Welcome to Blogger.com

This is the first posting of the new “Notes From the Red Lodge” blog - unless you have already been reading it. You see, “Notes From the Red Lodge” was a weekly blog I posted on MySpace through 2006-2007. MySpace has its place and it was fun to me while I was new to it, but I did not reach my target audience; what I reached was a small core of friends/readers, spammers and teenagers who were mostly there for matters other than what I was printing.

So I have launched a virtual version of myself onto the internet: The Virtual Jim Avery and it grows and perfects as I struggle through html. My MySpace page will stay. Eventually, I will update it mainly by simplifying it and pulling down a lot of what is there. The “friend” count there will gradually diminish from its current five thousand some odd down to something in the hundreds. It will mainly serve as a stepping stone over to The Virtual Jim. The good people at Blogspot have made space for me (or, for that matter, anyone) to store blogs. By clicking on that animation of me serenely meditating, you have stepped out of my website proper on into the world of Blogspot. If I currently know what I am doing, then this has opened up in a new window. Don’t panic. It you have lost me, there s a handy link to the right which will bring you back to me - virtually.

What is it I am hoping to accomplish here anyway, you might ask. Well, to be honest, at the moment, I don’t know much more than you do. I do know I need a place to rant. Hopefully, I will continue to inject at least as much humor into the blog as I did back at MySpace. I will not be backing myself into a corner here by saying, as I did there, that I will publish every Monday and that each week of the month was reserved for a particular theme.

There will be blogs that will be autobiographical so you will know what is up with me. I have started doing a lot more traveling than I have ever done before. If you are a travel buff and want to know about the places I go, then the Hoag’s Corner part of my website may be of more interest to you than the blog. There will be blogs about the trials and tribulations of owning rental property. The sometimes controversial Amway business will be dealt with. (Honestly, I have never known anyone who gave it a serious try and failed. Those who speak against it universally seem to be people who wanted a get rich quick scheme and are bitter that it wasn’t. If I ever should find out it was a scam, I guess I’ll have to go back to work, but I don’t think I could ever do what I did back when I was in my early thirties and I don’t think I could explain where all the money came from.)

Politics will be dealt with. For those of you who don’t know me, I am a registered Republican who is totally befuddled at how the Republican leaders of today could be acting like the Democrats of my youth. It was supposed to be the party of small government who did not try to regulate people’s lives. It used to be the liberals who wanted to control everyone’s actions and protect people from themselves. Ronald Reagan rallied the social conservatives for their support but he kept them in check. Now, they run things. Heaven help us. I’m a fiscally conservative libertarian if you haven’t figured that out.

I will also be dealing with a lot of environmental issues. In a couple of years, I plan to build a new home called Drumlin Cove. It will be an earth bermed home that provides its own power and heat. If I am successful enough to consistently pump power back into the grid, the house’s carbon impact can be expressed as a negative. While I try to be environmentally responsible, I have a problem with global warming doom sayers. Don’t we have historical records of the north polar cap being much smaller one thousand years ago than it is now? Didn’t we have a mini ice age at the end of the eighteenth century? (Remember that picture of Washington crossing an ice jammed Delaware River?) And why do we have stacks of evidence that Mars is warming up faster than the Earth?

That is what is going to be going on here. I hope you find it interesting. I hope you find it amusing. If you disagree with me, I hope you don’t get bent out of shape over it. There’s better things to do than to take everything so seriously.