Hey, looky there!

Last time I walked down to that Little Free Library, I had a pile to donate and I wasn’t intending to pick anything up. But then there was this. “The Wisdom of the West” compiled by Criswell Freeman. I opened it and found several pertinent sayings that I ought to try to remember. I walked away, then walked back and picked up the book.

This is the heart of the matter. I’ve dreamed my whole life of a place where I could feel like I belong there. I belong with the darling of course and would live with him under a bridge if necessary; but it would also be peachy to have a home assigned on earth. This is where Janel goes. When we are done playing with Janel, we put her back here.

We finally have a chance to own our own place without obligation. That’s the big dream and doesn’t have to include the creature comforts, hehe, it’s all about surviving that first winter, and if you’re lucky, write a book about it later. Now I get to do that, too.

This is a concept that might help me at the new place when I begin to get cold. In fact, I think it already has. We were out there camping for two weeks when it was 24 degrees. I sometimes wished I could go– well, not home, this is home!

Not back. Anything but that.

After only a couple weeks, I did begin to wish I could go inside. We’ll have an “inside” soon enough. In the meantime, ONWARD.

We have been marveling and giggling over the concept of heading east to get to the West.

I spent my early years deep in the heart of the old West, far south of here in gold country, where except for the cars and telephones it was still 1849. That place was excellent in all ways except that it was, unfortunately, politically situated in Cali (cough) Forn (cough) – sorry, I can’t say it. If the State of Jefferson ever became reality, I’d move back there instantly, but for now, no.

Anyhoo the West was alive there and I loved it. But right now we’re heading eastwards inside our good old birthplace WA, to get back to something a bit more West.

Right. There are so many limitations, but we have “a lot” and we can do “all kinds of things” and it is deeply satisfying to do as much as possible with what we have, rather than to just stay stuck. Knowing you’re doing everything you can do is all that’s necessary to be able to sleep at night.

Exactly. I dunno about the customs, I’ve never been good at that. But I’m def making do with the things that I have. Funny, but I think I’ve been preparing for this my whole life. I’ve scoffed at spoiled American women, and yet when it came time to leave “civilization”, it turned out I’d been comfortable there so long, I had started to get a bit dependent. Well, I’ve scoffed too much to deserve any sympathy. Toughen up.

Can’t we live without hot running water? Can’t we wake up cold and make a fire like our ancestors did, who craved freedom? Yes! If that’s the price of freedom, then absolutely yes, and that’s a cheap price.

Can’t we do without the internet? ::cries::

I’ve collected candles all my life. Whenever I saw someone’s used wedding tapers on the giveaway table, I picked them up. Now I finally get to need them. And the wool blankets, I’m gonna need those, and warm quilted clothing, for real. I have a self-constructed hand crank sewing machine for exactly this exigency! In case there’s no more electricity. There’s no more electricity, so yay.

I was one of many who was a bit crestfallen when Y2K didn’t happen. I was hoping for TEOTWAWKI while I was still young. And now, here it is! Because I brought it on myself.

It’s true. I can feel it coming. A bit of actual discomfort might just do wonders for my seething. There’s no time to be nuts when you need to carry some water to wash dishes and get the firewood in before dark.

That means I’m already a winner.

Messing around with WordPress and having SO MUCH FUN!

I was recently upgraded to version 6.1 while I wasn’t watching (away from keyboard for a while, but automatic updates had been left on) and wouldn’t be all that happy about it except that I’m a WP fan and therefore enthusiastic about whatever they do. Full site editing is the latest thing. I tangled with that for a whole day or two without any luck, then after banging my head against every wall in sight, discovered a series of useful new-to-me things, both related and un.

I had recently installed a WP for my Vicky, promising her that it’s easy and fun and then it turned into everything else but that, because it only takes a few months to suddenly not know what you’re doing any more. Full site editing is too bleeding edge for me, I guess.

