I have a lot to do in my day-to-day life. There are gobs of projects that remain unstarted and many others unfinished. I have several hobbies that occupy my interest and I have a family to care and provide for. While I enjoy this interwebby thing with all these interesting blogs, I don’t want to spend hours and hours of everyday reading about what’s going on in everybody else’s world. With all this in mind, I’m fairly picky over which and how many blogs I read on a regular basis.
I like blogs that are interesting, funny, quirky and informative. Strike a chord on several of these for me and you’ve got a subscriber. I happened across Just A Boy From Newfoundland several years ago, I don’t remember exactly when. I wouldn’t describe it as funny, quirky or informative, but for some reason it grabbed my attention. It is not the typical blog that draws me. The author posts very infrequently. I’ve often thought that he’d given up on his blog. However, when he does post, it is usually a post that you must commit to reading. He narrates anecdotes from his life and drains his heart in a verbose, sentimental style that just pulls me in. He’s lived a wild life that teetered on the edge of destruction. His posts reflect on his constant struggle to recover from his past sins while continuing to fight off the demons that almost killed him in the first place.
I had already long been hooked when he wrote the post Old City Memories. In it, he writes about his home town, St. John’s, Newfoundland. Specifically, he bluntly describes the rough neighbourhoods familiar to anyone from that town, neighbourhoods which, coincidentally, I lived in and grew up in myself. I reached out to him and discovered that he had been writing under a pseudonym. While I don’t know him directly, I knew his older brothers. It’s funny how the intersections of life, with the internet as a catalyst, prove to us that this is truly a small, small world.
Check him out.
My preferred method is reading the news headlines on my RSS reader either on my computer desktop or my iPhone. I subscribe to several CBC feeds; one each for Canada, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, World, Arts and Recalls. I can usually whiz through the headlines and only drill into the news stories that 
