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The 158th Friday Blog Roundup

Since I dragged my ass and all of your asses over to this new space, it seems fitting to jump into utilizing some of the features that brought me to self-hosting.  Yet for some unknown reason, both Josh and the Wolvog both refused to record me tooting away on the Irish Penny Whistle.  Josh muttered something about it being “painful” to listen to and that I shouldn’t subject others to this misery and the Wolvog simply scoffed at my inability to work the recording equipment on the Mac.  He has a point–you know, the fact that I’m asking a five-year-old for computer help.

So I decided to go with a song I got this week instead, except you’re not seeing the fancy audio player Lindsay and I finally got working due to a long, sordid tale of doubt.  So my first audio file will be another week and I will return to using the technology completely available to me at the old site simply because I love this version of the song and want to talk about it.

When I got back from West Virginia, it was grey and raining.  My brother gave me a disc that I didn’t listen to until many nights later; it was simply John Lennon with a tape recorder set atop his piano.  I started bawling when I hit this song:

I know he is singing about Yoko Ono, and certainly, when I’ve heard this song in the past, I have applied it to Josh, but there is something in this version, perhaps it’s the starkness and simplicity, that made me wonder if he was also singing about his sons.  After all, think about how many years all of us have collectively spent dormant, waiting for that “you.”

When the song is stylized and synthesized, it’s easy to forget that it was written by a very real person, someone who lived in an apartment in New York City, who set a tape recorder atop a piano to get down the tune before he forgot it.  A messy individual with a prior marriage and first son; a new wife and second son.  And that all those people got left behind when he died, the carrier of all of that real love.

Please tell me that you cried too when you listened to the song.

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So the move has been anything but smooth.  Lindsay could probably give you a better play-by-play because I’ve mentally blocked out about three hours or so of the time dedicated to lying on my side and crying, “this is too hard.”

This is my best advice to you: the moment you start considering the move to self-hosting, start the move.  You can move slowly, building the site over weeks or months, but don’t wait over three years like I did because moving after that much time provides a unique problem: the blog was simply too big to move.

It would be like bringing pieces of wood into your current home, building a huge cabinet, and then deciding to move to a new place.  The wood came into your house in planks, but now you’re trying to carry it out as a huge finished product and it simply can’t fit through the door frame.  Which is what happened when we tried to export the posts and comments–the file was too big to transfer.

It took about 10 hours or so of work to move it over.  And that was just moving the written posts and comments from point A to point B.  Yes, if we had started with the process that finally ended up working, it could have been a two hour ordeal, but instead, we started with the most likely process and worked our way back to more desperate measures, one time even hand-deleting 1310 files.  Mind-numbing.

The first night we moved into the house we’re in now, I remember sitting on the floor of the kitchen, surrounded by boxes, and crying over the phone to my friend that I had made a terrible mistake.  In those first days, when I didn’t know where anything was and things worked differently from the appliances in my old apartment and new simply sucked because it was new and unknown, all I had were regrets.

And now, I can see the advantages of owning a home vs. renting an apartment, even if home-owning is not a perfect, idyllic experience.  There are a lot of things I see as a disadvantage to home-ownership, but even with those disadvantages, there are clearly more benefits to owning your space rather than renting whether it’s the creativity or stability.

I am still figuring out things with the new site.  I’m obviously still recoding the blogroll rooms.  I know that the site looks different on older versions of Internet Explorer vs. the latest IE or Firefox.  The old header is going to be used in the future on the blogroll pages (I can customize different pages to have different headers–yay, self hosting!).  But I am slowly becoming more and more comfortable over here.  And yes, I dare say it, I think I’m a little bit in love.

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The Weekly What If: What if you could enter the world of any children’s storybook (as in, travel to the land of the wild things, fall down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, or hang out with the Whangdoodle), where would you go?  And would that answer change if you were not going to meet up with the main character while you were there (in other words, you’d go to Wonderland, but you’d never bump into Alice)?

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And now, the blogs…

AnxiousMum has a post called “Too Much Love” about the desire to store away love until it is needed rather than experience that sensation of having too much love spilling over in all directions and no location to place it.  She writes: “It was specially formulated and designed for a little person who was going to enter my life. When they didn’t, the love didn’t dissipate into thin air, as it should have. Instead, now I’m hungry for more people to love and I’m desperate to give my love away.”  It’s just a lovely post about something that so many of us have felt.

