Writing a blog has made me bolder. I’m basically a shy person, sometimes painfully so. For example, even after decades, I still get nervous speaking in departmental faculty meetings, unlike many colleagues who will drone on for tens of minutes about the controversial placement of a comma in a new department policy document…. Wait! Stop! Did I just write that?? Slap self hard! Or take Toilet Tissue Purchasing as another example. For some reason I get SO embarrassed buying it. I can’t look the checkout clerk directly in the eyes. I tried buying a single roll at a time for a while because I could hide it in the shopping cart between the rutabaga and the large bag of epsom salts. But all that shopping got old in a hurry. So now I just buy the small, anemic-looking four-pack. At midnight. DO NOT even suggest to me those super twenty-four roll jumbo packages or the insanely large mega-rolls. Everybody would be staring. Wait! Stop! That’s not really shyness, is it? It’s mental.
Anyway, recently I was minding my own business, walking through a hotel lobby restaurant in Orlando, when out of the corner of my left eye (my good one), I saw some pirates at a table. A decision had to be made: either keep walking and embrace a worldview which accepts pirates–or go ahoy them and take their picture for my blog.
Talk about friendly pirates! I didn’t fear for my life a single moment during our little connection time. Come to find out, they were a pirate family. Here’s mom and dad. Married 50 years!
And here’s their daughter, a very happy family practice doc, as well as a pirate!
They were joyful mates to meet.
NealEnJoy 
That’s really cool! Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone and you can be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
LikeLike