November 12, 2008

• …I have my very own archives! Gosh, doesn’t that sound high-falutin’? But it is true. If you pay a little bit to be a premium xanga member, you have the opportunity to let them “archive” your blog. I wasn’t really sure how it would work, but since I paid that little bit for premium (surely I’ve gotten $25 worth of pleasure from this), I thought I’d see how it works. You just click a button on your home page and they tell you they’ll do it for you overnight. The next day, when you check your archives, you can zip the file right to your desktop.

  I’d gotten that far with it, so I decided I’d just print my archives. I thought, “Maybe we’ll have a little great-great-granddaughter someday who will want to know what her old Mimi, the one who lived way back in the early part of the 21st century, was like. She’ll ask her mom and will be directed to the attic, to that old trunk full of stuff no one ever looks at. When she opens it, she’ll find some faded, tattered remnants of a hand-pieced quilt, a ratty knitted bag, some albums full of antique pictures and a few books…and there in the bottom she’ll come upon an old notebook. It will be filled with pages of old-fashioned print, text with pictures scattered throughout, telling the story of these years of my life! This little girl will devour the words and be inspired to start writing her own story!”

  Well, whatever…visions of g-g-granddaughter notwithstanding, I have been rereading and printing my two years’ worth of blogging. It has been fun, sad and intriguing to read back through what I wrote. Life’s ups and downs, losses and gains, griefs and glories are there for all the xangaworld to see, just as they happened. Right there, in black and white.

  A bonus for my efforts has been to reread the comments that followed every entry, for those are included in the archives. Some of the ones who visited my site no longer come around, but several have been frequent, steady guests. And do you know, there is not one negative word in the lot? Every single thing written by my visitors has been positive and encouraging. I’ve gotten a second blessing from this experience; the first one came when the comments were initally written, and now I’m encouraged all over again!

  Ozarksfarmgirl’s site is haphazard, at best. Sometimes I go for weeks without posting an entry, when I simply can’t find the time. Thoughts swirl through my brain like fallen leaves stirred by a little whirlwind in the yard, and I long for the calming effect of sitting down to the keyboard and making sentences out of snatches of life. Then suddenly I find time to write a couple or three times a week, when life is flowing smoothly along, without any hitches or snags.

  Sometimes it all seems like a lot of trouble. Without a high-speed internet connection (believe me, I’ve tried to get one!!!) it can be very challenging to upload pictures, sometimes it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r to see your entries, and occasionally it is simply too much for my old Dell…she just shuts down. But it’s as if there’s this magnet in my old hard drive, drawing me back, to pull up my page, check on my friends, and see what’s going in your world. And when I do, it’s always worthwhile and interesting, so I must say I’m happy that I’ve stuck with this xangering (as a reader from the UK so quaintly puts it!) Guess I’ll keep on a little longer.

  So stay tuned! I’ve got a new superhero to tell you about, when I can find a little bit of time, and I need to give you an update on Addie Dear who is coming up on nine weeks, and the guys are busy with the fall cattle-working…gosh, where to start??

  • 5:35 pm
  • 6 Comments