Posts from — September 2009

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

Last weekend, right before Yom Kippur, Jen and I jumped in the car and took a road trip to Shepherdstown, WV.  To see the Fingerboard sign (next time, Chickenpig, you’re coming too).  To eat vegetarian egg rolls on the college campus and have scones in the teahouse.  And just have girl time.

I caught Jen laughing at the beginning of the trip.  Isn’t this a great photograph of happiness?

We went to see tiny house on the campus

And discovered a mural on the upper level of the library.  I love this painting of the main street.  You can see the library set back from the road (a white building) with a tree in front of it.

I could spend hours in this tiny library.  I’m so glad it exists.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.

I know, moves are confusing. I put together this FAQ to explain the move to this new space and where everything is now located so people can switch over their links to Stirrup Queens.

If you are currently seeing these words in Google Reader or Bloglines, you may not know that anything has changed.  But…um…something huge has happened, at least it’s huge in my world.

I’m self-hosting.

What do you think?  When Lindsay asked me how I envisioned the new space, I told her I wanted it to be the visual equivalent of IKEA.  Clean lines.  Functional.  Space saving.  Streamlined.  I hope the new space is easy to use, easy to view.

Why the move now, after over three years on Blogger?  I mean, it was pretty apparent to me after the first few months that I was in this for the long haul.  Perhaps I should have switched over in 2007.  But I’ve always been a late-adapter and I usually wait until the moment comes to me rather than push myself to be ready on an external timeline.  And one morning, I woke up and decided that I could do this, due to three main impetuses:

1. I wanted to be able to upload sound files and have them look nice too.  I’ve used the still-picture-and-youtube trick in the past, but I wanted to be able to record myself playing the Irish Penny Whistle or have the Wolvog sing “Helter Skelter” and have it simply be an autoplayer embedded in the post.
2. I wanted the site to look a little more…mature.  Is that the right word?  I felt self-conscious that I wasn’t self-hosting and I’ve been at this for a long time.  At the same time, I’d say to myself, “but Postsecret doesn’t self-host.”  And finally, I realized that I wanted to self-host–that it wasn’t a real-sites-self-host sort of thing, but more of a desire to have my space honestly be my own and under my control.  It’s sort of the same thing with the curtain-door in the kitchen of my house: we lived without doors for years and it never bothered me and I pointed out a lot of reasons why I didn’t need doors.  And putting in curtains instead of doors is not more “mature” per se, but it gave me the control I needed.  If that makes any sense.
3. I wanted to ensure the longevity of the site.  I’ve always assumed that one day, when I am finished writing here, I will pass the site along to another person who will take the reins and continue with the idea, adding in their own story.  And while that day is far off–I assume it will be a bit like this self-hosting move, where I wake up and it simply feels like the right thing to do–I wanted to make sure that I had done this heavy work now rather than leave someone to do it later.

So this is my new home.

And it terrifies the crap out of me.  And I have spent a good chunk of the last week in tears.  And Brice at Bluehost is more god than man.  And Lindsay deserves a pie and I will make her one this week.

In addition to being a late-adapter, I am a poor adapter.  That’s probably the best way to describe me.  I’m excited to try new things, but I tend to get overwhelmed quickly, start to doubt my capabilities, and then tune out–spending more time contemplating my anxiety than paying attention to what I need to learn.

Pulling together this site felt a lot like being back in printmaking class, the one where the one-armed boy was king simply because he didn’t shut down in the face of new knowledge, but instead paid attention to the instructions and followed them.  He had beautiful plates throughout the whole year.  I had beautiful plates only in the spring, and only after I stopped allowing my anxiety to be louder than my teacher’s voice.

Lindsay got to witness my fantastic breakdown a few hours into the process of building this site.  I had such deep regrets, my first instinct was to walk away from the whole thing.  I had nightmares that night that involved bumping into an old friend I knew from college and haven’t seen since.  In my dream, I tried to hug him from behind and he coldly said, “why are you hugging me?  I don’t want you to touch me.”

