Aw Diddums

A week ago in Rumbling Discontentedly I mentioned dewdrops on webs. This was it:

The funny thing about ideas is that people tend to get the same ideas over and over… partly because they are drawing from the same wells of inspiration. Like when I took a photo of a cobweb with dewdrops on it, and was going to blog about it, and a little while later found a couple of blogs by other Scots around the same time, talking about these cobwebs with dew on that they’d taken photos of. There is no way that they copied me, as I never blogged about it… and I didn’t see theirs till after I thought of it. Actually, I doubt if they ever came near my blog.

Yesterday I was working through the images in my watch list, and this one popped up: Water Drops on a Spider Web. Actually there are three – you might prefer the green or the blue, but I went for the glowing, variegated one I mentioned first. It’s as though there’s a bed of nasturtiums in the background.

A thought: are there nasturtium beds? Nasturtium tangles, maybe.

What’s strange is how you change your mind about something you’ve written or painted… not just once, but two or three times. You create it, and either think it’s wonderful or it’s nice enough, and then you come back to it after tea and suddenly it looks horrible. You consider deleting it, but caution gets the better of you and you leave it alone. After another fortnight or month of living with it, you decide actually you like it best of anything else you’ve done recently, and enter it for a competition or a carnival.

After all that, I tend to feel that even if I’ve ended up liking it, it’s probably not all that great, but then again, other people will come along and say it’s their favourite too.

So confusing, but it’s one vacillating reason why I feel that nothing we do or see is 100% true. If it was, we would know a good thing the minute we saw it, and not hum and haw for weeks. We would like or dislike the same things. Furthermore, what comes from the heart can end up looking cheap and shoddy, often enough because so many others have followed a similar path. Familiarity breeds contempt… as does thinking we understand where someone else was coming from, and that it’s nothing new or fresh – looking back and down from our relative vantage points of maturity and experience.

But it IS all relative, isn’t it?

Being impressed by something somebody else fails to rate is often an indication of how far we have come – “yes, been there, done that…” and something looks good to us because it’s better than our previous achievements. It might not impress others, or yourself further along the line, and sometimes we fall into the same traps we saw other people fall into and meant to avoid… just because we got there ourselves and those traps were grinning wide with welcome. One way or another, achievement and failure (two sides of one coin) are merely a point of progress or a state of mind.

Delilah just loves insects and plays cat-and-mouse with them. Having bopped a fly so that it lay at her feet, I thought she would crush and eat it… but she picked it up in her mouth and dropped it near Samson, alive and kicking, so that they could both bully it.

I don’t like to see anything tortured, so I scooped it up in my hands (it didn’t protest) and pushed it outside the door. The feeling of its wings fluttering against my palms made me frown for a moment… I was reminded of a dream I had a couple of nights earlier.

In this dream, I was living alone in London. I had lots of friends there but had withdrawn from their company for a little. I needed time on my own but felt guilty. One lovely sunny morning, the sky was blue and the breezes playing, and I was having a quiet little picnic on the grass well away from the crowds. There were trees heavy with pink blossom, and I stood beside them and tried to compose a little haiku.

“The may tree blooms… no, wait. The may tree blossoms…”

Pacian came up and stretched out on the grass beside my picnic basket, heaving a sigh. “What a day. So full of crowds in the Big Smoke. We haven’t seen you around for a while. You hibernating or sumpting?”
“Oh, you know me,” I said. “Just taking time out for a while. How is Geosomin?”
“Oh, fine, fine! She was asking after you too. Are you coming round to see the new baby?”
“Oh yes, the baby. I’ve not met him yet, have I? I will come round soon; just not today.”
“Don’t leave it too long.”
“I won’t. Well… I better be getting home now. Things to do.”

I stood up and packed the food away in my trolley. Sharky was in the park too, strolling around, so I popped him in the trolley and zipped up the lid. It was the best way to get him home through the streets. I was just about to set off when Pacian stopped me. “Sharky is kicking up a rumpus.”