Inanna Journey has a post about a disappearing line on a pee stick, a terrible mind-fuck to receive a “yes” and then suddenly learn that it is now a “no.”  It is a heart-breaking post, an exchange between husband and wife, and I wanted to hug her through the screen.

Our Journey, but Not Our Plan has a post about feeling lost.  She writes about being in a perpetual state of waiting: “I feel like I am on my own. I have nothing to talk about of any interest. Me, waiting on AF, isn’t really a conservation starter.”  It is a simple post about life on hold.

Lastly, A Greater Yes has a tongue-in-cheek post about what she could have spent her money on instead of a chance for parenthood.  It’s easy to spend money when you know that the cash forked over will bring you what you want.  But what about when you end up, as she says, with “an envelope clutch purse than an envelope of paid receipts.”

The roundup to the Roundup: have a cathartic moment with Lennon, much ado about moving, the Weekly What If, and lots of great posts to read.  You know where to find me this weekend–recoding the blogroll rooms…

16 comments

1 N { 10.02.09 at 8:37 am }

I’m choosing not to watch the video right now, because it makes me cry. every. time. and I’ve cried enough at work this week. (Nothing actually work related, just stupid frelling hormones.)

Meanwhile, I’m 99% sure I’d go to the Hundred Acre Woods. And it wouldn’t change, because Pooh isn’t my favourite of them anyway. 😉

(Hrm. Or maybe the world of Paddington Bear. I do enjoy jam…)

2 a { 10.02.09 at 9:37 am }

I am a sucker for any song that’s all piano…but I didn’t cry. When you post the penny whistle video, I’m sure I’ll cry then. 🙂

My aunt introduced me to Madeline at a very young age, so I’d like to visit the old house in Paris that was covered with vines – and especially to leave the house at half past nine in rain or shine…because I’ve never been to Paris. I wouldn’t be bothered much if Madeline weren’t there, but Miss Clavel might be another story.

3 Journeywoman { 10.02.09 at 10:03 am }

I love that song as well.

Regarding worlds–I want to go to the World of Harry Potter. I want to be a student at Hogwarts. I want to live in Ravenclaw tower. Also, if we’re talking the movie cast–I don’t mind not meeting Harry as long as I get some after-hours potions work with Professor Snape! 🙂

4 Kristin { 10.02.09 at 12:00 pm }

Beautiful song!

As for where I would visit, I am torn between the world of the Dragonriders of Pern…oh the heaven to get to soar through the skies on a dragon… and the world of Harry Potter.

5 Kate (Bee In The Bonnet) { 10.02.09 at 12:12 pm }

Oh. That song. That version. Yes, the polished, perfected one that was released back in the day (what was that, more than a decade now? Sheesh.) was good, but the tape-recorder version has always been my favorite.

I don’t know which children’s book I’d want to enter. As a child, that definitely would have been Where The Wild Things Are. I love how enveloping the pictures seemed, a product, I’m sure, of the fact that the color was so dark and the illustrations covered the whole page, top to bottom. I picked up a version of that book in German when I was overseas this summer, and it surprised me how unreadable it was to me (that the sentence constructions that seem so simple in English were actually quite advanced grammatically and vocab.-wise). But just opening the book the other night, seeing those drawings of the wild Rumpus, I was 4 years old again, sitting in the carpeted castle at the downtown branch of the library with my nose pressed into the binding seam, smelling that library smell (what is that smell anyway? paper and hundreds of hands that have touched it and book glue and stamp ink, tinged with melted microfiche, a smattering of dust? I don’t know but I love it.). I don’t think any other book as a child truly sucked me in like that, made me really wish I could get inside those illustrations. Sigh.

Great memories. Thanks for helping me conjure them…

6 Lavender Luz { 10.02.09 at 12:19 pm }

I can hardly wait to move! Sorting out everything I’ve built and collected sounds like so much fun! Please pass the kool-aid!

Seriously, I am a little bit in love with your new space, too.

I read this post and am commenting to the background song by John Lennon. It’s so0000 wistful. Beautiful.

Narnia. I’d go to the Wardrobe. I’d go with my family and not care which other characters we met.

7 The Steadfast Warrior { 10.02.09 at 12:46 pm }

Okay, yes I got teary. Being less then two weeks from my due date made that song even more poignant.

