The Horns of a Dilemma

I am a member of SwapBot, a place for people who like to exchange things with other people to meet.  Not being "crafty," I'm not into sending knitted whozits, crocheted whatzits, or hand made geegaws, but I do join swaps that are of postcards or pen pal letters.  I recently started keeping a 6 week journal (written in a student's Composition Notebook).  

The other kinds of swaps I have done before is the chance to publicize your own blog.  You visit partners' blogs for a bit, then write about them in your own blog, telling what you liked (or didn't) about the blogs and why. 

This is about the third or fourth of these blog swaps I've joined but as the time has passed since partners were assigned, I find I am on the horns of a dilemma.  I'm not sure why either of the women involved decided to participate.

The first blog, My Wonderland Adventure, had no entries at all for the first two weeks after we were assigned (September 2).  I finally wrote to her on September 15 asking if she was going to be writing some entries.  She apologized and said that she would, and she did post a couple of entries, photos of mail she had received or sent, an announcement of a swap she was hosting, and a short review of another blog (ironically, the same blog I was reviewing) but nothing for the past week or so.  Every person has his or her own idea of what their blog is to be, and I certainly have no problem with this kind of approach to blogging, an entry every week or so, but it's not the kind of blog that is likely to find a following, and there's not much to say about it. 

The second blog is written by a woman in Romania.  It's called beauty2go and seems more an advertisement for beauty products.  Her latest entry was September 10, before this swap began, and is her home-made treatment for oily skin, including before and after pictures

Other entries are just lists of products she uses, along with photos of the bottles or boxes.  I also wrote to her on September 15 to ask if she was going to update her blog, she said she was going to, but it's two weeks later and still nothing new.

This may be a blog which appeals to people who use lots of "product," but as someone who uses nothing (letting my natural beauty shine through, dontcha know!), this is not a blog that I would have any interest in, even if she does start adding entries to it.  As with the other blog, each person decides what their blog is going to be, but my reason for reading a blog is to learn something about the person writing it, and I know nothing about either of these women.

Trying to find something blog-related to write about on this swap, I decided to visit the blogs of the people who were supposed to review me.   The first one only wrote one entry since the partners were assigned, and it was her review of her two blogs.  "these two very interesting women each have a blog in which they write about important things that happen in their lives. It is very interesting and I loved reading about the different things people do and the photos that they take instead of my own life."  It lacks something as a "review," but was better than nothing.

The second, Smadronia's Adventures, is the only one of the four that was satisfying to read, her latest entries a multi-part narrative about a vacation she has been taking.  Written well, with fun photos.

I'm disappointed about this round of blog-promotion swaps and wish there had been more interesting blogs to read.  The swap doesn't end for a week, so maybe something will happen and my two partners will produce something worth writing about.

It was a moderate day at Logos yesterday.  A lot of people wandering through the store, a moderate number of books purchased.  One guy was looking for books about Africa, since he is about to go on a vacation soon.  He picked up "Out of Africa."  I suggested the "Ladies #1 Detective Agency" series, which he knew about, but it is set in Botswana and he won't be visiting that country.

He was wearing a Nuremberg shirt and I asked if he had visited the city, which he had no (the shirt was a gift), but we talked about what I learned when there about German teaching young people about Hitler and the Holocaust.

I had set soup to simmering all day while I was at work, just one of those "toss everything in the crock pot and see what happens."  I had a "mystery bone" in the freezer to use and then lots of veggies, including my first crack at cooking kale, which Jeri keeps telling me I should use more.  

The result was tasty.  Not sure I was blown away by the kale, but it was edible.

Sunday Blog Stealing

There was no Sunday Stealing last week because the guy who posts the questions was having surgery. But he's back, so here is this week's Sunday Stealing

1. Why did you sign up for writing your blog?
My friend Steve Schalchlin had been keeping a blog since 1996. It started as a way to keep his friends and family up to date on his health. I figured if Steve could write a blog, so could I. I also wanted to see if I was capable of writing an Erma Bombeck-length column every day, in case everybody ever asked me to do it. Twelve years and 4,263 entries later, I think I answered that last question, but I'm still waiting to be asked!

2. Why did you choose your blog's name? What does it mean?
Well there are two blogs with 2 different names, both with the same content. Funny the World is the title of a Lawsuit song (the lyrics of which are on the index page for this journal). The mirror blog on Blogger is called Airy Persiflage and the title is from a quote from The Mikado, where KoKo asks, "Is this a time for airy persiflage?" (meaning frivolous banter).

3. Have you ever had another blog?
Lots. Right now there is The Pen Pal Project, My Compassion Kids, and Bitter Hack. In the past there was one for all of my post-crossing postcards (got to be a pain to keep up), one for weight loss attempts (obviously I'm not keeping that any more) and one for videos, which I ended when I started embedding them here instead. There were others too, now all dead.

