Post the First

Reader, if you seek his memorial - look around you.

And, Reader, if you are looking for a blog that will always be well-written, organized, and coherent, I suggest  looking elsewhere. This blog will mainly be for me and those select few I feel like telling about this blog's existence. But mainly for me.

The first line of this post is a translation of the Latin message on the floor of St. Paul's Cathedral. "His" means Sir Christopher Wren's. Sir Christopher Wren was the great English, 17th- and 18th-Century architect who spent decades of his life designing the most recent of the five St. Paul's Cathedrals in London. Though he is buried at the Cathedral, along with many other historical luminaries, there is no memorial set up explicitly for him, as there are for the others. This, however, this simple sentence. And I thought it was cool, interesting, and almost inspiring way to start my first blog. I know I'm not as dead as Mr. Wren and that this is not as much of a monument as St. Paul's Cathedral.

On the note of inspiration, I felt that today was as good as any to get going with this blogging/journaling/chronicling thing I want to keep up in Oxford, the "city of dreaming spires." (Hence, the punny, cheesy name of my blog.) After getting some of the best Old Chicago pizza ever (three toppings: garlic chicken, sun-dried tomato pesto sauce, and onions) with Sandra, Robert, and Kyle M., I stopped by the library to get some Oxford preparation materials. I checked out six DVDs for tourists of the UK, two travel guides, and two fat, comprehensive texts, each covering the entire history of Britain. I watched two of the DVDs - one a tour of London, the other, "Visions of England," a narrated helicopter tour of all the main sites of England - and read the history of neolithic, pre-Roman conquest Britain. Through all of it, I started a collection of notes on what are some of the most interesting-sounding things so that I will have a place to start when I want to plan some trips around England.

That's all I've got for now. In the coming weeks, I am planning to keep up this journaling thing, as boring as it may be, to try to get in the habit. I do not anticipate letting people know about the blog at this stage, because it will probably be boring for the next three weeks. It won't have much to do with Oxford or the UK, anyway. I'm going to go make salad for dinner and then, hopefully, play some Civ IV.

Sincerely,
Yours truly