Hi Kim, and thank you!

How do you get a person hooked up on blogs? You have to pick up the right blog for each person. I am hogging the computer all morning and all night. Kids are hogging it in the afternoons and over the weekends. So, my wife does not have much time online. One day, when I get rich, we'll each have our own computers and we'll blog 24/7 as a family.

But, my wife wanted to see what all those blogs are about and why I am spending so much time reading hundreds of blogs and posting every day. So, which blog did I show her first? My own? No. She'll read it to see what I think, not as a portal into the broader blogosphere. DailyKos? No, even I rarely go there, and it is definitely intimidating for a novice - it is so big, so complicated to navigate, and so vicious in the comments - it is usually a turn-off for a beginner. So, her being a nurse (and the only one in this house who works full time - she is my personal hero), I knew exactly which blog to show her first - Emergiblog.

When Kim started Emergiblog a few months ago, I was immediatelly smitten. This woman is a natural. A perfect mix of humor, snark, good writing and useful information. And will she ever run out of images of the old medical advertisements? Checking out her blog is worth just for those, if nothing else. Seeing all those old ads and how they portray nurses - and all women, by extension - just 30 years ago, is quite an eye-opener. It shows powerfully how much have we, as a society, moved forward over the past few decades, and how much more work needs to be done. I don't know if Kim would agree with me on this, but I think of her blog as a deeply feminist blog.

Now, dont' get me wrong, Kim and I are on the opposite ends politically and religiously. She is not going to send her entries to the next Carnival of the Liberals or Carnival of the Godless, that's for sure. Her blogfathers and daily reads are Instapundit, Lileks and Hewitt, while mine are Legal Fiction, PZ Myers, Shakespeare's Sister and Amanda Marcotte. But that never stood as an obstacle for our cyber-friendship. Who cares about politics when we mutually admire each other as people, writers and bloggers!

Now, my wife has a couple of dozen blogs on her bookmarks, some nursing blogs, some medical blogs, some political blogs, some feminist blogs, but the first one on top of the list is still Emergiblog.