Squamloonland

It is most assuredly not my plan to make the medium the message on a regular basis, but I do want to take a moment. My inspiration for this venture is sgazzetti, creator of the Best Expatriate Weblog, and my college roommate a quarter of a century ago.

“Real bloggers use WordPress” was the gist of his advice when I first discovered his œuvre. So I bought a domain and downloaded the necessary files, frantically crammed for several days and created a workable theme, and then promptly realized I had no real urge to create content.

Fast forward three years to today when, thanks to geocaching and a constellation of other unrelated happenings, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time communicating over the internet, and a WebPresence doesn’t seem to be such a crazy idea after all.

Frantically cramming again, I’m rediscovering the joys of WordPress, this time with a purpose.

I will admit, however, that the learning curve’s a steep one. The photo below shows the state of the blogue at this moment, as seen quite differently on Internet Explorer,  Safari, and Firefox. Evidently I still haven’t mastered the distinctions among absolute, static, relative, and fixed positioning.

Both sgazzetti and I had our first expatriate experiences simultaneously—his in Florence, mine in Caen—back in 1984, when the internet was in its infancy. The word ghenghe, in the parlance of our circle of friends at the time, was an interjection expressing that humorous angst that comes from the exhilirating thrill that can be found in the overwhelmingness of life.

Back then, it took a telegram to get the message from Italy to France. Nowadays, Slovenia’s just a mouseclick away.

Ghenghe.

Here’s my Twelve of Twelve (twelve representative photos of the twelfth of the month, originally the idea of this guy) for April.

The twelfth fell on a very interesting day for me this month. Three days ago, the superintendent of schools for my district emailed me to ask if I could fill in for her and teach her graduate-level course on curriculum integration and performance-based assessment—something I love to talk about. I leapt at the opportunity.

A hefty chunk of my three-hour lesson plan involved PowerPoints and a Flickr slideshow, so PSU’s state-of-the-art setup pleased me. I panicked for a moment, though, when I realized I didn’t have the dongle needed to hook up my iBook to the projector.

The flash drive in my pocket saved the day—and as an added bonus, it meant that the transitions in my PowerPoints worked better, as they were created in Windows, and the podium housed a Windows machine.

Anyhow, the class went really well.

After my professorial debut, I went on a caching foray. ChcknLdy had a nice set of four in some woods just off exit 16 in Concord. She’s got a style all her own that involves storylines about cookies and toys and other inanimate objects, as well as the willy-nilly suppression of vowels when it suits her. I have a soft spot for her flights of fancy, and find her caches fun. These are a few of the marauders from the Invasion of the Gingerbread People.

On my way home, I decided to stop in Meredith to take some photos for my WWFM cache page. This gazebo will be one of the waypoints.

If you’ve seen my previous three twelve of twelves, you’ll understand how phenomenal it is to be standing on grass and looking at open water.

This is the other major waypoint for the WWFM. I’m hoping to get the group photo on that platform.

You can see the gazebo from the previous shot just to the right of the tree. I timed the walk from point to point, and it’s about five minutes.

(I don’t know the woman with the dog. I just felt they added a little something to the composition.)

Home to the SquamDogs. This picture is mainly about the lack of snow on the luge track, and our concomitant joy.

Denny’s cone is thanks to the ordeal that I keep meaning to create a blog entry about.

See that little medallion of rubber in the center of the photo? Well Denny took it upon himself to swallow it last weekend and get it lodged in his colon.

A week has now passed since that day of worry, tears, the dismissal of a vet who didn’t call back on a Sunday, the discovery of a brand-new emergency veterinary clinic in Meredith, and the sudden disappearance of $1600. But I’ve been meaning to get a picture of the offending toy, and this seemed like a good day to do it.

The balmy weather had T2 suggesting that the three of us go on an ice cream outing. Which we did. And it was good. (I took that hasty picture with my BlackBerry.)

How often does one ride in the back seat of one’s own vehicle? Always good to get new perspectives.

We like to randomly drive around and speculate about what we see.

In fact, we randomly drove up into a new housing development above the Weirs. Every McMansion up there has a phenomenal view; none of them is selling.

It may have something to do with the fact that the neighborhood is the Coney Island of Winnipesaukee, in all its bygone, sometimes seedy, glory. On a much smaller scale.

T2’s just about to graduate from PSU with a Bachelor’s in early childhood studies.

She just got some really cool Crayola window markers. She hadn’t finished yet, but the letters in HELLO became flowers in a spring garden.

Is Denididerot not the handsomest dog ever created?

Before bed, I like to try to grind the next morning’s coffee. This photo contains several illustrations of the state of our home at the moment: a dirty old coffee maker that needs to be replaced and whose clock is wrong; unbleached filters because we’re on board with the green trend; a collection of milk bottles that need to be returned for the deposit but I’ve been too lazy; a just-finished bottle of wine; the bowl that contains many of the pet products; the selfsame bowl that contains the latest wine corks ere their transport to the big barrel in the basement. (Someday we’re going to build a boat or something.)