I opened the trolley and peeked in… sure enough, Sharky wasn’t sitting purring as I had imagined – he was half standing, wailing anxiously at me, things falling on top of him.

“Oh,” I said, “I thought he was sitting comfortably on the rug, but he’s just jumbled up in there with the rest of my stuff.” I felt upset because he had been shouting inside the trolley and I didn’t hear… it took someone else to point it out.
I pulled everything straight so that the cat was sitting peaceably on the rug again, zipped up the trolley, and set off.

My way home lay through a market… it was half empty today, but I ran into an ex-colleague, Dick. He was packing up a stall.
“Nobody’s around,” he said. “I’m taking all this stuff back to the office.”
“It’s a nice day for it,” I said. “How’s Donna?”
“Donna’s her usual self.”
Once he told me Donna didn’t like the song ‘Oh Donna, you make me stand up; you make me sit down, Donna, sit down, Donna…’ I had grown up with the song, and didn’t sympathize – till I looked up the lyrics.
“How are things at work, Dick?”
“Oh, so-so. Every thing’s at sixes and sevens just now. We could do with more workers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But it’s a beautiful day and I’m enjoying my freedom. Have fun!”

I took off, leaving Dick labouring disconsolately.

Near the candyfloss stall, a large moth whirled round and round me, trying to escape the attentions of a large red-coloured rat. The rat ran round and round me, scrambling across my clothing. They were both moving very fast, and I caught the moth and held it between my hands, trying to protect it from the rat. My heart was in my mouth as I was worried the rat would get the moth anyway, and then I would feel terrible for trying to protect it and not succeeding. It was fine, though; I took the moth somewhere safe and let it fly away… and the rat never knew. It kept looking round for it, and eventually gave up and went to get some candyfloss instead.

Meanwhile, Samson and Delilah are still torturing all the flies they can catch. Those insects have no idea what it takes to stay out of the wee devils’ reach. I have rescued three so far, all lightly battering the palms of my hands. Yesterday when they were chasing one which was waving the white flag of surrender, I picked it up and popped it out of the window. The cats watched it zoom off into the blue, then turned and glared at me.

I don’t think I’m Person of Note around here at the moment…

Today I was alarmed to discover that one of my older posts on WordPress had a list of four links at the foot of it. The list was headed ‘possibly related posts’. The first link was to one of my own posts; the other three was to posts by blogs I didn’t even know. I saw it as a type of advertising spam, and I didn’t want it.

Investigating, I found that some bloggers were reporting a rise in the number of trolls visiting their blogs, as well as bloggers whose views were radically opposed to their own. Some of the links led to inappropriate sites, and there was nothing to point to the fact that the poster wasn’t endorsing these places. A quick look in my stats showed that I was receiving referrals from sites I didn’t think had any interest in my blog… turns out they had my posts in their ‘possibly related links’.

The good news is that I could opt out – and I did. I wish I’d known earlier it was happening, as I wasn’t seeing any of those links at the foot of recent posts. I won’t be receiving any of the traffic generated by this exercise, but I was happy enough the way I was before.

Meanwhile, the latest ScribeFire update still wasn’t working for me; in particular I was getting login errors when I tried to reconnect it with my blog… so I downgraded to the version I was happy with. It’s like going home.

Last night I dreamed I was a nervous wreck. My cat had just died and my life was on rocky ground. I went to the local school during the night, when it was empty of all staff and pupils, and pinned my cat’s best show rosettes on the padded back of a school chair. (Since when were school chairs padded?) I also typed a couple of sheets about my unhappy experiences, and pinned them alongside the rosettes.

They stayed there for a few months and became quite a feature of the school. The teachers and schoolchildren were talking about them and hadn’t taken them down. I wondered if they kept so many chairs in the school that they didn’t have to use that one, or if there was a girl who would perch gently, half turned, so she wouldn’t squash the rosettes.