4. What do you do online when you're not on your blog?
Check other blogs, write and read e-mail, spend time on Facebook, play Lexulous, research things I'm writing about or just interested in, write theater reviews, check sales on Amazon and Audible.com, check Pinterest follow current events, read some columnists I like (like the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll).

5. How about when you're not on the computer?
Read, watch TV, mess in the kitchen (operative word being "mess," though the end result would be called a "meal"), cuddle with the dog while napping, and when I get really wild and crazy, clean house. Fortunately that doesn't happen very often, or I would have no blog material!

6. What do you wish people who read your blog knew about you?
That I'm not as open and gregarious in person as I appear in print

7. What is your favorite community in the blogosphere?
Don't have one. I've tried BlogHer many, many times and just can't find my niche there.

8. What is your philosophy on your blog layout?
No philosophy whatsoever. It just works for me.

9. Tell me about your picture you use to represent you on your blog.
The camera is because I like taking photos and videos, and the smiley in the screen changes each month, trying to represent something about that month, whether everyone "gets it" or not. This month's is pretty unambiguous!

10. Pick 3 random blogs from your blogroll and tell us about them.
Jim's Journal. Jim has been at this longer than I have. He's from Rhode Island and writes interesting stuff about his travels around the state, and his physical activities (he and his daughter are big runners, for example) and posts cute pictures of his grandchildren.
Life on a Small Island. My friend Sian lives on Graemsay, a small island in Orkney (Scotland). She writes about island life, her cat Button, and a side of life that many are unlikely to experience. Oh. And she lives next door to a lighthouse. Her photos of the island, her chickens and flowers, seals lounging on the beach, sunsets, and island activities are great.
Life of Wry. I include my friend Kari's blog because she is looking for new readers. She lives in Davis, writes beautifully and takes great photos. She posts a photo a day.
There are LOTS of other bloggers from which to choose and it was difficult to only choose 3. I completely left out the 40 blogs written by letter-writers (fortunately most of those don't update very often), the 19 blogs written by Compassion sponsors, and lots of blogs I have been reading for 10 years or more.

11. What features do you think your blog should have that it doesn't currently?
I would like to be more entertaining so I would have a larger following. Those Mommy Bloggers have hundreds of comments in their guest books and sometimes that makes me jealous, especially when I have written something relevant that I would love to have comments about and am lucky to get only one or two. Maybe I should get pregnant again...

12. What do you consider the 10 most "telling" interests that we would infer from what you blog persona?
1. I love my family
2. I like dogs
3. I go to a lot of theater
4. I like reading
5. My mother is my best friend
6. I am no fashion plate
7. I have a crazy friend named Char
8. I eat too much
9. I am a TV addict
10. Martha Stewart I ain't.

13. Do you have any unique interests that you have never shared before? What are they?
I don't think so. I think that over the past 12 years I have pretty much covered just about everything.

14. The best thing about blogging is all of the friends that you make, Aside from those folks, do you think your blog has fans?
I know it does because occasionally I get notes from someone who will say they have been reading my blog for a long time but have never written before.

15. What's your current obsession? What about it captures your imagination?
Bonding with the Compassion-sponsored kids and writing snail mail. It should be pretty clear why I am obsessed with bonding with the kids, since I really want to get to know them, as much as possible. As for snail mail, I'm sure it's a passing fancy which will pass again in a few years, but I used to love writing snail mail and I was tired of getting only junk mail in the mailbox. Now that I have a lot of pen pals, it's more interesting getting the mail each day! (Walt will also tell you that I'm obsessed with reruns of NCIS and Criminal Minds!)

16. What are you glad you did but haven't really had a chance to post about?
Nothing comes to mind at the moment.

17. How many people that first became a blog friend, have you met face to face?
Steve Schalchlin and Mary Wise (my ex-clown friend!). However, there are several people whom I first met on line, then met face to face, and then later they started blogs. Lots of those.

18. What don't you talk about here, either because it's too personal or because you don't have the energy?
There are (believe it or not) family issues that I don't bring up as much as I used to. I learned my lesson on that. I'm always trying to edit myself so as not to hurt or anger someone in the family. (The exception being my mother, since I know she will never read it and whenever I'm concerned about her, it definitely helps to get feedback from the community of people who read this journal.) I'm not always successful, but this is my goal.

19. What's a question that you'd love to answer?
Is there life after death? Because the older I get the more important that question becomes and the more I hope for a reunion with the growing number of loved ones I've lost.

20. Have you ever lost a blogging friendship and regretted it?
There are some bloggers I used to follow when I first started reading this one -- Al Schroeder, who wrote about his autistic child and drew cartoons, for example. I know there were lots more, but I can't remember them now. I often wonder whatever happened to them. I also regret losing Laura Morefield, who wrote wonderful blog entries, but, sadly, died this year.

