Anyway, if a picture is really worth a thousand words, my life is still talking, and likely will for a long time. My point is, I take a lot of pictures, but I do nothing with them. I once had grandiose ideas of this neat-o website for the family with dynamic yet simple photo galleries for anyone to peruse. I even had a pretty fair sized photo gallery assembled using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

That was a stupid idea. Today, I have had a better one, and I think I may have even found a purpose for this whole blogging thing. I think, instead of a huge, cumbersome gallery, I will pick images based upon entirely arbitrary rules defined at any given moment at my whim.

Then I will share their story.

I have not lived a life of wealth or fortune – far from it, in fact. Yet, as I ponder the future and the great adventures ahead, I can’t help reflecting more than I ever have before. I have long been a hugely nostalgic person, but this is different.

I have begun to focus my efforts on learning who I am, and what I want from life as I move forward. It has been an astonishing time, this period of introspection. I mention it all because I have begun to realize just how lucky I have been to have done the things I have done, and it perhaps explains why I document the everloving shit out of everything I do that could be considered interesting in future conversations.

I will begin with an image that will also be an aid in explaining the name of the site.

I doubt there are many out there who do not recognize this character, jumbled though he may be. This is Mr. Potato Head, as seen in Disney’s Toy Story in 1995. I was a junior in high school when this came out, and fell in love with the movie, and especially this character.

In 1997, I met my wife. The details are hazy, but Toy Story, and specifically Mr. Potato Head were favorites of both of ours, and we soon began collecting Mr. Potato Head.

This mug was a daily driver for a long time. After a while, I decided I needed to protect it, so I stopped using it as a mug, and ended up displaying it, along with whatever other oddities we came across (and there were many).

My wife and I ultimately amassed a collection of hundreds of Mr. Potato Head items, all of which I have photographed. There will be more images to come, and I will likely end up with a gallery of the images eventually, but for now, this is the only teaser I offer.

Around 1998, I decided I needed another email address, but this time, I wanted something that would be a little more permanent than whatever an ISP gave me. We moved (a lot) back in those days, so I ultimately settled on a Yahoo! email address. For a while, Sarah had been calling me Taterbob, so I decided to try for that, only to find it taken.

A tuber is a thickened plant base that forms buds from which new plants grow; a potato is a tuber. I have always loved words, and that is a great one – come on, say it out loud. Tuber. So, I tried tuberbob at yahoo dot com, and it worked. Ever since then, I have been tuberbob anywhere I go online. I even registered the domain name around 2000, though I only used it for email purposes for a long time. I think I tried to host my first website sometime around 2002, but really, I am just guessing.

Now I feel, after all these years, that it is time to address something. There is only one ‘O’ in tuberbob. It is the ‘O’ betwixt a pair of ‘B’s’ in ‘bob.’ I have never understood how people can look at the letters in my username (even sounding it out!) and come up with turbobob. Turbo? Seriously, glancing at the letters and hurriedly forming noises in your head that you think align with the letters in the name is not a sign of even a decent level of reading comprehension.

Tuberbob. Because I like Mr. Potato Head. Thank you, drive through!

Mr. Potato Head

Collection of pics detailing my Potato Head collection

But, I digress. I have mostly used the tuberbob.com domain name for email. I figured the hosting space would be cool, though, since all my family is on the opposite side of the USofA from me. Add globetrotting parental units into the equation, and suddenly, “photo gallery online” makes perfect sense! Now, this all began before even myspace.com came around; the only way to track school buddies down was a phonebook or classmates.com. Since I decided very early in my internet history that paying for things like information online was stupid, I never did fork over the $13 to locate a few good buddies from back in the day, though I thought about them non-stop.

So, somewhere along the line, I found out about wordpress, and while I am certainly no brand whore, I have to say, I really like it a lot, even though I hardly ever used it. I have tried numerous themes, and looks, and gimmicks, but none of it interested me enough to keep me active, if I’m completely honest. But, on occasion, I would post about things that interested me, or profound events in my life, so there is something to be missed by the handful of people who did stop by back then.

I do not have anything to hide, other than a few political opinions I am none too proud of, but even those were really pretty mundane. On the other hand, there was at least one post that I will likely re-create here.

The other driving force behind this renewed effort is far more difficult to explain, and it could be argued to be the main reason I am doing this. It is intensely personal, but not in an uncomfortable way. I have been growing, changing, and exploring.

Apparently, now I want to talk about it.