One day I realized I was feeling better; the experiences I wrote about were in my past and I didn’t want them hanging in full view any more. If I cared at all about the cat I had lost, I should get the rosettes back before the school itself took them down. All of a sudden I was filled with a sense of urgency – I had to get out there that night, before it was too late.

After waking up, it occurred to me the essays in the dream represented my blog.

I am still (very slowly) going through old blog posts and deleting many which have passed their date of usefulness. It’s true I posted them when I needed to, or when they were part of an ongoing story, but they don’t have to be up there forever. When I’ve finished editing those, I’ll start on the newer ones here. Editing is something we should always keep in mind as bloggers or site owners… though sometimes we get tired and just let things slide.

I also have desktop wallpapers ‘out there’ that I don’t like any more! They will be coming down eventually as well.

As for the cats’ rosettes… I don’t know what to do with them. I said I would go through them and keep all the best, and I did.. but there are still too many. I’m waiting to lose interest but I haven’t yet, because of the cats who won them. There’s a rosette pinned on the cork board behind this computer – Best of Breed. Could be Sharky’s, could be Thor’s. I noticed the other day some toothmarks at the bottom of its trailing ribbons – probably courtesy of Delilah. At first I was sad and annoyed, then shrugged it off. The cats never cared. One day I won’t either.

PS It’s one of those days (in a minor way) when one thing going wrong leads you straight into another thing going wrong…

ScribeFire had a fresh update which at first seemed OK, then it started telling me it couldn’t or wouldn’t delete my notes. I wasn’t sure what was up with that, but it didn’t seem too terrible, so I left it. Doubtless it would be sorted in the next update.

I typed out a fresh post which it allowed me to save only once, but that wasn’t a disaster either, as it wasn’t forgetting anything I typed into it.

“B-b-b-but I’m addicted to hitting ’save’!” I grumbled, feeling lost. That seems a weird objection, but it’s true. Saving every little change is as routine as making coffee. Hunting for the save button and not finding it makes me hesitate. In fact I nearly hit the ‘Clear Content’ button instead, as it was over in that corner.

Later on (after I turned off the computer so a guy could bring Sky to my delighted old analogue TV), I tried to post something, but discovered Scribefire had forgotten where my blog was. I clicked around, looking to see if there was a list of blogs from which Aw Diddums had accidentally been deselected, but couldn’t see anything, so started to remind it via the ‘launch wizard’. I got as far as being asked for my password and was spooked enough to cancel without answering. It didn’t make sense that it had forgotten the first time; I would rather wait it out. My imagination was running riot again, with the squeaky little voice whispering “it could be a haaaaaaaacker!!” Aw shush.

Gradually it occurred to me there was nothing stopping me from using my own blog’s dashboard, so I toddled over there, pasted my blog post, and looked at the list of categories. I read it over three or four times before realizing (panicking) that Agoraphobia wasn’t there. Had some haaaaacker been tinkering with my blog?

THEN I noticed the small print beside the list of categories. It said, ‘Most Used’. Underneath that was a link to ‘All Categories’. OH!

When you’re not expecting to be presented with an abridged list, it wastes your time while you scroll up and down looking for the thing that isn’t there. Agoraphobia should have been right at the top, alphabetically… it would have suited me to have the whole list there. I notice this time it’s still on the ‘All Categories’ tab – probably ‘Most Used’ is the default when you’ve not been on the site for a while, or when you’ve been doing most of your posting via ScribeFire. I hope ScribeFire feels better soon. It’s gone a little bit haywire and I miss it.

Found this on Blogs by Women: Are Bloggers Lacking Coping Skills?

The article draws our attention to recently published research on why people blog. If blogging is considered a coping skill in itself, isn’t that a bit of a contradiction? I wonder why something like that might be labelled merely a coping skill, whereas being the life and soul of the party is not? I have always said ‘how’ people communicate is never the issue.

