Squamloonland

(Thanks for that, Ben.)

Spring has sprung.

SquamLoon is very thankful for the Winnipesaukee Veterinary Emergency Center. Little Denny’s safely out of surgery, toy chunk successfully extracted. (For the second time...)

The hard drive on my Dell having reached capacity, I deleted a bunch of huge files. When I emptied the recycle bin, it appeared to empty just fine, but I got this message:

Uh, No, I clicked.

The bin, theoretically empty, still had its fullness icon.

No hidden files… and yet this box came up over and over again. A Google search gleaned all kinds of suggestions, none of which worked.

Finally in a fit of whimsy, I clicked on Yes. (I am pretty happy with my school MacBook after all…)

All fixed.

Just when I’d committed myself…

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.

Birth; renewal; “recalled to life”; I Channel Paris in the Springtime… call it what you will: there’s three feet of snow outside, but in my psyche, the croci are popping up all over.

My birthday’s later this week. Easter’s been on my birthday three times in my life, and it looks like I’m going to have to make it to the ripe age of 98 to see that happen again. Somehow the early Easter, the scanning of old slides of my childhood, a wake-up call at work, and a series of synchronistic links to long-dormant ideas and relationships have all coalesced into the realization that there is an inchoate renaissance happening in my life right at the moment.

So it’s highly appropriate that on this Easter Sunday I succeeded in upgrading my WordPress from its three-year-old one-point-five-point-something oldhatness to its actual nearly-two-point-five-oh spiffiness.

I have a steadily lengthening list of personalizations, plugins, and design tweaks that simply must happen before I start opening up to the universe with this thing, but I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that I have finally, three years after opening it, stepped out of the thousandth-floor window and discovered I’m not falling.

I’m flying. And it’s fun.

“Recalled to life.” That’s a Dickens reference.

Happy Easter.

It may sound silly, but this teacher on vacation is going on vacation. I know you’re already addicted to my vacuous vapidity, but, hey. There’s plenty of that everywhere. Go read some more at the blog of your choice.

Time to take the plunge.