It’s still slow here and since I’ll be gone this weekend, I’ll leave you all with an extra post to help get you through the weekend.

I’m the world’s biggest snoop. If I every tire of my current career, I’m going to become a private investigator because I just love spying on people. I’m not sure where I developed this habit but I just can’t stop myself.

I love walking Artie right now. It’s cold out but not rainy yet and beginning to get dark earlier. If I take him out around 8pm, I find most people have their lights on and curtains open. It’s dark enough outside that I have a nicely lit stage to peer into as I stroll by. And I simply love doing it. I like to see what people are doing, how they decorate their house, what’s on their wall. And then I try to figure out what type of people they are. It fascinates me and I can spend well over an hour strolling around with my dog playing peeping tom.

The same holds true with my friends. Never, never, never, leave me alone in your house. I’m simply too dangerous. Forgot your jacket? I’m more than willing to pop by your house and pick it up. Of course, I’ll have to rifle through your refrigerator while I’m there. Need someone to water your plants while you’re out of town? I’m your gal so long as you don’t mind me snooping through your medicine cabinet. I’ve actually developed a quick snoop technique that’s quite amazing. I can rifle through a pile of papers in the time it takes you to pop into the kitchen and refill my glass.

Normally, my labors are all for naught as most of my friends are normal people with normal lives but I always maintain the hope of some day hitting the jack pot and finding strange photos or old love journals stashed away somewhere. I think I may plant notes around my own house just in case I have a guest with my own fetish.

Actually, now that I think about it, I remember playing this game with my sister. We’d leave a trail of cryptic notes throughout the house. You’d start with note 1 that would say something like “Now you’ve started the game and the trail isn’t to hot but you can pick up your next clue if you look in the pot.” Then you’d go into the kitchen and look through all the pots until you found the next clue. We loved this game. It would take one person a good hour or so to come up with all the riddles and hiding placed but we’d amuse ourselves for hours.

Man, don’t even get me started on all the crazy games we played as kids. I think I’d be a much more normal person if I was allowed to watch more TV. Maybe then I wouldn’t have to work so hard trying to suppress my desire to steam open the mail that is mis-delivered to my house. At lease I have my dog to help purge my system but someday I’ll be McLaughlin, P.I. You just wait and see. (Obviously, I have read one too many Janet Evanovich novels and need professional help.)

When I started this blog, I had two concerns.

Would anyone read it?

Could I make it interesting?
As I have started typing down my thoughts, I find I worry less and less if anyone else sees this. I mean, I have no way of knowing who’s accessing this site. This is the joy and the curse of the Internet. I could have hundreds of thousands of people whose only reason for getting out of bed in the morning is the knowledge that there’ll be a new entry here. Or, it could be the only person looking at this is my mom. (Hi mommy!)

But since I have a very strange mind that I have been told is like a bad neighborhood which one should not walk through alone at night, I began to worry. What if I posted something negative about someone and, some how, they found this site and read it? Then I thought, nah, I’m just being paranoid. There are a gazillion sites out there. What are odds that the one person I don’t want to read this WILL read it? But the thought lingered in my mind.

So I started this blog and, unbeknownst to anyone else, I also started another blog. A secret blog.

Pooka Thoughts was my Dr. Jekyll, the tales of the good life, suitable to be read by small children, domestic animals and my mom. (Hi mommy!) But the other blog, that was my Mr. Hyde. There I let loose and named names. I called it like I felt and with no regard to who would every read it since it was hidden behind the sheer number of weblogs out there. I figured the odds of anyone I knew actually finding that journal were worse than me winning money at Vegas. With odds like that, I felt invincible.

So I was surfing around the ‘net today trying to learn more about this whole weblog thing and I come across this article about how to make a good web journal. The information seemed pretty innocuous. Don’t have lots of pictures that drag down the load time, use a spell checker, don’t posts thoughts that start “I have nothing to post” and, here’s the kicker, don’t post anything you don’t want the world to know. Whoa there Nelly! What was that all about? So I stop skimming and actually read that paragraph. The author said that no matter what you think, if there is someone out there you don’t want to read your thoughts, rest assured, they will find them. If you are putting something on a website, it will be read and it will be found. If you want to write intimate or private thoughts, do it in a journal. Don’t put it on a public access site.

Now this scared me. I quickly popped over to Hyde and began to read. I counting the number of people I didn’t want to read Hyde and when I ran out of fingers, I realized I could be in trouble. I mean, here I am venting about my boss and co-works, complaining about acquaintances and uncovering feelings I thought long dead. If any of this got out, I would never live it down.

So I did the only sensible thing. I deleted it. That’s right, no back up copy was kept, no print outs made. I decided a public forum for private thoughts was a very very bad idea. I have decided to write them in my journal which can be hidden safely in my house. Perhaps this journal would be more interesting or read by more people but I’ll never know and that’s fine by me.

Which reminds me to post about my addiction to snooping. But my stomach is rumbling so maybe, if things stay slow here, I’ll get to that after lunch.

(Bye Mommy! Thanks for reading!)