Doesn’t seem like it’s been a whole year since the last Lurker Day, does it? Well, good, because it hasn’t. The last Lurker Day here was in September 2005. But I’ve noticed a lot more repeat customers in the Creek Running North site stats these days, and — especially as I’m gonna be a bit busy getting ready for my next Mojave Desert trip — I thought I’d re-issue a formal invitation to those of you who haven’t yet left a comment.
If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to say “hello,” here’s your chance! Offer opinions about what you like, or don’t like, about CRN: subjects, attitude, format, design. Suggest potential writing topics. Ask questions. Tell a joke. Talk about the weather. Rant about politics. Urge Stephanie and Kat to write more. Anything goes! Well, almost anything.
You have the floor.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
28 comments on "Is it Lurker Day again already?"Well, since you asked: I’ve been hanging around for a couple weeks; thought you might enjoy Two-Heel Drive, my hiking blog. I’m in the dead-tree biz like you, though closer to the scene of the crime.
I may have de-lurked before - however… I love your stories - love Zeke with a passion and have been sending him scritches and good energy - and absolutely love the new blog I found because of coming here daily - I Gallop on! I don’t have a blog yet. Not able to communicate as eloquently as most of the people I read regularly. Thanks so much for posting and educating and giving so much of yourself.
hugs from PA
Connie
It’s been about a year for me - I suppose I came for the nature writing, but I’ve returned regularly for the personal glimpses. I particularly respond when you allude to the roads taken/not taken (e.g. Allies http://faultline.org/index.php/trackback/2993/ )
That piece particularly brought out an ache of recognition. Thanks.
i’ve only been lurking for a couple weeks, needed more enviro-granola insights. Enjoying it quite a lot. I’m totally an urban creature, but come from a long line of east coast enviro-people.
Good going !!
:cheese: I am a lurker from the interior of
BC Canada. I like your nature writing. It is
like walking with you almost. I have an old
dog who will cannot go walking in the woods
with me anymore. I can hardly bear the thought
that I have to go alone now. Your Zeke story
brought it home to me. I also liked your
German tourist story. The next time I see
some ass…. ripping off the bark of a live
birch tree, I think I will start screaming
murderer or perhaps just tell him thanks and
who needs birch trees in the valley anyway?
There is a big push here to get rid of
“invasive plants”. Yet I cannot find a
scientific definition of them. Most seem to
seed where man has disturbed everything.Just
when are plants invasive? Who decides and
why?
Yo! I showed up with Stephanie (post, Stephanie, post!) and since I mostly lurk on political blogs I find CRN to be a relaxing change. I’m also interested in hearing more from Kat (post, Kat, post!) since I don’t know her well. I have popped in randomly from time to time but added you to the RSS feed after your story about Zoom in the moon.
I was born and raised in Berkeley, educated up to a BA at Cal. My dad, who died recently, taught History at Berkeley High for 25 years. I worked for the CCC at the Dwight and Martin Luther King Jr Way recycling site when I was 13 because my mom drove the truck. I worked at the Ecology center about ten years ago, in the recycling end doing file clerk/reception stuff. My aunt ran the place then.
So my feminism and environtmental is hard assed but also not as thoughtful as I’d have had to have been coming from somewhere else than Berkeley.
My livejournal is more personal than anything else though personal includes my politics.
Oh, I also lurked on a.f.u for a long time. And I strongly supported you in email.
Ok, I admit it. I lurk. I will lurk again. But I only lurk where the reading is good. And, after all, I stop by for the pleasure of reading your writing. If I wanted to read my own writing, I’d start a blog or something.
Your writing provides me pleasant mini-vacations from the hum drums. I’m an avid dog and cat lover and really would like to give Zeke a hug around the neck. Your writing frequently touches me so deeply I tear up.
Hi! I started to lurk here because I liked your comments on other blogs I lurk on, and stayed for the quality of the writing. I keep telling myself that one of these days I will strike up the nerve to jump right into some of these discussions I enjoy reading so much… until then, I will keep lurking.
