Milestones

We have three major milestones to celebrate this week.

On Wednesday, I will have been a Colorado resident for exactly four years. I grew up in a beautiful corner of England surrounded by lakes, rivers and green, green hills. Which meant that a move to the Arizona desert was something of a culture shock and as I've said, I was never really happy there. Arriving in Colorado was like being given a berth in heaven. My true spiritual home, I can't imagine living anywhere else.

Another milestone occurred on Sunday when Angus the 4Runner notched up his 250,000th mile. I missed it of course; noting when he was only 8 miles off and 2 miles past, but failing to catch the actual moment. 250,000 miles is the equivalent of ten times round the equator or to the moon and back five times; although even in 4-wheel drive, I think he'd struggle to make either of those journeys. His rust spots are spreading alarmingly and his shock absorbers appear to have given up the ghost recently but even with his dents and scrapes, he's still a reliable old bus and we're happy to have him in the family.

As for the third milestone; well, if you've been keeping track you'll know this epistle marks the 99th edition of The Gunsmoke Files. Yeah, yeah I know '99' isn't really a milestone the way that '100' is but if I wait until next week to write about it then it will be a week past the other two milestones and that will throw off the whole symmetry of the thing so just work with me here, OK?

I'm well aware that The Gunsmoke Files doesn't follow the pattern of a traditional blog. Rather than posting a paragraph or two every couple of days, I set myself a target of one article, 1,100 words long (with a leeway of 15 words either side), to be uploaded every Tuesday night. My original goal was to see if I could meet this self-imposed deadline in the way I would be required to if I were a real writer with an editor tapping his foot. And for the most part, I've succeeded. A couple of posts didn't make it online until Wednesday morning, although in both cases, Internet access or the lack thereof was the challenge rather than no article to post. And there was a spell last fall where my work schedule was so intense that I simply had to stop updating the site for a few weeks in order to cope.

In fact, rather than the deadline, I've found more of a challenge in coming up with a new subject each week. My original vision was to restrict the theme to life in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A worthy subject, but the problem I ran into was that while my home is indeed in the mountains, the sad fact is that much of my waking hours are spent in an office downtown. That or in the car between here and there. When the weekend rolls around, I often do little more than walk the dogs, pay the bills and take care of things around the house. That's a pleasant enough way to live but it doesn't for interesting reading make. Not week after week it doesn't.

So after a 10-week hiatus in 2004, I re-launched The Gunsmoke Files with a broader scope, including events that occurred previously in the soap-opera which has been my life. Not necessarily stuff that will ever grace the shelves of the autobiography section, but things that were fun at the time. As well as things that weren't fun at the time but which seem a lot more so looking back.

Then there was an article on a subject far from fun. In March 2005 I hit and killed my first deer while driving home from work. In The Headlights was painful to write and even reading it now, is emotionally tough. However, writing it provided me with a much needed catharsis and the piece has probably brought more people to The Gunsmoke Files than the rest put together. It was also my first ever published article, appearing in the Frisco based Mountain Gazette in June. MG were also the publishers of my second article to make print, A Walk in Winter which appeared in January of this year.

I've made friends via The Gunsmoke Files too, from around the US but also Britain and elsewhere. I'm not going to turn this into an Oscar speech, but you know who you are, and I'm grateful to have met you, even if only on-line. The visitors' log shows me I have regular readers in France, Australia, and New Zealand and have been read by people in places as diverse as Iceland and India, Poland and Western Samoa. The 'search query' statistics tell me some of those folks were looking for information on the TV show, others on firearms in addition to dozens of other subjects, some of which I've actually discussed. Although I have to wonder what the person who googled 'gunsmoke spanking' was hoping to find. I hope he wasn't disappointed.

Occasionally, I'll glance back and re-read some of the earlier Gunsmoke Files. I have my favorites of course, but it's always obvious to me which ones were written in a hurry, to meet the self-imposed deadline. And I find it astonishing that no matter how many times I've read the articles, either through the composition and editing process, then later for my own amusement, I still find typos and grammatical errors. Maybe when I'm rich and famous I can get me one of them fancy editor type assistants, but 'till then, I'm afraid you're stuck with the goofs.

So where to go next. There are still lots of stories to be told, yarns to be spun. I've only scratched the surface of my adventures with a back pack and summer is just around the corner which means fishing tales and bike rides and picnics and yard work (oh crud, the yard work!), so I'm sure I won't run out of things to say for a while. I may or may not absolve myself from the 1,100 word rule and if I do that, I might post a little more often than once a week. But I'll continue to write. For posterity and nephews and nieces and friends from miles away.

And for me, when I'm old and grayer, and can't remember all this stuff.