The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Christmas is a lot like Amazon. It gobbles up all the other little holiday competitors. Used to be Christmas started right after Thanksgiving. For those of you who quit using math, that’s about 30 days of shopping. A month, an entire month. I was in a store last year that started putting up the Christmas decorations right after Halloween. This year most of them did. And some, I kid you not, started before Halloween. That’s over two months, 60 days in case you don’t have the calendar app.

I got neighbors who never take the strings of lights off their gutters all year round. Maybe they celebrate their own birthday for a couple months, I don’t know. Presents every day for weeks and weeks. We got Black Friday, Internet Monday, the holiday that never really ends, whoopee! Did I say Christmas was a little like Amazon? Amazon IS Christmas, 365 days, don’t forget Leap Year. One day delivery. Drones, not reindeer, next year, count on it.

I was chatting it up with my neighbor today who bought the old farm next door. He’s been out of work awhile but said he’d been doing a little consulting this past year. Consulting. I like the sound of that. Conjures up visions of bathrobe and slippers, a cup of joe and a home computer screen. “Sounds good!” I offered, semi-envious. “Well, he countered, “I don’t know about that … but it’s good to make some money for a change.” Indeed. And isn’t that the question for all us South Enders: how much money versus how much work? Or, as I opined to my neighbor, “what’s the bottom here? What’s the LEAST amount of money we need to live so we can have the time to do just that?” Live. Sure, it’s probably germane to a more global audience too, but … let’s be honest. This is THE burning question on the sloth-inducing South End. How much is Just Enough? Wen do we draw a line in the beach sand and say, No Mas!

Admittedly it’s a slippery equation, one fraught with peril. Foreclosures, collection agencies, repossessions, divorce, severe depression. But obviously we didn’t move to the end of a skinnyass island off the beaten career path looking for a management position with a high tech startup. Those people RETIRE here. The rest of us, we’re hoping to retire here too — just a lot earlier. Without a pension, without a 401-K plan.

Let’s just say it’s a high wire act without the safety net.   Sure, plenty of us slipped. Hit bottom and couldn’t scrape ourselves off to try again. You don’t get second chances down here. The bank isn’t going to offer grief counseling and Tyee Store isn’t going to extend credit. It’s a hard road when you screw up. Paradise when you balance the risk to the reward. Point is, you want to keep both in equilibrium. You need help, call me, I’m available for consultation.

I’m one of those yahoos who thinks most anything he needs to know, he can teach himself. What is they say: a person who has himself for a teacher has a fool for a student? Close enough. But over a lifetime of self-inflicted wounds from an education from the Univ. of Hard Knocks, I never seem to learn the real lesson: that what I taught myself is rarely accredited. It’s like learning Business at Trump U. Worthless paper, expensively acquired.

Nevertheless, I’ve managed to build our house, fashion musical instruments, repair plumbing, fix trucks and manage to make a living at art, all without much experience or expertise. Okay, so I nearly burned down the glass studio fiddling with a panel box with a direct feed from the power line and yeah, I had some close calls building our house, a couple that might’ve crippled or killed me. Which brings to mind another dopey aphorism: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Oh, right, even an uneducated moron like myself knows what doesn’t kill you probably weakened your defenses, good luck with the next Near Miss. All of which is to say I’m not overly confident about my abilities, just a bit more willing to not let failures stop me, my five guitar building adventures a potent proof.

So when my glass business website got taken down by my nice host Small Orange when I missed a payment that got overlooked without offering me a second opportunity to pay belatedly before they deleted all the data, well, maybe it was anger at them or maybe it was the usual Do-It-Your-Damn-Self attitude, but at any rate, I embarked on my new career as an Information Technologist. Website Designer, here I come.

They say artists are right side brainiacs and engineers are left. Me, I’m working off the lower animal portion, the medulla something obladon’tgotta, which means a lot of cursing, yelling, spleen venting and mouse beatings. Needless to say, I like to work alone. The mizzus assured me web construction would be fairly simple. And I actually believed her!

A few days later, new host procured, domain name still mine, passwords and user names created, WordPress up and running, all I had to do was pick a ‘theme’, a template around which I could create a website that would showcase my glass installations without taking a day to load on some viewer’s computer. Of course I used images too big at first, but hey, a day or so of resizing them and they were ready to upload. The first ‘theme’ wasn’t really what I wanted so I went to another ‘theme’, wondering after the third why in hell they were named ‘themes’ and not, say, renditions, a black ops torture. There are ‘posts’ and there are ‘pages’. I don’t have time to tell you the difference but I used plenty to figure it out myself. And then comes the fun part, the program that takes those resized images and lets them be seen on a slideshow. Am I boring you? If so, think of me, three days into the labyrinth of digital hell, not quite like you, only one minute into this. I’m googling, I’m You-Tubing, I’m screwing up, I’m making a mess of my elegant website, but … perseverance, my friend, while not necessarily your enemy, can be.

Okay, you’re sick of this but bear with me a little longer. I found a ‘slideshow slider’, free of charge, uploaded it and spent a day trying to figure out its intricacies along with the rendition’s, how to order the images, how to delete, how to add text, how to … well, you get the idea. A Learning Curve. A Challenge. A Roadmap to Insanity. Call it what you will, finally I got the thing to pop up on the world wide web, the hallowed Internet, the holy grail of all digital knowledge and phony conspiracy theorists. I was ONLINE! I was back in bizness!

Until I did something fooling around trying to make the site Even Better. If I punched in archibaldglass.com, instead of seeing the previous slide show that took me five days to put up there, I got this cartoon figure that said something like Oops, Looks Like You Have Encountered ERROR 404. What Error 404 is, I have no earthly idea. It sounds bad and it certainly isn’t the message I want to send to my adoring website fans.

I spent another couple days cursing, torturing the mouse, fuming, fumbling in the dark. In the end the mizzus found the mistake I’d made, corrected it in five minutes. Is there a moral here for those of you who want to make your own website? Sure there’s a moral. Ask your techy spouse to do it. Pay her whatever her demands are. You want to do it yourself, good luck. But don’t call me.