New Look and a New Focus

Welcome to the Baker's new blog.  The site has been redesigned although is still has the same basic structure.  I purged the old articles, we rarely updated and they seemed woefully behind.  With all of the changes that have happened in our lives recently, it seemed right to move on somehow, to enter into a new season and do something different.  We also didn't really know what we wanted to do with BakerVillage back then.  It was a mishmash of personal news and reviews on tech gadgets and such.  In other words it lacked focus.

Well I'm not promising daily posts or even weekly, but what I can say is that we have a pretty good focus for this go around.  As I interact with people I often find myself going off on these little rants about a wide variety of subjects.  Friends tend to find them interesting and I suppose lots of people find them boring, but they usually don't stick around to become friends.  So BakerVillage will not be a megaphone to the world.  I could care less about the world and I would be awfully arrogant to think that my ideas on anything would be interesting to anyone outside of our friends and family.  Instead my focus for this blog (and I think Sheri will be on board) is to make it a collection of conversational ideas aimed at just our small circle of friends and anyone who wants to join that circle.  

Blogs with rants are a dime a dozen.  People who are not experts will give their opinion in exaggerated and often angry tones basically to make themselves feel better.  Maybe they feel special by doing it, maybe they are deluding themselves to thinking that others are actually reading their garbage.  But there are lots of them.  I don't want to be them.  If just four friends read this blog regularly and it sparks conversation when we get together, my ambition will be satisfied.

Of course there is an ulterior motive for the blog.  So much of what we do starts with writing.  I would love to make little local documentaries, and am excited about learning videography and editing.  My taste for such things is very refined and my skills are abysmal, but that is sort of the heart of hobby.  It's a journey of watching your skills grow to match your taste.  I am okay with that process.  I look forward to that process.  But that process is wasted if I let my ability to write and edit language decline.  It is hardly anything to have a great thought, and even a great thought in a witty wrapper is wasted if the telling of it is awkward and clumsy.  For instance, did that last sentence make sense?  Did you understand it?  Was it compeling?  Poignant?  The only way to know is by doing.  It takes a lot of words written on a page to find your voice.  I don't know that I ever found a voice.  The meter of my writing is nonstandard.  Is that interesting to readers or frustrating.  It is conversational.  Can that lead to misunderstanding?  The only way I can think of to find out is to just write and see how people respond.  To write about complicated subjects and make them easy to understand.  (Current economic crisis anyone?)  And to also write about simple subjects and make them interesting and compelling to listen to.  (The human drama of selecting a new pair of glasses.)

So if you are reading this then chances are good that you are somehow already connected to me.  Maybe you could bookmark the site and check in every once in a while.  If you don't know me already then you might want to move on and read stuff by people who have already been through this process.  Malcolm Gladwell is a genius, and Ira Glass may be one of the best storytellers of our time.  I think your time would be much better spent with them.  But it's your time, spend how you like.