Please tell me it’s pretty.

I finished hand-erasing html code off of 2000+ entries on the blogroll.  If not, the blogroll had strange spacing and blogs were hidden (meaning: the url was there, but there were no words to link it to, so I could see it in draft, but no one could see it once I published it.  So it really was necessary to fix this). So go poke around and check out the new numbering feature on all the subsections so you can tell how many people are in a category.

And while you’re there, you can thank Josh who sat beside me through most of it watching Across the Universe on continual play because he is that patient with me.  And he only mentioned once or twice when we heard Joe Anderson sweetly croon “A Little Help From My Friends” that it takes 19 times of hearing Joe Anderson sweetly croon “A Little Help From My Friends” to fix the blogroll.  Thank you, Josh, for enduring.  And thank you, Joe Anderson, for providing the music.

It was like a really good eyebrow plucking, where it’s a pain-in-the-ass to make the appointment and have someone put hot wax on your face and RIP OFF YOUR HAIR FOR THE LOVE OF G-D WHY DID ANYONE THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?  But…er…then you leave the salon and you feel so clean and neat and orderly.

First request: if you have a link to the blogroll on your sidebar, please change it to the new space: https://www.stirrup-queens.com/a-whole-lot-of-blogging-brought-to-you-sorted-and-filed/.

And now, I can add people again.  Second request: if you write me in the future about moving your blog to a new subsection, please let me know where your blog is located (as in: “hey Mel, I’m #34 in male factor”).  If you don’t know where you are, put your blog name in quotes (as in: “Stirrup Queens”) in the search feature on the left sidebar.  See that?  Under the ads where it says “search this site?”  It will bring up the page of the blogroll that contains your blog.

In case you care, the number of blogs in each room: adoption (223), loss (171), child-free (10), donor gametes and surrogacy (130), pg and parenting (509), general IF (274), diagnoses (336), miscellaneous (89), and situation (294)=2036 blogs.

Now back to you telling me that it’s so pretty and neat that it’s making your own eyebrows feel like a Costa Rican rain forest.  Not to even mention the state of your nether regions…

Finishing it was most definitely a perfect moment.  Sigh.

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.

*******

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.

*******

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)?

*******

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…

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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?

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