THE
BLUE BOX (Recycled Ideas)
by Don Cox
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It's a grey day here in the midst of the northern woods,
a closed in kind of day. The overcast is eye level or lower.
The fog is like a white gauze spread over the brooding depths
of the boreal forest. I think the Great Manitou is giving
us a primer coat before He lays down the final white blanket
and puts the year to bed. It's a day for sharing a warm
fire with a dog or two, a day for looking back over the
years and for looking ahead as well, but not too far.
Since this is the 198th column, and since we are only
a couple of weeks away from the turn of the century, maybe
it's time for a major change in the Blue Box too. Let me
tell you what brought this on and then let me tell you what
I have in mind.
I was speaking to my editor, kindly old Mr. Ennis the
other day and he had some wise comments, as always. "Don",
he said, "you've pretty well exhausted the potential of
this weekly 800 or so word column, it's time you picked
out the best material from them, put them together in chapters
and made a book." So I agreed to do that, and I even mentioned
a target date for completion, 30 June 2000. As I get the
chapters together I'll post them for comment on the Blue
Box mailing list and you can suffer twice, once when you
read it here, and again when you buy the book.
Of course I'll want to occasionally post a column like
always, so look for them sporadically. The yearly raft of
letters outlining the events in the lives of my various
friends over the past year have started arriving, so next
week the Blue Box will be my Christmas letter and will amaze
you with things about 1999 you never suspected.
One of the things that has prompted this change in pace
is the fact that the journaldebuckingham.com has gone belly
up and I no longer have a Sunday night deadline to meet.
Without this pressure I find it quite easy to delay writing
until the next weekend. Fortunately the paper is soon to
be reborn under new management and I was asked to provide
a weekly column. I declined but suggested instead that the
editor ask our well known and well loved community virtual
person (but real tax-payer), Elizabeth Maryon Cox. Liz leapt
at the opportunity and has agreed to do a weekly column
on the Mayo social scene. I'm sure she would be delighted
to send it to the Blue Box mailing list as well, when and
if she starts. You can reach her now, by the way, at lizmaryon@hotmail.com.
Sometimes she's slow at replying, but can generally be depended
on for an eventual response.
So there you have the new face for the new millennium,
I hope it turns out well. If it does, don't thank me, just
send your accolades either to kindly old Mr. Ennis or to
Elizabeth. They both need a little attention, poor things.
Bluebox ©2001 Don Cox
Website ©2001 OttawaWEB