I woke up in the morning and decided that I had three choices.  I could be myself and wait until the buzzing died down on its own as I usually did and get to a place where I was comfortable with self-hosting, perhaps a few months from now.  I could quit the idea of self-hosting.  I could remind myself how much time I waste worrying and jump into this feet-first, learning everything I can about this new software without worrying about how long it takes.

So that is what I did.  I took my time and built this site and played around with the different features and asked a lot of questions.  And when I was ready, I moved the old blog over, redirected the links, and settled in.  Oh, and the whole thing was a goat rodeo that ended well with a massive headache to boot.

And now the time has come to welcome you in and perhaps even propose a toast to the future of community.  Please raise your pomegranate martini–to our corner of the blogosphere, our collective community, our individual spaces.  May they always feel welcoming, may they always be a home.

Er…and um…what do you think of the new space?

There was a boy in my etching class in high school who had one arm. It was amputated above the elbow and he never used a prosthetic. Everyone in the class was learning printmaking for the first time, so we were all coming at it from a level playing field.

One part of printmaking is that after your metal plate is ready, you heat it while putting on the ink in order to get the ink to sink into the grooves. After you get the ink into the grooves, you take it off the heat and rub the plate with a tarlatan to take off the excess ink and then I was taught to hand-wipe my plates. When we were working with the tarlatan, we kept the bottom of the plate on a stack of newspaper serving the same purpose as an oven mitt. Metal plates heated up get…hot. By the time you were hand-wiping the plate, the metal had cooled enough to do the quick movements and not get burned, but I still have light scars on my arms from times a plate hit my uncovered arm after the plate was heated.

It is probably pretty clear at this point that it would help to have two arms.

One day, I was watching the one-armed boy work and noticed several things: (1) He worked more confidently than I did. When I put on ink, it was like I was a little worried that perhaps the plate didn’t want to get dirty and I hadn’t asked the plate yet how it felt and perhaps I was overstepping a line and… When he worked, he worked in the ink with quick confident movements like he was Super Nanny taming a child. (2) He was not only a better artist in terms of his needle-work, but he was a better printer. His lines were clear and crisp and he hadn’t had the same issues I had with being wishy washy in terms of the resin. (3) He did all of this with one arm and no prosthetic. Without burning himself too badly. And er…I had two arms and did I mention that I still have scars from burning myself on hot plates?

He saw me watching him work so I said, “you’re really really good.”

And without looking at my sorry plate, he said, “well, I listen.”

Which was a fair point.

Because I really didn’t listen. Here’s a reenactment of an average class: we sat down to watch our teacher demonstrate a new technique. I started taking notes. I soon became confused because I was busy trying to balance worrying that I wouldn’t understand the assignment with listening to the teacher. I soon gave up listening to the teacher and daydreamed about boys. The demonstration would end and my teacher would start up the boom box so we could listen to the same Bruce Springsteen tape we always listened to while we worked. I started asking everyone around me a dozen questions, which showed just how little I listened during the lecture. I then became overwhelmed and took a walk and rode the merry-go-round outside the school (one of the perks of having your class on the Mall). And I ate a Big Chief Crunchy because by that time, you could really only get them in random places like the cafeteria at the Natural History Museum. And then I’d return to the classroom and attempt to work but usually end up returning to the teacher to have him walk me through the steps again. And then it would finally click with me, but I would run out of time to actually do the work. And then I’d go home and daydream about boys.

I took on a new project this week and saw myself entering into the same traps I set for myself back in that class. I could feel my eyes glaze over as I stared at the instructions on the screen and I called up Lindsay and said, “I am never ever ever going to get this. Will you please hold my dick through this whole thing?” And then I’d daydream about boys. And then finally, finally, when it was almost time for bed, a small element of it would finally click and I’d realize how much time I wasted with my incessant worrying.

So I’d like to thank the one-armed boy for his simple advice. You know, to listen. To be in the moment and absorb the task at hand rather than worrying about how I’m going to fail. And to stop daydreaming at boys. I mean, he didn’t tell me to stop that, but I assume it was inherent in the message.

No?

It wasn’t?

Okay, scratch that. I’d like to thank the one-armed boy for his advice that I should listen, be in the moment, absorb the task at hand, and save daydreaming about boys for when I’m eating my Big Chief Crunchy after school hours.