21. Have you ever lost a blogging friendship and thought, "Was that overdue!"
Overdue? No, I don't think so. I have lost blogging friendships when we both seemed to decide it was time.

The End of a Beautiful Career

I don't know if you can call teaching one 1-1/2 hour class every six months as a volunteer a career, but I think it ended last night anyway.

I taught my third blogging class and by the time it had finished, I decided I didn't want to do it again. For all sorts of reasons.

The class is held in a room in one of the city training offices that has about 10 computers. One computer is connected to a projector so the students can see on a screen what I'm typing on the computer.

All of the computers turned on except for the one that I needed to use. My partner fiddled around with it but she couldn't get it to work, so we called the expert, who only lives 5 minutes away, so came down to see if he could get it going.

In the meantime students were arriving. Four had pre-registered for the free class, Seven showed up (fortunately I had prepared hand-outs for 10). The youngest student was 14, the oldest was my age or older.

The first thing I always do when teaching this class is to go around the circle to find out why they think they are there. The first time I taught the class I had 3 people show up and all three really didn't have the first notion what a blog was and what they really needed were web sites for their businesses.

By now I guess more people are becoming aware of what blogging is and most of the people were there to do an actual blog, though one woman wasn't sure what was the difference between blogging, Twitter and Facebook.

The way I've done it the last two times was to have everyone log into Blogger, since that's the blogging platform that I use and with which I am most familiar. Then I take them through the creation of a blog and once they have their blogs created, we look at the various things you can do to tweak them.

I logged into Blogger, as I always do, and discovered that the city had now put some sort of firewall on its computers which prevented people from viewing personal blogs. Swell.

We called the guru again to see how to bypass the firewall, but he admitted he didn't have a clue what to do about that and wished me luck. The warning screen I was getting said that you could override the system for a 60 minute period of time, but that it would have to be done in 10 minute segments, which really didn't work for what I was trying to do, but I tried to go ahead with it anyway.

I set up a test blog like I always do, but I couldn't really have the students set up their own blogs and go around and help them, because every 10 minutes, it timed out. We did get blogs started, but it was very choppy and I was thrown off my game.

I finally just had people ask me questions. The person with the most questions was the 14 year old, who sat at the far end of the room and spoke barely above a whisper, so every time she asked something I had to walk back to help her. She had also brought her own computer, which had print that was very tiny and a screen that was very dim.

People in the class asked more questions that I couldn't answer and I had to say "I don't know" more times than I have in the past, which was embarrassing for me.

In the end, I think people learned some things but I didn't enjoy it at all, and left feeling that I really didn't want to do it again. I'll have to think seriously about this in the future.

---

I had to take Walt to the Sacramento airport at 5 a.m. this morning. It was after midnight before I got to sleep and my internal clock (aided by dogs) woke me up at 4 a.m., so I just stayed up, fearing I would otherwise oversleep. I felt like a zombie when I got home from the airport and ended up taking a nap until a very strong muscle cramp hit the top of each foot and sent me into an upright position trying to walk the cramps out.

I was still groggy when I drove downtown to have lunch with my friend Ruth and when I got home the only thing I wanted to do was sleep again, so I napped off and on almost all afternoon, waking intermittently to more foot cramps.

I'm still feeling groggy, my stomach somewhat unsettled by the Chinese lunch I wasn't really ready for, and, amazingly, another nap sounds pretty good right now, but if I take a late afternoon nap, I won't be able to sleep tonight!

Thursday Thirteen

Thirteen things I blog about

1. Dogs
2. Television
3. Current Events
4. Gay Rights
5. Travel
6. Our Granddaughter Brianna
7. Childhood memories
8. Theatre
9. People in my life
10. Work
11. Weight, self-esteem and body image
12. Memes
13. Cousins Day

And Then I Ate

Because I don't have enough to do already, and because having 12 blogs, a Flickr account, Facebook and Twitter accounts plus a vanity web site on the net isn't nearly enough, I've started a new project.

I read an article recently about the rise in the number of food blogs. I know I take lots of pictures of food. Some get posted here, some to Facebook, lots get posted to Flickr in my "And then I ate" set. Mostly when some food I am served looks particularly appetizing.

But after reading the article I got to thinking that it would be fun for me, and maybe mildly interesting to others, to take a photo of everything that I eat.

There is method to my madness. I do have this creative side to me that wants to make food photos look as good as possible, so pictures of a year of toast isn't going to cut it. My normal diet tends to be pretty monochromatic and not very healthy. By having to plan a photo for every meal and every snack I take, it's going to force me to think about (a) do I really want to eat this, (b) do I already have 50 pictures in the past week of a handful of peanuts? (c) what can I add that will make this look more colorful. (I notice that today's food intake is all rather monochromatic, at least up until dinner!)