I don’t deny that people do lack proper support and social networks; the larger the population and the more impersonal the system, the worse that whole situation becomes.

I see blogs as being educative; they open a door to a world I would never have known about if I hadn’t looked into it, even if I could have called myself one of the best balanced individuals in the world. Can one be truly balanced without having tried the various things within reach? Would someone who never read or blogged be considered better balanced because he/she loved to go out every night? Perhaps a balanced extrovert is not the same as a balanced introvert.

I feel myself on the verge of this whole ‘introverts versus extroverts’ thing again… I’m still hunting for an article on the continued survival of introverts, one that I enjoyed very much, but this one will fill the gap: Introverts of the World, Unite!

PS: I seem to have developed a nervous twitch since last night…

Playing Neil Diamond again – my favourite tape of his has always been Tap Root Manuscript.

One of the bad things about my having moved to WordPress from Blogigo is that I can see which of my links people have clicked on. Nobody followed my last link to Soolaimon… do you all know what it sounds like? Either that or most people read this from work. I should stay out of the blog stats, but my main reason for looking is the keyword search data. I used to envy how people could see what searches brought surfers to their blogs. Now I can, too. Nothing of particular interest so far – most visitors from outside the local blog community drop by looking for Nothing Lasts Forever (it seems to have a connection with Ashes to Ashes?), Forever Autumn from The War of the Worlds, D.i.d.d.u.m.s P.a.r.t.y S.t.o.r.e (I don’t know what that is, but I put the dots in to make it less searchable), writing inventories (makes me feel warm and fuzzy knowing I’m not the only one), desktop pictures, ScribeFire, magic teddy bears and “life will find a way” (from Jurassic Park).

Also the occasional search for the best way to break one’s neck.

I seem to have given a few pointers to people setting up ScribeFire. Talking of which, I’m still using it. I even use it if I’m not posting on my blog but need a bit of code for a comment. It has been updated twice since I downloaded it, and it now has tags as well as categories, plus a few other extras. It seems we will be able to put timestamps on our posts if/when we get Firefox 3.

Something I’ve always liked about this is, when I have ScribeFire open, it takes up the bottom part of the browser, and I can switch from tab to tab (or scroll) without disturbing the ScribeFire section.

I mentioned Neil Diamond at the start of this post for a reason, but got sidetracked… Mum was sorting through her tapes and came across some by him. She put them in the ‘keep’ pile, and I said “I don’t know why people are so down on Neil Diamond. He’s cooler than most singers.”
“Never a dud song,” agreed Mum.

I was just thinking about the video clip I found of him singing Soolaimon. What amazed me about that was I never saw him sing it; just knew the tapes and the records for years… then the other day I saw the video clip and he sang that so effortlessly. I don’t know what I was expecting. I’d like to speak the way he sings – speech to me is something that takes so much effort, and I’m lucky if anybody hears or understands – I have a very quiet voice. I’d like to say something as though it was round, warm and full of the sun, and everybody would know just what I meant.

Somebody did come to my blog trying to find out what Soolaimon is, but that’s not what I’m referring to. I always thought it was King Solomon, but that was the best judgement I could come up with as a teenager. I didn’t know the words of the song, so I had no additional clues. If anybody finds out who Soolaimon is, I’d love to know too.

And it’s not what I mean
I mean it’s not what it seems
I just keep living for dreams
And it’s not what I mean
I mean it’s not what it seems
I just keep living for dreams

Have you ever played that game of reading back in your blog or diary to see what you were writing and thinking a whole year ago? I’m generally unlucky and find I wasn’t writing anything on a particular date, but today I found myself moving across a post from the old blog that I wrote exactly a year ago: It’s an Awful Long Way Down. In it I noted that I was writing a lot of rambling rubbish (I know – I was deleting most of it!) and then talked about a song in my head. “It will pass,” I said.

Well, unfortunately, it hasn’t. It’s a whole year later, and I’ve got the same song in my head that I had then.

