it clanked shut behind her heel.

He carefully steped over to his boot on his now numb foot and gingerly, brushing the snow off, pulled it back on. He glanced up at the chimney, grey smoke curled out the top, and the traced the path he had made through the snow with his finger. Time for trial two.