The Matrix — Or Why I Never Blog

Almost every morning for the last eleven months — usually while I’m going about my morning chores: making coffee, feeding the cat (undoing whatever chaos she’s created overnight), retrieving emails and the newspaper — I get a great idea for a blog entry. I’ll even parse it out in my head…formatting, graphics, all that stuff.

It would be wonderful…then LIFE intervenes and by the time I think of it again (if I think of it again) the shades are drawn, the lights are out, and my head’s on the pillow.

Eleven months, because — well, blogging never quite rises to the “must do” stratum of my “to do” list. And that, sad to say, is because it’s only something that I want to do, not something that has to be done by a specific deadline, or something that I’ve promised someone that I’ll do.

So, why is there an entry now? Have I suddenly and unexpectedly cleared my “to do” list? Not hardly, but I have made a promise. Lynnabbey.com is not my only website. I’m the resident geek for two other sites: chainstitchers-ega.org (which I maintain for my Embroiderers’ Guild chapter) and peekskillhighalumni.net, which is really my dad’s website…all nine-hundred-plus page of it.

Dad’s become the unofficial archivist for Peekskill High School (Peekskill, NY) from which he graduated in 1940. He’s made pages for all the graduates from pretty much all the classes between the 1920s and 2006, and now he’s looking for ways to make the site more interactive…more sticky. That’s where I come in: It’s my job to untangle the directories when they get fouled up and to make the things that Dad wants real.

We’ve tried a guestbook, but we were collecting more drive-by entries for dubious websites in the former Soviet Union than legitimate entries. We’ve tried forums, but they’ve proven to be somewhat less than user-friendly. That leaves blogs…plural: one for Dad and another for one of his correspondents who used to write for a now-defunct Peekskill newspaper.

I can neglect my blog, but if my dad wants/needs a blog for the PHS site, then I’m going to have to learn–really learn–how my own blog works, so I can teach him.

I think it’s safe to assume that this little corner of the Internet is going to be going through some fast and furious changes/experiments/trials and tribulation. Who knows…maybe by the time I’m done, I will have formed a habit of blogging.

And now it’s time for an experiment…

The above was a picture I took long ago, when I was working in Manhattan. I had just gotten an SLR camera and was able to indulge my fascination with architectural details. It was a black-and-white photo until I fed it to my scanner and began playing with it in Paint Shop Pro (I’m too cheap to have PhotoShop).

And the experiment is: can I get it to display in the blog….