People say we never learn from the lessons of the past, but I’ve got a new perspective on that now. Maybe it’s the looking back and stepping into old shoes that causes the same things to happen?

There’s a definite difference between Scroogle results and Google results… it’s almost certainly due to a time delay.

Just out of interest, when I searched for one of my lines “This morning Mum was rushing around looking for her car keys”, Google asked me if I didn’t mean “This morning Mom was rushing around looking for her car keys”?

Google is wacky in its own way – some posts are very easy to find, and others only seem to show up as Technorati and WordPress tag results. Some are so deeply buried (even if you’re almost pointing directly at the post screaming “THAT one!”) that a lot of completely irrelevant results come up first. Some posts are there, and others aren’t. Absolutely senseless – and I’m starting to wish I hadn’t looked too closely into this, because it’s annoying me now.

I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the vagaries of search engines, so I allowed myself to be sidetracked into updating my Technorati profile…

For a long time I didn’t trouble myself with it, but today I realized I’d claimed my old blog at Blogigo and also my emergency Blogspot (for when my main blog goes down) but not this new and active blog at WordPress. This is the one I (and Technorati) should be concentrating on.

I’ve now claimed it and updated my list of favourite blogs – there were dead links to delete and a lot of blogs to add. I don’t actually like the idea of having searchable favourites, friends, rating systems and so on, but if we view it as a kind of blogroll (links I think other people might like) it has its uses. I suspect I’ve linked to a few blogs which haven’t been picked up by Technorati yet. You can pop over and claim your blog if you haven’t yet – look for the ‘join’ link, or the ’sign in’ link if you’re already a member. (See, you hold the egg this way up…)

Mostly I’ve linked to the bloggers with whom I have some kind of ongoing conversation, but I tend to be quite slow updating my links, realizing with a shock that I’m visiting this blog or that all the time and it really should be in my blogroll… I expect I’ll be adding to it. I read A LOT of blogs.

While I was at it, I added an ‘add to favourites’ widget at the foot of my sidebar. Just in case it makes life easier for the more Technorati-orientated visitors to this blog (she explained casually, tossing her hair with gay abandon). I’ve put a bookmarklet in my toolbar so if I happen to be reading one of those blogs I haven’t linked to yet, I’ll be able to add it quite quickly.

Well, I keep trying new things – some of them stick and some of them don’t.

Edit 7 March 2008:

Talk about short-sighted – I’ve just realized all those posts I thought weren’t on Google were there. But to see all of them you have to click on the ‘more like this’ link (something I never do, so I don’t even ’see’ it any more). A multitude of links appeared – there were six pages of links for my Who Stole the Car Keys? post alone.

It just annoys me that one of the links to get hidden is the direct link to the post itself. Maybe if it’s visited a number of times, it will creep up the hierarchy, but it’s a pity the Googlebot can’t recognize that straight off. And I’m still not sure what the point is of having the various indexings (by Technorati and so on) appearing in Google… that confuses me. Maybe they’ll filter them out later, I don’t know.

I have been making a mistake! There I was imagining you had to use quotation marks in searches if you were hunting for a phrase such as “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and didn’t want to end up with results such as “I suspect the dog wandered away yesterday because Jenny sounded lonely when I talked to her on the phone. I decided to go home just as a cloud came over.”

I tested it on my short blog post Rugs Do Not Discriminate. First of all I did a search for “When I trip over the rugs in the kitchen and squawk” including the quotation marks, and the only result I got was the WordPress category tag accidents in the home. My rug post is listed there, but it’s also listed under other tags: accidents, hearing others, kitchen mats, listening to others, rugs, tripping (yes, I know that last tag is more about magic mushrooms. Tough). None of those are listed in Google when you search for my rug post. Not that I was particularly interested in seeing them there, as I prefer to see a direct link to it.