EIC
I’ve lurked here for about a year (I wrote a minor comment once), and read your posts on Usenet for a few years before that. I’m from Berkeley, and especially enjoy when you go on about Berkeley/East Bay subjects, as I’m homesick in Seattle.
If you hadn’t started this thread, I would have commented on your Tarantula post—I’ve been dwelling on the lot of the poor tarantulas since I read your post this morning. As a kid I always thought of them as nice creatures you could pet at the Lawrence Hall of Science (museum). Torture, and ignorant German tourists—way to depress me.
Gillie, who posted above, has a biography similar to mine. We don’t know each other, but hi Gillie! and everyone!
yup, another lurker, came here in search of good writing, found a lot of it and so lurk daily. any real change wld be for the worse. tell Zeke yr best secrets while you can.
i’m a candian in california, anxiously waiting for my first trip east, into the desert.
you keep me inspired.
Hello Chris, I am lurking from Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. Only got onto you a few weeks ago. I love good writing and for me one of the joys of the ‘sphere is to chance across people doing extraordinary things. All the best.
:P
I lurk. I sometimes comment. Mostly I read, because I enjoy the high-quality of the writing here, and the intelligence of the discourse.
I am also feeling groovy because I do not have to go to work for one entire week, and I am relaxed and just… mellow. I hate that word, but there it is.
I’ve been reading this for a few months now having wandered here from somewhere else, probably Pandagon. I have to admit though, I really began to lurk in earnest after that “I hate white people” post.
I live in Emeryville.
Reading since…. quite a while!
I probably arrived via Pharyngula or Tangled Bank, and found myself coming back and back, reading about Zeke, and the desert, and wondering what it exactly was that drew me. Clearly the writing resonated, but that wasn’t it, and it only dawned on me when I tried to explain to somebody else.
It’s that mainstream media is aimed for the lowest common denominator. There’s no risk-taking, no exploration, no attempt, and no real possibility of creating anything of lasting value.
I don’t suppose anybody can consistently hit the high notes bang on, but I’ll honour anybody who can do it even once. Reading your piece on the desert fire, with the pictures and the captions and the understanding, it felt (to this person who grew up watching David Attenborough), a bit like coming home.
I am sometimes up at an observatory in the desert high in the Sierra Nevada in Spain. One blazing afternoon, with nothing to do but wait for a phone call, I figured that, if Chris Clarke were in my position, he would pick up a camera and go outside. So I went outside and looked down at the gravel car park, and quickly found beautifully camouflaged grasshopper/cricket type creatures, 1 inch long, that would stay perfectly still until you almost walked on them, then would flicker away a few feet, go motionless in an instant, and vanish again. I even found a pair in the middle of mating! And I found I needed a better camera.
Thanks!
Ronan Cunniffe
I am enjoying your writing - very much. I send your posts to my friends. I wonder if you sleep.
hi -
my name is Andi, I live in England. I enjoy reading your hiking things because I enjoy hiking. I like the way you try to pile as many layers of context into what you write as possible, I know how difficult it is to do well and you often do it well. I’m not so interested in your notes on your personal life because we’ve not met.
“lurking” is a horrible word. I’m a bit new to all this - is it bad form to just read people’s blogs as if they were in a magazine I’d bought? if so, is that because I haven’t actually bought anything, because it’s actually a lot more of a community thing than I thought?
however it works, please keep on writing, I very much enjoy reading.
best wishes
Andi
Thanks for the opportunity to say “hi.” I enjoy your comments at Pandagon, I Blame the Patriarchy, Feministe, and elsewhere, so eventually I followed you back home to see what you do in your natural habitat.
My favorite post was your parody press release for the “After-Love Boat” a couple of months ago. I love deadpan humor that never breaks character.
