My Journal is 1 year old as of yesterday!

Yes, Wanderer is 1 year old.

A year ago, August 3rd, 2005, I began blogging under the journal name AntFarmAnalogies. I had started an ant farm with a space age blue gel ant habitat that I had purchased during a five day teacher workshop in Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina.

Eventually, I changed the name, which happened not long after the ants all died. I learned quite a bit observing those tiny critters busily chewing their way into the gel, creating the most interesting network of tunnels.

It seems I have come full circle.

Something is going to change regarding my journaling here at AOL. I'm not leaving, but there will be another change. I realized what I had to do while in the mountains, and I will write a more thorough explanation here over the weekend.

But for now, I'm marveling how the journal evolved, initially from observing an ant farm, noticing the steady and focused work of the Harvester Ants as they tunneled through the space age blue gel, to observing the life of other journalers, as well as my own, tunneling through the various layers of what Life has given to us.

Ants do have something to teach us. Most observations I made were regarding their behavior. I wondered what would they do when the tunnels were finished? Or, do they just keep tunneling until they die? Since I only have observed that one ant habitat, I can't say for certain that the next colony would respond the same way, but I would like to find out.

The ants finished their tunnels. They just stopped tunneling at some point, and then eventually they all died. I think it had to do with there being no queen ant to keep the colony going, no purpose to tunneling any further, or that the habitat was really too small. Maybe they didn't really care for all that blue gel.

The space age blue gel had been developed by NASA scientists to carry ants into space, andthey actually did go into space as a student designed experiment. They were launched on the same Challenger mission that took up Christa McAuliffe, and though all the experiments coming back on that mission were destroyed, the data sent by computer from the ant experiments were received at home and completed. I found some links to answer questions about the shuttle mission ant experiment and wrote about them in this entry.

If you are interested in the beginnings, or in the ant farm observations, you might want to go back and check out a few entries I wrote during the month of August in 2005. Click above on View Archives, then click on View first entry. There are pictures of the ant tunnels as they progressed from no tunnel to a living tunnel sculpture.

Happy Anniversary to my journal! One year old yesterday.