Well, I was wondering just what had happened, then discovered by accident that if I made the same search in Google without the quotation marks, my post showed up at the top of the page – which it should, seeing as I was using a direct quotation! Another search using single quotation marks had the same result – showing my blog post at the top of the page. Ah. At some point it seems I got confused and started using “these marks” instead of ‘these ones’.

Talking about the WordPress tags, I realized the other day that the older blog posts I’m moving onto the new blog are not appearing properly in Google. When I thought about it, I realized it was because I have so many brand new posts on my feed that none of the posts with older dates are showing up on it. When they don’t get on the feed, they don’t show up in Google as individual posts… though they might turn up as part of a WordPress category. For instance if you were to search for ‘painting my territory’ diddums (it’s hard to find if you don’t put the ‘diddums’ in!) you would get a result for the WordPress tag lost in thought instead of a link to the actual blog post, Painting My Territory.

I only realized it when I looked in my blog stats and discovered some of the search terms were leading the unfortunate searchers straight to categories and tags, not to individual blog posts. I don’t think that’s such a brilliant idea, but on the other hand, it seems to be my only option for the older posts.

Just musing out loud… and it keeps it in my brain so that I don’t keep twittering to myself “but WHY isn’t it showing up on Google?? Oh wait, I already worked out why not…”

Edit 7 March 2008: 

Now I’m not so sure I WAS making a mistake when I searched with double quotation marks instead of single. There’s something else going on here.

Yesterday I was badly sidetracked and didn’t accomplish much. I meant to move a lot more of my posts across from the old blog, perhaps a couple of months’ worth, but instead I was trapped in a web of highly practised bloggers.

You know the kind of thing… you go to look at a single blog page which might be called something like 73 Bloopers to Avoid as a Mature Blogger. At the foot of that well-written article it says, “see also the following links: How to Maintain your Blogging Credibility; Do Not Be a Blogging Fool; The Ins and Outs of Accomplished Posting; Keep Your Blog when All about You are Losing Theirs.”

(I made all these titles up – I hope they’re not genuine!)

They all look so promising that you open each one in a separate tab and fetch another mug of coffee.

None of those pages will let you go… each one presents another multitude of fascinating links. Most of the articles are entertaining, with many other bloggers having their say in the comments. You feel the need to visit some of their blogs as well. Three hours and 73 mugs of coffee later, you’re still there.

Eventually you notice how the main blog writers keep referring back to each other, repeating more or less the same things while the clock ticks away, and you start to feel you are being taken for a ride.

I lost too much time doing that and I’m not sure any of the advice stuck, except perhaps for the blog editor advice. Either I agreed with what people said, or I couldn’t do what they said because of WordPress.com limitations, or I disagreed and had no intention of changing. It didn’t really seem to matter.

Visiting individual blogs is fine, especially personal blogs. Having had my fingers burned, my tip is, stay away from those articles about how to be a better blogger – or just read the first one and refuse to follow any of the links. Otherwise you’ll still be there in the wee sma’ hours, with nothing accomplished and little learned…

I never had any intention of using a blog editor, but last night I found myself sitting here looking at the Firefox extension ScribeFire. I used it to post my last two entries.

I’m not entirely sure why I downloaded it… I think I was scared by stern warnings from WordPress Help not to copy and paste text from wordprocessing software (actually I type my posts into my Eudora email application and copy them from there, and have had no obvious problems doing them that way). It also resulted from following a bunch of links by people saying “get yourself a blog editor! You’ll never look back!”

I wasted ages searching for the WordPress API URL. There seemed to be hundreds of people hunting round for it in increasing desperation, and just as many smug people who had it and weren’t talking about how they got it. It was so frustrating when people asked “what is the API URL?” and somebody else said “don’t ask here, go away!” or “why don’t you have a look at (some place we’d already checked)“… and sometimes the person who had asked would get back and say “oh, it’s OK, I’ve got it!” and not say WHAT they had got or where from. At one point I read something that made me think I had been misled, and people posting to WordPress.com blogs couldn’t use third party blog editors. I nearly gave up.