The time it takes to gather food and set it up can get me past the crazy "gotta have junk food now" point and maybe result in less snacking and more healthful foods.

When I make a commitment to a project like this, oddly enough I generally stick to it. If I eat 10 donuts for breakfast and pick at peanuts throughout the morning and have ice cream for lunch and a couple tablespoons of peanut butter in the afternoon and a snack after dinner, I really will record it. But actually I won't be recording it because the mere fact of having promised to stick with that commitment will give me pause, make me think about how this is going to look on a food blog, and maybe help me get some eating behaviors under control.

I'm not doing anything radical like going on a diet or promising to eat only nutritious foods. Heavens no. We've all been there with me for those kinds of projects more than once. No, this is simply going to be a record of everything that I eat and I hope that over the next months I'll begin to make better, more photogenic choices.

I've already started. I've created another blog here on Blogger. The brunch I had on Monday was so pretty that I started with that, but the project didn't really go into gear until today. I had an English muffin for breakfast and then went to donate blood and had a donut and some string cheese after my blood donation. All dutifully recorded.

(Look at all that lack of anything healthy, except the fruit!!)

As I said, I don't know what this is going to become. It could be one of the most boring ideas I ever had and I might end it after a week or so. Or it could actually do what I want it to do, which is to help me get a handle on my food intake.

If you're into food, or if you're just curious and want to check up on what I eat during the day, it will all be there for you to see. And if nobody cares at all, well--it will all be there for me to see, and perhaps improve upon as the weeks pass.

---

I went and gave blood again this morning. I was thrilled that the droplet of blood didn't even hesitate before plunging to the bottom of the little blue solution that determines the amount of iron in your blood. In all honesty, I was surprised because often I do some special eating the week before I go to give blood, making sure I concentrate on iron-rich foods and I usually have a bowl of oatmeal before I go to Blood Source, but this date had crept up on me and I hadn't done any preparation. So where all that iron came from, I'm sure I don't know. But it's nice that I was able to donate successfully this time ... and they didn't even need to run the blood through a centrifuge first.

An Embarrassment of Riches

What a delightful day it was today!

Any day I get to drive to San Francisco on a sunny, clear day has got to be good. That view as I round the curve at Golden Gate Fields race track and see the Golden Gate Bridge sparkling in the sunlight just lifts my heart up every time. (I always wish there were an overlook at that spot so I could take a picture, but you'll just have to imagine the viewing stands rising above a racetrack and behind it, shining in the sun, the Golden Gate Bridge.

I was meeting three women from Facebook. Kerry signs the guestbook here as "Tiff." She and her husband were here in California visiting his family and she suggested that we meet for lunch. She also invited Terri, whom she had also never met, and Ellen, with whom she had gone to high school.

While I was in Santa Barbara last week, discussion went on on Facebook about where to have lunch and finally Terri suggested Zazie's cafe on Cole Street, near the edge of Golden Gate Park. There are lots of small eateries in this neighborhood, also on the edge of the Haight-Ashbury District (where the Hippie movement started), but I was not familiar with any of them.

Zazie's is a (very) small French cafe, obviously very popular, judging from the crowd waiting to get in. After Kerry and Gerrit arrived, were fortunate to catch a corner table and sat there waiting for Terri and Ellen.

I discovered that we had one of those "xx degrees of separation" things with us. Apparently Gerrit's uncle, whom they are visiting, borrowed ficus trees from the Davis Comic Opera Company, so probably met Walt, who used to take care of getting them to people who were borrowing them, at some point. And since he's a farmer living on the Delta, he may have encountered Walt in a "professional" capacity as well. I must remember to ask Kerry to give me his name again, since I have forgotten it.

Terri finally arrived, but Ellen never did. Kerry later discovered a message on her cell phone from Ellen, saying that her car had broken down and she was waiting for a tow truck. So we just went ahead and ordered without her.

I had something called La Mer Benedict.

I'll bet you can guess what's under that Hollendaise and egg...crab, of course. It was delicious.

We had an absolutely delightful time together and I look forward to continuing having interactions with Kerry and to follow Terri in her upcoming adventures. Gerrit pointed out that they had met several internet "friends" and hadn't come across a single axe murderer yet. My experience too!

The others were going to go on and wander the Haight-Ashbury, but the time had expired on my parking meter (it was flashing red; I was lucky I hadn't received a ticket), so I opted to come on home.

I decided that since I was closer to the Golden Gate Bridge than to the Bay Bridge, I'd take that route home and it was a great drive, alternating between blue-blue skies with fluffy white clouds and deep green rolling hills, and absolutely torrential rain, and then back to blue skies again. Definitely no problem staying awake on that drive!

