The Riversider begins.

This is the beginning of The Riversider Blog. We’re hoping to bring readers some interesting insights into the goings on of our city and surrounding areas. Our goals are not very clear at this point, we are going to write and take pictures and report what we see, and hopefully get some response from the community and start some dialogue among Riversiders. This thing is experimental so keep that in mind.

We have found a few Riverside blogs out there, but not too many. Some have a conservative agenda (eww), and some are all about real estate (yawn). There’s a few interesting blogs we have found (see links over on the side). We’re hoping to keep The Riversider multidimensional, and address a wide range of topics including the arts (since Riverside is calling itself “City of the Arts” these days), politics, food (possible restaurant reviews?), historical tidbits, upcoming events, and whatever else we think would be fun. We also hope to keep it pretty random and artsy.

Our “staff” is small right now but we are looking for contributors- photographers, writers, people with opinions and ideas. We’re hoping to have guest bloggers on here as well.

As for ourselves, we wish to remain anonymous for now. We live in town, grew up here and -for better or worse- call Riverside home. We remember when the Galleria was called Riverside Mall, and Farrel’s was in the parking lot. We know about Twin Palms, the airplane house, and recall the Otter Pop factory on Iowa Ave. We’ve explored the bamboo caves of the Santa Ana River, climbed the many rocky peaks around UCR, and attempted to find the legendary Riverside catacombs. We have fished in Lake Evans, scaled Mt. Rubidoux (and looked for it's ghosts), dined at the Mission Inn’s sunday brunch, and played baseball in Arlanza. We’ve been around a while, and like most who live here have a love/hate relationship with our home. Yes we are Riversiders... and this is our forum.

Oh yeah that picture above- it's our favorite eel in town, the friendly eel from Rubio's near UCR. He/she is a Riversider too. I would like to rescue this eel from it's hexagonal prison, but in a way it looks pretty happy. We think it should be our mascot. How about Eelie? Eelie the Riversider eel...