I only found the relevant page in WordPress.com FAQ by searching for XML-RPC. The title of the help article is XML-RPC and Desktop Apps – no mention of ‘blog editors’, ‘ScribeFire’ or ‘API URL’. Half an hour before, I hadn’t heard of XML-RPC, and ‘end point’ didn’t mean anything to me at all. It turned out that the stern warning about not using Word linked to it as ‘desktop clients’, but if you happen to miss this, which I did, searching for ‘API URL’ turns up nothing of consequence.

I’m not sure yet if ScribeFire is worth my while. It’s pleasanter to use than hamming around in Eudora, and it seems I can do things in different fonts and font sizes without having to insert the code myself. It’s possible to save the blog posts as ‘notes’, but I’m not sure how many I could keep… and I don’t really want to keep them there. I want to store them in a nice solid wordprocessing application, nicely laid out.

Other concerns:

• categories are added but not tags, so I have to go to my site anyway to add them
• there is no ‘link break’ button, so if I change my mind about a link, I have to delete the code myself
• I can’t use special characters such as the en-rule
• I can’t specify timestamps in the past or future, although I can post entries as drafts
• the ‘notes’ in Scribefire do not save the date and time the post was published, and that has to be searched out and added separately to any other copies I’m keeping
• I found an ‘enable pings’ checkbox (unchecked) which unnerved me, thinking maybe my last two live posts didn’t ping the directories (though who cares about those posts?)

Because I want to keep the blog posts in AppleWorks or Eudora, I tend to copy them there anyway. Using ScribeFire is no quicker or less bulky than my original method. On the other hand, I can put the links, bullets and other formatting straight in, and copy my post across as a draft. I can also add and position my images, and (unless something goes wrong) they will be copied to WordPress when I hit ‘publish’. I will still have to add their descriptions separately.

Time will tell.

Just found a piece by TechCrunch on a major outage by Bloglines. I noticed yesterday that something had gone awry – people do go quiet, but not this quiet! Not all in unison. Bloglines is my main feed aggregator, but as I am also watching Google Reader and Newsgator, I’m not left spinning. It might take me a little while to acclimatize. Perhaps I should hurry and check that all the links have been transferred, just in case something does happen.

Edit: the feeds are being updated in Bloglines again – at last. I’m still synchronizing my feeds, though. I just love time-wasting.

Still moving my posts over from Blogigo – I was a more prolific blogger than I knew.

August 2006 was a bad month – I deleted most of it. It’s no accident that I was recovering from an agoraphobic spell and the town was still full of hot sun and holiday-makers. It melted my blogging and all I was able to do was skulk at home and mutter. Thankfully, September 2006 was a cooler month in more ways than one.

It’s strange to be able to look back in this way. Even stranger, I thought I’d be deleting all the memes – not because I didn’t enjoy them, but because they have served their purpose by now. Yet I found a book-related one I thought was interesting; I went ahead and reposted it. So far there don’t seem to be many memes, which is not what I remember, but maybe I posted so much other stuff that they got swamped.

I’ve been copying some of the old comments across, though I can’t copy as actual comments. At first I was linking them back to your blogs but have begun to wonder if that’s a bad idea… is there some hoary commandment along the lines of ‘thou shalt not overload the net with links to thy favourite blogth’? It slows things even more, so I’ve abandoned the linking for the time being.

In November 2006, my short post featuring Boromir from the Lord of the Rings had 12 long comments, so I only reposted Iain’s… he found a link to a LOTR-related thread which was very good reading. The thread is still there – it would have been a shame if it had gone.

About the term moonlight flit in the title… I remember quite happily writing it in my email to somebody, and was quietly corrected to moonlit flit. Well, I thought that made sense and was probably right, but ever since then I’ve had this horrible twisting feeling that it wasn’t, and I didn’t like it as much as ‘moonlight flit’. So now I’ve gone back to my preference.

This must be the longest moonlight flit ever.