When I arrived home there was a box here. From Amazon. A kind of heavy box. I didn't remember ordering anything that heavy, but I am so carefree with orders from Amazon, I may well have. When I opened it up, inside was a waffle iron, and I know I hadn't ordered a waffle iron.

I read the paperwork and it was from a woman here in Davis, whom I have known for several years, who, upon reading that I love waffles and don't own a waffle iron, decided to buy one for me. What an incredibly sweet gesture.

I certainly am so lucky with having so many nice, friendly, and sometimes generous people in my life!

What? No Apple??

Aren't students supposed to bring apples for the teacher? I didn't get so much as a strawberry. But I sure got a hefty dose of ego-boosting.

Last night I taught another round of my blogging class. I did this last year and didn't think it went well, though people asked for a follow-up class. I had I think four students who came. All of them seemed to be needing a web site, not really a blog. The only one who was possibly really wanting a blog was going to use it to write a cookbook, but over the year when I checked back on her site, she never did anything with it.

This year I made sure that the course description included a brief explanation of what a blog was, and, more importantly, what it wasn't.

When I checked on the status of sign-ups last weekend, they had nobody signed up and my hopes rose that maybe nobody wanted to come. Maybe blogging was so common now that nobody needed to be "taught" anything about it.

But then I had word that three people had signed up. By the time of the class there were seven people who came to learn about blogging and none of them really needed a web site--they were interested to learn about blogging.

Of course I had performance anxiety. I don't really think of myself as a teacher, but if there is anything I can teach at least fairly, it's blogging. I at least have lots of experience.

Tsui, from DCN, and I went to the lab to meet with one of the tech guys to learn how to set up all the new equipment. Good thing we did, since there were a couple of little glitches that needed to be fixed and he was able to do that for us.

Then we returned at 6 to get all the computers up and running. I put some links into the machine so I wouldn't have to type them over and over again, and we waited for students to arrive.

Seven is a full class (that's all the computers there are), and we had exactly seven students show up. Now performance anxiety sets in.

I had them go around the class and introduce themselves and explain what they hoped to get out of the class. I expected to have the same result I did last time, with people not really being there to learn about blogging, but surprisingly they were, to one degree or another. One guy runs a Mac Users group at the senior center and also wants to start a blog for his Sons of Norway group. Another woman is setting up a blog for deaf users. A woman from Congo has a lot to say on her blog. A gentlemen, who is probably in his 90s, just wanted to find out what it's all about. Another woman was interested in blogging but concerned about privacy issues.

There were all sorts of levels of experitse, from people who knew the lingo to the older man who had difficulty moving his mouse and whose hearing impairment made it difficult for him to understand everything.

I had everyone set up a blog on Blogger, because that's the site I'm most accustomed to, but I also gave them a handout with several other blogging sites and examples of blogs from each of those sites, if they wanted to check them out.

It seemed that everyone had either problems I couldn't solve, or questions I couldn't answer because they dealt with situations I had never considered before.

Tsui was a godsend, because I've learned that you can't do this class in an hour and a half with only one person. Everybody needs individual attention and Tsui was able to handle one side of the room while I took the other.

When we left, everybody had a blog set up, whether they ever use it again or not. They had all asked for a follow-up class, which I agreed to teach. I had promised the older gentleman that I would make a step by step instruction sheet for him, and even offered to come to his house where we could work one on one and he could do it at his own speed. I had also offered to help the woman from Congo by proofreading her writings in English, which she has been looking for some help with.

The ego boost came when the woman from Congo was shocked to learn I was 66...and later referred to me as "Professor."

So I guess it wasn't as bad as I always think it's going to be.

But nobody brought me an apple. (Though, come to think of it, this was a PC class...what did I expect? LOL.)

How Obsessive Am I?

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a little place called GeoCities. Steve had a journal called "Living in the Bonus Round" there. When I decided to start writing a journal, I joined GeoCities.

When you joined GeoCities, you were shown a real "virtual neighborhood," a map of roads and houses. You picked the neighborhood you wanted to "live" in and then chose the design of the "house" you were going to fill. Seems all kind of silly now.

I don't remember what my neighborhood was, but it had something to do with theatre, I'm sure. I picked out my house and started to decorate it with journal entries.

It didn't take too long before all those "houses" were bought up and GeoCities dropped the graphical context. Now you just posted things to a web site called GeoCities.

Then Yahoo bought out GeoCities and things continued pretty much as they always had, but somewhere off in the distance, a death knell was sounding. You could still log into GeoCities, but if you wanted to set up a web site, you had to do it through Yahoo.

