Blogging from Vienna

The combination of lack of broadband, and a whole new location, has conspired to make blogging a lot more complicated for me than it ever has been before. It’s not just that I don’t have high speed access (although that definitely cuts down on reading the web, and thus having interesting things to link to), it’s also that so much of what I’m dealing with in these past few days is not easy to talk about in public ways.

It's been hard to figure out how to blog about experiences that are shared by my family -- often with very different perceptions. Nathaniel's first (and thus far only) post from Austria in his own blog gives you a hint of his experiences to date. Yet if you read Eric's version of that walk, you get the glorious pictures and a sense of how beautiful it was.

So... do I write about my fears? My sense of how hard our kids are struggling to figure out their places here? Even though THEY read this blog? And how self involved and pathetic do I sound, if I write about what's hard in the midst of this glorious chance to be living in Europe?

I just can't figure out a "voice." It makes me conscious of how easily I fell into a kind of blogging which was just pointing off to interesting pieces, and rarely even commenting on them more than to note that they were worth visiting. This new kind of blogging is probably a whole lot closer to what many people do (the diary thing), but it still feels weird to me.