Blogiversary

Happy birthday to my blog, four years old today. It's been great fun, mostly, and even the bits that weren't fun at the time are enjoyable to read now. It's certainly introduced me to people and ideas that I would otherwise never have met, and I am grateful to you all for your company and your contributions.

More later on perhaps, right now work is calling: we have two competitions to finish in the next ten days.

Memories part one

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

Saskatchewan meant early mornings, windy days, pulling weeds until our hands were green, four enormous meals a day, riding the tractor or the grain-hauling trucks (but never the combine, that was too dangerous), driving 25 miles to the nearest town for coffee and gossip at the Co-op (in later years, driving the same 25 miles to town for a beer), or a hundred miles north to "the lake" to swim for a day. After the harvest, both families would often drive together to Alberta to stay at Banff or Jasper and walk on the glaciers, or possibly even as far as Vancouver.

Saskatchewan meant being driven mad by mosquitos, being scared by the noises of unseen animals in the Bush (rabies!), being chased by chickens and geese if you went near them at their usual feeding time, chasing the calves out of the grain or the vegetable garden or the flower beds; the smell of motor oil and rubber and the rustle of mice in the cool, echoing Quonset-hut equipment sheds; separating compostable garbage from the rest, and burning the latter in a steel pail; not flushing the toilet if you'd only peed; being in a house without books - unthinkable! - then noticing that the whole community was essentially without books; the smell of the pulp mill which carried fifteen miles downwind; weddings, so many weddings, every year it seems now, with dances and self-catered receptions for up to three hundred close friends and family, when the Mounties would leave town and go sit out by the highway to avoid having to arrest every single citizen for DWI. (There was in fact very little drunkenness, Lutherans are big on self-control.)

Saskatchewan meant realizing one day that the meat we were eating had answered to its name until quite recently; walking out behind the farmhouse and hearing absolutely no man-made sounds at all, not even aircraft; waving and nodding at oncoming cars on the road (typically not more than three during the ride to the Co-op) because we knew them all; a tiny one-room airport, where you walked through a screen door just like the one at home to get to the staircase-on-wheels up to the airplane; houses with two kinds of cold running water: drinking water from the well and "cistern water" that could be cooked with after boiling, or showered under (but don't get it in your eyes or mouth).

Saskatchewan meant being surrounded by animals, wild and domesticated and halfway between like the cat that simply arrived one Spring day and settled into the old garage, tacitly bartering rodent-control skills for a warm and dry place to stay; my uncle's enormous strong hands, his fingers each as thick as my young wrist; the smell of the Bush, an unmistakeable, inimitable compound of poplar, wolfwillow, aspen, pine, drying dust and various grasses going to seed.

Saskatchewan meant a hierarchy of roads, from two-lane paved to single-lane paved to pressed-and-oiled to gravelled to graded-earth to muddy tracks, and how you drove on each. A skilled driver could maintain a thirty-mile-per-hour four-wheel drift, proceeding steadily northwards although the car's nose pointed alternately east and west. Being in cars at all was something specific to the summer holidays, my parents didn't own a car until after we kids had left home.

Saskatchewan meant berries, so many berries of so many kinds, blueberries blackberries gooseberries cranberries strawberries raspberries and best of all the bittersweet bluered (not purple) saskatoons; driving out in the morning to pick saskatoons which we ate in a pie that evening with whipped cream from my aunt's own cows.

Saskatchewan meant our cousins, being constantly surrounded by masses of other children, and the dilemma of loving their company but wanting desperately some time alone by myself.

Saskatchewan still means most of those things to me.

This was my blog's second birthday, but I was too caught up in this Memories series to notice.

Metablog the third

or, happy birthday to my blog. One year ago today, the person who had just christened himself "Udge" said:

Hello, world. You know you're a geek when: Having created a brand-new squeaky-clean blog, you first look through all the Settings pages before typing a single word.

I was a late adaptor, I had been reading public-diary-thingies on the Internet (I hadn't even registered the word "blog") for nearly a year, before it occurred to me that I might play that game too. This was partly because I had tried to play a similar game a few years previously on my professional website, and found that wrestling with HTML, CSS, RSS, FTP and all the rest of them was just too much hard work. It took longer to debug the entries and crosslink them with the rest of the site, than it did to write the words; plus needing four separate programmes to write, debug and post the damned things - what you might call "a serious cost/benefit imbalance". Naturally, it didn't last long; I stopped updating the site several years ago (without actually admitting to myself that I had done so).

I don't remember what prompted me to click on that big orange B in the early hours of August 20, 2004, nor which blog I had been reading; but I did, and from the start I loved it. Getting immediate positive feedback (my first comment was waiting when I came home from work that day) was probably a major factor in the "feel-good-ness" of blogging.

Blogging and the reading of blogs has become a significant part of my life; as Tim Bray said on the occasion of his blog's birthday, "it scratches an itch that I didn't know I had." Blogging has taught me things about myself and my life that I didn't know before I started, and has introduced me to some great new friends - even if we never meet.

Apart from how amazingly easy blogging is, the most obvious difference to a static website is the presence of comments on a blog. I published a link to my e-mail address on every page of my website but in all these years I have had just one (1) response. The reason why is obvious: it's just too much bother to change to a different programme and type in a response to something that you can no longer see because it's back in the first programme. I know this is true because I do it too: neither Sass nor Mimi allow comments, both say that they love e-mail (and I can confirm that they read & reply to messages, even if in Mimi's case the reply comes two months later ;-) BUT it is just too much effort to write an e-mail reply unless the post is something that got me particularly worked up. (This is probably why bloggers who don't allow comments get large amounts of hate mail: responders are more likely to go to this kind of effort to say "that was appalling" than to say "that was pretty good.")

Lioness once said words to the effect of "let me know whether I can play with the big kids". Well, part of the joy of blogging is that there are no big kids. We are all amateurs here, we are all just making it up as we go. A good blog is a personality (not necessarily a person, Udge is not all of me) and the most trivial pieces are often the most interesting. My pieces about doing the laundry or flowers or the sound of car tyres in the rain get many more comments than the earnest, important, change-the-world ones.

Bloggers who disable commenting are depriving themselves of a great joy. The community that develops around a group of bloggers exchanging comments, is what makes all this worthwhile; or rather, what makes it better than just writing in a book that you hide under your mattress. When I see e.g. Late Edition leaving a comment on Sleeveless in Southern Utah, or DM commenting on the Blue Sloth, I feel a sort of happiness to think that I probably brought them together, Late probably picked Heather out of my sidebar or from comments that she left here. This must be how matchmakers feel on seeing a prospective pair hit it off together.

The world is full of wonderful, interesting people, and I am so very happy to be a tiny leaf on the tree, a fly on the wall of this marvellous worldwide conversation.

Thank you all.

Other Metablogs: first second fourth

Hello world,

You know you're a geek when: Having created a brand-new squeaky-clean blog, you first look through all the Settings pages before typing a single word.

I'm a geek. In the blogosphere this surely makes me a member of the majority. What else I am, I'll tell you in a future post: right now I am "late for work".