Hmmm, I could second Hogwarts but only without the whole Voldemort trying to take over the world bit. Too dramatic for me. But in the end I think I’d jump into the Catskill Mountains like the character from My Side of the Mountain. Anyone else have to read that book in school? If not, it’s about how this young boy runs away from his family and that life and decides to make it on his own living inside a hollowed out tree on the Mountain that I think his ancestors had lived or something like that. What kid never had a moment where they wanted to do that?

8 Sue { 10.02.09 at 2:10 pm }

Just reading your post made my eyes well up, so I will put off the catharsis for a little longer (damn that work I have to do!). Thank you for sharing it!

9 Chickenpig { 10.02.09 at 3:18 pm }

I want to go to Earthsea. I wouldn’t care if I never met a single character, I just want to go there. Narnia would be a close second, though.

Real Love is a beautiful song, no matter how you slice and dice it. The true love songs always make me think of my children as well as my husband, and that always makes me cry. When I think how close I came to never having them…

10 Baby Smiling In Back Seat { 10.02.09 at 5:06 pm }

Of course I’m crying. After 7 years of IF waiting, I’m currently doing some very literal waiting to meet, or preferably delay meeting for just a little while longer, these babies.

I don’t have an answer to the What If. There’s no world I’d rather inhabit right now than this hospital bed.

11 Half of a Duo, Raising a Duo { 10.02.09 at 6:08 pm }

I like your having dragged my butt over here.

I love John Lennon and Beautiful Boy “life happens when you are busy making other plans” is the song of my life… the song of my sons… and my journey towards motherhood in the face of being totally barren in every way, shape and form.

On a side note, I saw Yoko and Sean on “the View” I think. I really hate saying this, but the woman cannot sing and I don’t “get” her. I usually “get” musicians but, really, she talk-sings and not well, either.

Weekly What if: What if I went to Where the Wild Things are but never met Max? How would it end up? He’s the “original Wild Thing”.

As for blog hosting… I just had to switch my friends’ yarn shop website (I am her webmaster) from geocities to a yahoo hosted blog and it took forever to change all the photos and links. I totally “get” what a PITA “moving” a website can be…..

12 Quiet Dreams { 10.02.09 at 7:33 pm }

Wow. That song is amazing. I love the starkness of it.

Got nothin’ for you on the what if. All of my energy right now has be zapped by my own move, so I feel your pain, though, granted, your move has got to be a lot more difficult than mine, even though you haven’t had to go through all your posts and comments changing names/pseudonyms.

And I love your site. Love. It.

13 Paz { 10.02.09 at 10:39 pm }

One of the best songs ever written. I listen to it ALL the time. This raw version is especially… so real.

John Lennon did drawings for Sean that Yoko made into a children’s book. I think I’ll go there, where I can curl up with a cat napping or play with an elephant counting… (one small complaint: the colorization of his drawings S-U-C-K-S)

14 FET Accompli { 10.03.09 at 1:27 am }

Congrats on the move to your new webhome! That song is beautiful. I think I’d choose Narnia – I see Lavendar Luz had the same thoughts.

15 JuliaS { 10.05.09 at 2:03 pm }

Where would I go if I could literally, as opposed to figuratively, disappear inside a book? Oh my, my mind has been reeling with the possibilities. However, I think I have come to the conclusion that I like books so much, because they are “safe”. No matter what – just like with your “Wild Things” post, no matter how amazing, scary, exciting, treacherous or inspiring, I like that bowl waiting for me in the corner, still warm.

As many fabulous books I have read, I just can’t think of one where I think I would fit in and be very happy for long.

16 Battynurse { 10.11.09 at 1:38 am }

So I sit here surrounded by boxes and a whole bunch of crap that I probably really don’t need and I sort of chuckle at your description of when you first moved into your house. Sitting amid all the boxes and not knowing where anything is and everything being different. I chuckled because I’m crazy enough to have done this pick up and move thing so many times my relatives no longer bother writing down my address as it will likely be a new one on the christmas card next year. And strangely as much as I hate the actually pick things up and carry them part of moving and even though I get frustrated by not being able to find something I need for several days (currently missing is my good pizza slicer but I just found my glasses) I still find it fun to have a change of scenery.
I’m glad that your move is happening even though it is stressful and scary and all that. It will be a good move.

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