Getting Started...

This is the first blog posting I've written.  It's hard to get started - it took me a few hours just to come up with a title for this darn thing!  There are easy steps to customize the page but when I click on View Blog what I view is the same beige background, flying birds, and Arial font I started with.  I want the cool map background in my favorite olive green shade!  Where's the button I push to add some pictures?  Like most things, this exercise is going to be tougher than I thought.  Luckily, the settings, materials, characters I have to work with are well worth the effort.  Beginning here at newly named Frankora Farm bursting with summer reading, family, and livestock and then trekking off to FSU's London Study Center in just a week. Could that be an icon for a picture in a handy tool bar just above my text?  This adventure in blogging is already looking up.  Perhaps a picture of the rustic aspect of this blog...

...in the image I took last night of the rainbow that arched above my roughly woven together garden fence will anchor this post.  After living in the cities of Boston, Hartford, St. Petersburg, London, Austin, Charlotte, and Louisville, my husband and I have spent the last year settling in to a 37 acre property in rural Alamance County, NC.  It can be a tad quiet and lonely out here, despite the presence of our two young children and my parents, so we've populated it with chickens, goats, dogs, and turkeys.  Those peeper frogs in the pond can liven things up too.  In the midst of egg collecting, goat milking, kid cuddling, and weeding, I will be deserting this oasis and heading over to the bustling city of London for a condensed three weeks of chronicling the sights, sounds, and motions of the city through this blog, a facebook page, a photobook and other multimedia projects.  I'll be living in a flat near the British Museum and listening to the sounds of the emergency vehicles as they zoom to the nearby hospital.  Instead of hauling buckets of water to the chicken coops, I'll be hauling my little lunch bag to a picnic.  The sounds of crickets in the evening will be replaced by the melodious cadence of Shakespeare's verse at the RSC.  Long walks through wooded overgrown paths will turn into long walks down the streets of London.  With everything we have going on here at Frankora farm, it's difficult for me to shift gears and work on my graduate studies and my other life as a librarian. Even with the opportunity to go to London drawing nearer, I find the time to work on projects skittering away from me.  But now I have started the blog and this chance I have to immerse myself in roaming, reading, and learning is taking shape.  Let the adventure begin...