With GeoCities you had free web space, which was great, but it was limited. So I actually had three sites there. One for beverlysykes, one for bevsykes and one for bevasykes. About the time bevasykes was starting to fill up too, I decided to bite the bullet and get my own domain for Funny the World, which has been the address for many years now, still hosted by Yahoo.

Well, I knew it was coming. I heard rumors. And you can't say that Yahoo didn't give GeoCities members plenty of warning. Steve even wrote about it a couple of days ago. But two days ago, I was putting in the "Today in My History" section, and, as I frequently do, I was clicking through entries for the past ten years.

Imagine my shock when I clicked the entry for 2000 and was told that it didn't exist! All of my beverlysykes, bevsykes, and bevasykes entries were now gone.

As I said, it's not that it took me by surprise, but seeing it there on my screen gave me a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if a beloved friend had died.

Fortunately, though my life is an instruction book for how to live in chaos, there are parts of it which are organized, and, envisioning this possibility several years ago, I have been saving all of my journal entries for many years now. They all get saved to my hard drive and at the end of the year, the entire year is moved to a CD. The entries weren't gone, exactly--they all exist on disk, but they would all have to be reformatted to put on the Funny the World domain.

Did I really want to go through all that work? It took about 5 minutes for me to decide that...yes, I really did. It would be so much better if they were all in one place. I knew it was going to be a horribly time-consuming project, but I couldn't not do it.

I discovered that it takes about 3-4 hours to put one month worth of entries back, so I'm going to be doing one month a day, and at the same time putting in the current year 2000 entry while I am doing the current day's entry. (I.e, I've finished March and April, and also October 28, 29, and 30).

For some reason, when I saved the entries originally, not all of the photos saved with them. Some photos I've had to delete, some I've been able to find elsewhere on my hard drive, and some I just took again. If the photo is essential to the entry and I can't find the original photo, I've left a note explaining that the photo is gone. I'm sure lots of links are wrong, but I'm trying to upgrade them as best I can along the way.

Someone on Facebook introduced me to The Wayback Machine, which was brand new to me, a massive internet archive which has stored over 150 billion pages archived from 1996 on. You enter the old URL and it searches to see if it's still stored. While I have all of my entry pages on disk, I didn't have the table of contents for each month. I checked to see if I could find any through the Wayback Machine and they were all there. I just needed to edit them, not recreate them.

So this will be my activity for the next several weeks, along with all the other stuff. I anticipate that as I complete this project I'm going to find I've missed a lot, so I invite anybody who finds a mistake somewhere to let me know and I'll try to get it finished. (I should really take time to double check all those links to other sites and remove the ones that are dead, but I'm not going to do that at this point.)

I may never dust furniture in my house, but I really do like to have my journal / blog entries as correct as possible!

Blog, blog, blogging along

I wonder how many of us still call what we write about our daily lives, our ideas, our opinions, our pets, "Journals."

In the early days of "blogging," when the term "blog" was starting to be used more often, there was a real snobbishness about us "Journalers." Blogs, at the time, were generally (not always, but more often than not) written by young people, with poor grammar, and nothing that you wanted to read unless you were a giggly teen talking about cute guys or unless you were angst ridden and totally illiterate, where you wrote in incomplete sentences, with poor spelling and poor grammar.

At least that was the feeling. We "journers" were so much above all that. (How arrogant we were!)

Well, there is real no distinction now between "journals" and "blogs." I still call Funny the World my journal, but when I post the exact same content with the exact same photos onto Blogger so it can be subscribed to thru an RSS feed, I call it a "blog." I often even refer to Funny the World as a Blog, though it makes me cringe almost as if I'd called San Francisco "Frisco" (don't you ever do that to a native San Franciscan, by the way!)

I resisted getting a blog reader for a long time. I couldn't get the hang of the first one that came out (the name of which I can't remember) and I even installed Google Reader a long time before I actually started using it. In the interim, subscription to blogs became much easier and following them on Google Reader was the easiest way in the world to keep up with the blogs that I found I was interested in. I became hooked.

And you know how blogging goes...someone has a blogroll and you start clicking on something that looks interesting and next thing you know you've marked another blog to follow.

I've added some really interesting blogs in the past year, some for their photographic content, some for their writing, some just because they hit me in an interesting place. I thought I'd share a few and see wht you think of them.

Among my new "must reads" when they are updated include:

- Pioneer Woman. My friend Joan first turned me on to her. She's been around for a long time and the fact that she has thousands of followers and routinely gives away very nice prizes (iPod? DSLR camera?) from time to time tells me that she's one of the Important Blogs. But I'd follow her anyway. She gives great Photoshop tips, she makes great recipes, and her stories of living on a ranch, with all the photos that go along with it are fascinating. Great horse and cow and kid photos here. And the writing is wonderful. She may have 3 entries a day, one photograhic, one "house" based (decorating, cooking, etc.) and one run of the mill day to day life.

