Hi, I'm over here!

Well, my Taproot blog probably set some kind of record for briefness of existence.

Within hours of my creating it, I found yesterday evening that I could no longer connect to the blog.com site.  Don't know if it's a temporary problem or not, but it's still not letting me connect this morning. What good is a blog if I can't post to it or read your comments?  Not much, I'm thinking.

So here I am at blogger.com, trying again with a new name:  Weird and Wonder-ful.

About that name.  It probably describes what the posts on this blog will be like, though there's no way of knowing yet.  But it certainly describes me!

Thanks to the good folks at the National Geographic Genome 2.0 project, I now have scientific evidence of what I have long suspected:  I am definitely on the weird end of the homo sapiens bell-shaped curve.  I have about twice as much Neanderthal material AND about twice as much Denisovan material in my DNA as most folks. At least in the DNA I inherited from my mother, which is all they tested. So I am certifiably weird.  In the best possible sense of the word.

Now for wonder-ful. Note the hyphen. This trait too I inherited from my mother. She it was who taught me to wonder at the world around me.  When we would go for walks together when I was a little kid, she would be the one to stop and point out some small thing--a lichen, a tiny bug, some interesting tree bark--and invite me to really look at it, notice it, take it in, in appreciation and wonder.

She also subscribed to Arizona Highways, the New Yorker, National Geographic, and the Saturday Evening Post. Through the photos, art, fiction, and prose of those magazines, I came to know a wide, wide world of inexhaustible wonder. She instilled in me curiosity and delight. Can't ask for a better heritage than that.

So once again, thank you for your attention.  Now I have to try to figure out all the nitty-gritties of the blogger.com blogging ecosystem.