I also greatly enjoyed your recent post contrasting the labels “feminist” v. “pro-feminist” for men who support feminist causes. I’ve thought about that for years, since my days in the early 90s volunteering as a clinic escort.
Chris,
I found your website about a year ago. I usually log on to it about 1/2 hour before I leave the office in the afternoon. It gets me ready for my daily walk with my two dogs (hello Zeke). My wife and I have an empty nest - 2 grown, great kids - and we have 20 acres of Kentucky hillside that backs up against about 1000 acres of woods that were last logged maybe 30 years ago. No neighbors in that direction, so it feels like our own private park. Spring is in full tilt! A second bad year for morel mushrooms. We’ve had some astounding years in the past, so it’s really sad when you come home with only 2 or 3. Planted much of the vegetable bed today. Easter seemed like an appropriate day for that. Hope the frosts don’t reappear.
Walk in peace.
Charlie in Kentucky
P.S. Keep an eye on that scoundrel Berube!
I try to wander by at least once a week, for the writing and the glimpse of your world. Awhile back you wrote a post about working for a disfunctional enviro outfit that so completely mirrored the experience of a friend that I knew I had to keep up with your doings.
Oh yeah—I also left Buffalo, as so many do.
I read this blog almost every day, and comment fairly (probably too!) often. There are other blogs I read where I comment rarely and some not at all. I suppose I comment here mainly because of the high quality of the discourse. I like to throw my two cents in every now and again, whereas at some other blogs the quality of the discourse is, shall we say, lower. But I was wondering about Andi Chapple’s etiquette question concerning comment frequency and would be interested in reading some enlightening opinions on the topic.
Well, my two cents on Andi’s question are that:
one cent) I put this stuff on the web so that people will read it, and I have no expectation of any recompense for it whether financial or kudos-oriented;
other cent) I love hearing from readers, and as I recognize that some people might hold off on making comments out of a misplaced fear of intruding, I like to specifically invite folks to say hello now and then even if only to offer a smiley raspberry.
Though knowing where Dread Pirate Roberts lives, that was probably an Olallieberry.
I will confess to some distress at hearing comments like the one Connie offers. This isn’t a repartee race! Just because I have the bad habit of overdramatizing my words doesn’t mean people who prefer plainer speech ought to fear to tread here. (See, I’m doing it again.)
And why is it that the people who worry they’re not eloquent enough always say so in perfectly clear and thought-provoking ways? I think we all worry too much about such things.
I am a lurker from the “central” coast of CA. I lurk all over the place, even on my own blog (and for a guy with an English BA, the writing there is kind of sketchy). I showed up here cause I love reading great writing about anything. Tough to request a topic since I’d be happy to read pretty much all of them.
While my life is not quite a work of art, it may eventually become that. Good to know that there are some role models for that. Cheers, Chris.
I live in central IN, but am a transplant from Chicagoland, via Rochester NY. I only lived in the Rochester area for 10 weeks, as a newlywed many years ago, but I still miss it, and the Finger Lakes. They inspired a deep attachment in me in a way that Indianapolis, in 11+ years, has not.
I have visited parts of California, and have family in NM and OK. I like deserts in theory, but have not seen much of them.
I’m an environmental scientist professionally, but an amateur ecologist/botanist at heart. I’m never happier than when I’m outside, hanging out with trees.
So I especially appreciate your natural history, but I enjoy your sense of humor, and how you think. I like hearing about Becky and Zeke too.
Well, I’ve been here a few weeks, I guess, but I’ve been ignoring my newsfeeds, so I’m just now getting around to reading a lot of your recent posts. I think I arrived via Gina Spadafori’s site, if memory serves. Possibly linked to a post on feminism. Gina tends to get me up and get me moving.
I liked what I found.
I’m a writer (two books, You Are a Dog and We Are the Cat).
Thanks for inviting me to comment. Otherwise I’d probably sit on the sidelines for another three months or so.
Blessings.
Terry