WPMs? What's a WPM?

BoyBob is learning to use the computer keyboard using a program called "Typing Instructor Deluxe". It tells him how fast he is typing in "words per minute"--but he calls them "woopms". After each lesson, he runs upstairs and tells me his achievement as measured by woopms. This cracks me up.

When he was 4, he saw the abbreviation "lb." and decided that was pronounced "limb". He now weighs 65 limbs; I buy 5 limbs of sugar at a time. I asked how he came up with this, and he said that "limb" was the only word he could think of that started with an "l" and had a "b" in it. (A silent "b" at that...)

I thought of calling the blog WPM on a LB, but I'm not a very controversial person and am not likely to go on many limbs, so I thought I'd better keep the blog title to what I could deliver against. I can deliver words per minute.

The past 2 years, I've spent a lot of time writing about a lot of topics related to homeschooling on a busy, busy bulletin board. It occured to me that I would like to write more thoughtfully, less reactively, and about things that I want to think about. I would like to have time to reflect, and I hope not alone, about a particular subject rather than chasing topics on a busy board.

So that is my first entry. It's about what I expected. Not a lot. When I have been thinking about writing a blog, lying awake in the middle of the night, I have thought of a lot of interesting things to blog about, and as I have written the text in my head, it was sparking, scintillating, elucidating. But as I write it now with my fingers, it is measured not in "atings" but in woopms.

Part of the reason I'm going to be short tonight is that I am in the middle of a riveting book--Witness, by Whittaker Chambers. It is the story of his life, as a Communist, as one who turned against communism toward freedom, and essentially gave his life to testify against Alger Hiss, a communist who (among many others) had infiltrated the highest levels of the United States government in the Roosevelt and Truman years and who provided secret information to the Soviet government. It cost Chambers his reputation, livelihood, friendships to do this...but he did it. All of this is news to me, as most of the history classes I ever had ended in 1945. I have griped about that fact for years...but it is up to me to add to my knowledge, and that's what I'm doing. It's a beautifully written book, and of the two activities--reading his writing or producing my own--it is clear which has the greater benefit.

TTFN...and thank you for reading.