The week went well right up through its end. Palin resigned, and in the process once again exposed herself as a babbling fool. I wonder how the dude I saw in the HEB parking lot a few weeks ago who’d razored off the McCain portion of his McCain/Palin bumpersticker is feeling right about now, but not enough to drop in on Free Republic to see.
The other big news Friday afternoon was we got sent home a few hours early. Which as far as the good of the world is concerned doesn’t hold a candle to Palin’s self-ouster, but was a nice bonus anyway. Especially since a few hours earlier I’d discovered how to corrupt an Evernote database in one easy step – inadvertently yanking out the computer’s power cord mid-entry does the job beautifully – and wanted to get back to my main work. Evernote does of course have a web interface for entry, but it’s a clumsy and slow tool when you’ve got as much of it to do as I have.
Actually the current phase of the project is not so much entry, which conjures the image of fingers dancing continually over the keyboard, as it is simple copy-and-paste. Right now I’m in the thick of my earliest blog entries (July 2000 as of last night), hacking them apart for the good pieces. Those were the days when I published my first drafts and they regularly came in over 2000 words, 4-5 days/week. Sometimes upwards of 3500. There’s a lot of stuff valuable to me in there – family history, political commentary (“oh yeah, that Bush idiot doesn’t stand a chance even against Al Bore”), spiritual awakening, kissing beautiful redheads, etc. – but it’s buried under a flood of dross. Sorting out which is which is challenging but fun.
And relatively easy while it remains primarily copy-and-paste from web pages or old Word docs. I’m lucky in that I have soft copy of pretty much every blog entry I’ve ever done, even if it’s just a first draft that might differ significantly in places from the final published version. The second half of 2003 is lost – got PDFs of everything from then but the Word versions apparently never made it off my old computer at the bank. The good news is that by then my new job and commute were cutting my blogging time severely anyway and we’re only talking about 36 missing entries here. The bad news is the entries did get written were still churning out at 2-3K words apiece and that’s a lot of transcription when I finally get around to doing it in toto.
The good news (for now) is there was a lot smaller portion of non-dross stuff came out that year: life in general was less interesting by then, and I’d already vomited out a lot of the most vital history/philosophy and other context-establishing material back in the beginning. So my typing muscles may get spared some for the time being.
While my official 10-year blogging anniversary comes this December 15 with my first published Diaryland piece, the unofficial 10th is later this month, the date of my first practice entry. That’s right: I practice-blogged, working to get the feel of this unfamiliar medium before I went public. I’d barely kept a journal even just for myself prior to that and I so wanted to do it right.
You’d think anyone would have been content with a dozen or so trial runs – how hard can it be to write an online journal, after all – but no, I did it 44 times in the next few months. There’s a convenient intersection between perfectionism and procrastination somewhere among those never-published entries.
Of course, it didn’t help that blog-hosting sites were almost non-existent in those days. No doubt I would have remained dead in the water for some time, perhaps even let my OLJing desire die still-born, if I hadn’t discovered Diaryland that December. The templates were ugly as hell but overall the service was easy to use without having to learn any HTML - a project I’d been letting intimidate me a lot more than it should have. Once I got on D-land I gave no more thought to writing anything I wouldn’t publish. Or to editing, for that matter. Or even to organizing my raw content before I constructed an entry from it. In all of those contexts mine was a pretty typical Diaryland effort for that time.
A few of those practice entries are now seeing the light of day on my personal site. While none are any great shakes (though I am kind of fond of the one about how target shooting in the Napa woods can help remedy a bad breakup), they are at least short and relatively to the point. I had a much better sense of proper blogging form before I went and became an online journaler.
I’ll probably put more of them up someday. For the time being though filling out my personal site is taking a backseat to getting everything into Evernote and I’m going to be spending what part of the day I’m not in MFW on that. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds, as long as you’re not having to retype anything.
Only ten years? Huh. I was sure I was reading your journal before I moved to San Diego, but apparently not by much.
Posted by: Judy | July 07, 2009 at 11:43 PM