- And speaking of cooking, you can't complain about Noble Pig, whose blog I have linked to here before. She still turns out mouth-watering recipes and even more mouth-watering photos on a regular basis.

- Before leaving cooking, I have to talk about Cake Wrecks. I suspect more and more people are stumbling across this blog. For anybody who has ever deocrated a cake, this will tickle your funny bone regularly, with pictures of cakes that people actually paid money to a bakery for. The idea is that the pix are supposed to come from a professional bakery, so I don't feel so bad that many of them are much worse than things that I created and felt bad about.

- I recently found Poop and Boogies, the adventures of a young-ish father. This was a case where I was intrigued by the title and followed a link on someone's blog and found myself giggling enough times that I added him to my list of blogs to follow.

- Of course I can't not read Indigo's blog, Thoughts Outside My Head. Indigo (that's not her read name!) is the person whose site, "That's My Answer" I visit every morning to answer such deep questions as "Who is standing out as winners on The Celebrity Apprentice? Who are you hoping will be fired next?" "Do you carry an umbrella when you go out in the rain?" "Could you have given up Facebook/Twitter for Lent?" and "Would you rather be in the movies or a soap opera?" Her blog itself is more like mine--"how I spent my day" combined with, well, thoughts outside her head.

- I just came across "I Do Things So You Don't Have To," intrigued to read about how she ate expensive ice cream so I didn't have to. She seemed like a kindred spirit when I read, "In this time of economic hardship, we are trying to cut back on some of our luxuries, such as US Magazine and cat food. NO! I’m kidding. I can’t live without US Magazine. The cats, however, can live on table scraps and dust bunnies." She goes on to talk about gourmet ice creams including such oddball flavors as queso (Vanilla with kraft cheese pieces), maiz (vanilla with sweet corn) and donut 'n' cream. Another entry was entitled "I avoid housework so you don't have to" (thanks--but I'd rather avoid it myself). Anyway, she has promise so she's currently on my 'must read' list.

- My friend Bill Dahn (The Dahn Report), who tentatively stuck a toe in the blogging water a year or so ago, has garnered a nice following and has turned his guestbook into more of a chat room. He is caring for his aged mother and is getting a lot of support for others of our age who are taking care of aging parents. We've also seen him go through a successful weight loss program, we sent him sympathy when a hoped-for relationship with a woman didn't work out, and smiled with his tales of what he was learning in a comedy workshop he took last year. He's a neat guy.

- I've also started reading Blogging in Paris because, well, Jeri and I are going to Paris, so I figured I should start getting a feel for blogging there!

- And of course you have to read My Mom's Blog, written by Millie Garfield, who is almost my mother's age and who has become quite an internet celebrity in the time I've been following her, simply for learning how to surf the net in her 80s.

- I've even started reading Ken Jennings' blog, that Jeopardy wunderkind who walked away with over $1 million. His blog is actually quite entertaining.

There are lots of others, but these are some that I haven't really given much attention to here and I thought I'd share them with you, if you're looking for something new to read.

Who Am I?

My friend, JoyZeeBoy, found this interesting site called Type Analyzer, which will analyze your blog and tell you what kind of a blogger you are. I put in the URL of my mirror blog on Blogspot and this is what it gave me:

I was pretty amazed to read that. I decided if they'd thrown in a potted palm for me to hide behind because of being so shy in public, they'd have nailed it exactly. (They even got a remarkably life-like caricature of me, did ya notice?)

Now how can they do that in a split second? And can't be just random because if you read JZB's entry, they pretty much nailed him too and his is totally different from mine.

Yes, I'm attuned to pleasure, beauty and like to fill my surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors, and sweet smells.

Of course, what I get these days is fabric softener softened towels, and the sweet smell of puppy urine. But I recently went out and bought some better than run of the mill air fresheners so now that faint smell of urine now has a hint of tropical rainforest about it. I probably won't try to market it as my signature scent (even if it is!)

Anybody who has ever lived here in this house during holiday time can nod enthusiastically about the "don't like to plan ahead part." Anybody who has had to suffer through "Mom's Annual Christmas Crisis" (which includes all of my children and some of my in-laws) knows how well I plan ahead for big events. However, if I am exhausting myself, it's usually from doing something like sitting up at the computer at 1 a.m. writing a journal entry that won't be posted for 24 hrs.

(what? what? who me?)

And anybody who has read this journal for any length of time can agree with "enjoy work that makes them able to help other people," having watched me go through a series of bleeding heart liberal activities, from driving HIV clients to working in a homeless shelter, to all the marriage equality stuff, to the foster puppies.

"They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation." Who ME? Peggy was always encouraging me not to "suffer in silence," but to speak up when something upset me. I keep trying to tell her how very bad my history with speaking out is.

