My brother sent me the Google Maps image of my parents’ house. There were several cars and a couple of people in the driveway of the house, and he was trying to figure out who the people were. I, of course, had no idea, but it turns out that one of the people was . . . me! I’ve made only a few trips to visit my parents in the past three years, and strange as it seems, during one of those trips Google photographed the house. Spooky as hell — no one on earth took that photo, yet there I am, frozen forever in the Googleverse.
I really had no intention of blogging about this, being in an unblogging frame of mind, but after we realized that the person was me (I always wondered how people recognized when someone looked like them — I didn’t even recognize myself!) my brother sent me an email, “I smell a blog coming . . .” So, not to disappoint him, here it is. A blog about Google Maps and Me. (That was the title I had planned to use, but somehow I couldn’t pass up free words, so I used my brother’s instead.)
This sounds as if it has the makings of a good mystery. A woman is checking at her house on google maps to see if a new photo with the improvements she made have shown up, and she sees an unfamiliar woman skirting the house. Thinking it’s a meter reader, she thinks nothing of it, but then she finds out that all her meters are read automatically and becomes obsessed with finding out who the person is. Is someone casing the joint? Is her husband having an affair? Is her son?
Or, use the scenario of my photo — my brother and I cannot figure out who the people are, though we ask around. So we become obsessed with finding out who the people are. One turns out to be a neighbor, but the other . . . the other is a siser we never knew we had. What happened to her? Why didn’t we know about her?
I smell a story coming on . . .
Bertram's Blog 
January 31, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Recently went on the Google earth site to check out our previous addresses. Nowadays some areas are set up with ‘street view’ rather than just a top view. Pretty cool.
If we could turn 10% of the ideas that fall into our brains from every day ‘stuff’ into real books & stories… wow, that could be incredible. Hope you get past your unblogging frame of mind soon. BTW – Speaking of blogging, you’ve got an award to be picked over at my joint. Actually, I think you were selected multiple times (by others besides me).