By happenstance I ran across another rural "Notes" site, only this one is by an American living in the countryside of Japan; Notes from Pure Land Mountain. I lived in Japan for two years as a small boy at a time when most of the country was still rural outside a few big cities. Here is a quote from the first post in his archives:

I decided not to take the main and faster highway back home, but to meander a bit in search of the kind of moments one can only come upon in mid-meander, and so took the narrow winding road along the Lake. I would thereby also get to see the old thatched-roof cottage again, where the beauty of its old wood and the stone path to the door was discreetly revealed by elegant bamboo fences and the gracefully sloping arms of ancient red pines and I could feel that old spirit, one of those last embers of the old Japan, like sitting close to fading loved one, moving close to a dying fire

The rest of the post goes on to mourn the loss of that "old Japan" which I can only half-remember myself from forty year's distance.

I was sorry to discover that Gerard Serafin has removed the Orthodox section from his blog list. I had grown acustomed to getting a few ecumenical hits a day from his link. He gives the reasoning behind this here on his blog. Orthodox/Catholic relations are a convoluted and controversial subject. I have previously posted on the topic here and may have some further thoughts in the near future.

I have added a list of a few of the Orthodox folk who keep on-line journals on LiveJournal.com to the permanent links section on the left. LiveJournals are typically more personal and less link-oriented than most weblogs. The first one listed, LiveJournal for Orthodox Christianity, shows off one of the useful features of the LiveJournal software, the ability to easily create a jointly authored "community" page. If any of you other Orthodox LiveJournaler's stray into blogger territory and would like your page listed, drop me a line.