I was a teen ager before I spoke out for the first time, in defense of my mother in an argument with my father--and it resulted in an entire month of silence.

The next time was when the kids were little and my parents had moved into a home with a pool. It was their first time in the pool and my father became livid because one of the inquisitive boys lifted up the cover to the pool thermometer. He ranted and raved about how he had bought this beautiful house and gave the kids this great pool and all they wanted to do was break his thermometer. He stormed out of the house and I ran after him and tried, in vain, to try to get him to understand that the kids were little and inquisitive and that he had never told them to leave the cover alone and that if he had instructed them in what they were supposed to do, and THEN they did it anyway, he would be justified in getting angry.

Well, that went over like a lead balloon. It was a very quiet family meal we had that night and I was very glad when we left.

And then there was the infamous last time when he went against my request not to take it upon himself to talk with Paul about sex, as Paul went off to college. That little bit of "standing up for myself" resulted in his trying to write me out of his will...and then dying before things were ever resolved. The ultimate "silence."

So I try to avoid confrontation like the plague. The very idea does funny things to my stomach. I can count on the fingers of half of one hand the times when I've actually done it and had a positive result.

It's amazing to me that a web site could come up with such an accurate personality assessment ... or maybe it was just a lucky coincidence. Nonetheless, it was pretty much right on.

Except for the potted palm.

(And if there is some trick to all this, I don't want to know; I prefer to believe in serendipity.)

Do You Yanoo?

Dr. G has come back into my life. He had a huge web design edit which I spent a good part of yesterday doing. In truth, I would love to teach his staff how to do this stuff, but that doesn't seem likely to happen. So whenever he needs changes, I charge him big bucks (though people tell me I'm not charging him enough), work a couple of hours and pad my bank account.

I got most of his corrections made and posted to his web site. When I originally set it up, it was on Yahoo, just like Funny the World is, so I was logged into Yahoo under his log in and password.

When I got ready to post my own journal entry last night, I went to log out as Dr. G and log in as me and couldn't do it. It wouldn't let me connect to the log in page.

That was strange, I thought. I even tried going to Internet Explorer and logging in from that browser, thinking this might be a Firefox problem. But I had no better luck there.

I tried connecting to yahoo.com and received a message that the site didn't exist.

Yahoo didn't exist? Oh my...NOW what's going to happen?

I sent a message out on Twitter asking if others were having problems. I only received one response, but she said she'd been having problems with the site all day, so that made me feel a little better.

I sent out a note to my notify list saying that I couldn't post to Yahoo. And I went to sleep, confident that the Great Gods of Yahoo would have the problem all fixed by morning.

I guess my subconscious worried about it all night because I awoke at 5 a.m. with a headache and wondering if Yahoo was back. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't, so I got up to check. No. Yahoo was not back. I checked Google for "Yahoo" and expected to see huge news stories about Yahoo servers crashing, but there was no news whatsoever. And all the links led to yahoo, none of which worked.

I'm intelligent enough to realize that something is wrong with the yahoo servers, but I continue to hope that somehow I'll find a workaround.

This is the first day that I've been home and haven't posted a journal entry since I started this journal nearly nine years ago. There have been a few days when I didn't post entries, but it was usually when I was on a boat in the middle of the Thames or somewhere in the Australian outback, or somewhere else without internet access.

When I first started my journal, it was Geocities and Geocities was so cutesy that when you joined, you chose a "neighborhood" and then it gave you a map with available "homes" to choose. You could pick which person you wanted to be your neighbor. It was all very graphic-designed.

It wasn't long before it just became Geocities without all the map and the houses and you just posted directly to the server, which I've been doing now for nearly nine years. In all that time this is the very first time I haven't been able to post. I've heard of other people who have had problems, but it has been completely reliable for me. Until today.

Early in the life of this journal, I heard horror stories of people whose servers went down and they lost their entire journaling history. At that time I started keeping a backup. I went back to the very first entry and backed the entire journal up to the present, so if something catastrophic happens to Yahoo and, god forbid, it loses all its files, at least I have them.

I know that it will be back up--eventually--and that it's just a matter of being patient and waiting until they fix this...whatever it is...that is wrong with Yahoo today, but it's damn frustrating.

Of course there are always alternatives, and a year or so ago, I started a mirror site on Blogger. I did it because of people who wanted to follow me, but because of the way I structure Funny the World, I can't have an RSS feed on it. So every day I post the same entry on Blogger and I can post THIS entry on Blogger so that I don't miss a day.

But I want my Yahoo back!!!

I posted a note to Facebook to see if others were having problems and two people responded that Yahoo came up just fine for them, so I tried rebooting my computer to see if it might be something on MY computer, but it still comes back with a "page not found." Now I'm REALLY flummoxed.