Older than the Lord

I've been skirting around the notion of a blog for a while, and today I find myself in test-drive mode. I've never had a tremendous understanding or respect for the value of blogs, other than to the blogger him-/herself. Honestly, I can't pin down the reasons I'm choosing to tackle it now, unless it's to map out my future by organizing the past and labeling the present: a self-study. But I guess that's what all blogs are really about, eh?

For starters, some of my basic data (material that will be fleshed out a bit more in future blogs, perhaps):

• I'll turn 34 later this month, making me, as an old friend pointed out, "older than the Lord." Really and truly, when I was a teenager, I thought I'd be farther along in life by this point.
• I live four hours from my hometown, and only within the last three years have I begun to sense the place calling me back.
• I consider myself very rural and very Southern, but given many of my shortcomings and interests, this culture that I know and love often sparks a feeling that I'm a pair of brown shoes in a world of tuxedos.
• I love my job and desire to do it well, but I fear that I lose sight of my priorities.
• I'm an aspiring fiction writer who's now finding encouragement on a semi-regular basis.
• Although always an avid hiker and underweight for most of my life, a poor fitness level and more than a few extra pounds have snuck up on me in the last eight or nine years, prompting me to declare myself a runner (who's not as faithful to his running as he should be) and (very recently) a beginning cyclist.

And with that introduction... I enter the Land of Blogging.