But Vicky came up with the FAIRY theme, and it’s every bit as clean and simple as the Basic theme (no kidding, that’s the name of it) that I had been using before, but more up to date. We’re back to the good old days of crop a banner to these dimensions, pick some colors and then get on with our lives. It took me half an hour to produce a brilliant pink candy cane theme from a random image of flowers from Wiki Commons.

To get the images right I downloaded a bunch of “free, easy” image crop things, but eventually they all failed and I had to revert to ibisPaint. I had been avoiding that because I didn’t know how to use it, but after ten minutes of really trying, I started to get it to work and it’s AMAZING and does so much more, not only cropping to dimensions, but semi-transparent layers, clone brushing, etc. And it works offline! I have a new tool!

Speaking of offline. I’ve been wishing and searching for some way to compose posts offline, other than copying and pasting text and assembling with pictures later. Up at my cold new home there’s just one place on the hill where the phone gets signal, not enough to make calls, but texts go through, and emails if they’re brief enough. I can even load images if they’re small enough. But it’s so cold! I don’t want to stand out there a minute longer than necessary. I’d like to compose a post inside where it’s warm, then go outside to the signal spot and hit UPLOAD. I still need to share my fabbdalous nonsense with the world!

The WordPress app does work offline, for composing posts, and queuing images for upload, but cannot, as far as I can see, do both at the same time. Can’t add an image from your device into the post and then upload – or it’s, “failure: image not loaded”. Also can’t upload images in one session and add them to the post in the next – the Media tab forgets them and there’s no way to insert them because, “failure: not connected”. Hmph.

Bouncing around ideas, I even thought for a while of good old html and a text editor. I could share a link to a directory with some basic pages and pictures, then go up to the phone zone, fire up FTP and… argh, there we are, fiddling in the cold with hurting fingers.

Then I found the solution! Posting by email, YAYYY! The “Postie” plugin. They mention “journalists in foreign countries” as the ones who may find this feature useful, but it’s also cool in other cold places, like up on my hill where EMFs are only frying your brains, just a little bit, in one spot.

Now I have this FABBDAlous new theme, AND I can throw some content at it from anywhere!

That came from https://imagecolorpicker.com/ analyzing my picture of flowers. One of the light pinks happens to be #fabbda.

UPDATE:

Nov 2023. Found out Fairy is nagware, and there’s no rage like love to hatred turned. Just when I thought the whole theme thing was settled and not on my to-do list any more, Fairy started popping up with the most ANNOYING messages, top and center of the WP dashboard:

“Hey there! We notice you’ve been using Fairy for some time…” and a request for payment. The way it’s phrased reminds me of a security guard posted at the store entrance: “Hey there! I notice you have an item tucked under your arm…”

I complained on the Fairy theme message board and had a long, frustrating convo with the devs who insist the messages can be got rid of. Sure they can, until next time you sign in.

Anger about that was just the motivation I needed to get me off my lazy butt and do a little bit of reading about FSE. Guess what, I figured it out!

I’m now using Twenty Twenty Three and absolutely love it. Just a bit of work to get over the hump, and now I feel like WordPress is back the way it should have been all along except UNLIMITED power and control. You can make your site look exactly the way you envisioned it, starting from scratch, as easy as drawing a layout on a blank canvas. This is better than CSS alone, better than any super-customizer theme (I’ve tried all of those). You can customize as much or as little as you please.

Wah-hoo, I’m so excited about 6.2! By the time I write this, 6.4 and it just keeps getting better and better.

I’m moving all the posts from my old website to this one. These were mostly miscellanea I uploaded for testing.

Isn’t this the perfect pinecone? Freshly fallen, nicely rounded, light color brown.

I love pine trees. It’s been so long since I was among them! Just those stupid boring Douglas firs on the other side.

Only after posting the picture I notice you can see the patch on my skirt. “Sign of authenticity.”

This is my faithful sweet puppy, Peanut. I bring him with me everywhere because he’s shaped like the perfect neck pillow  🙂

I was keeping an eye open for a larger ash pan, and here’s this huge thing at Costco. So beautiful with a refreshing winter scene with nothing about Christmas. Nowadays metal ash pans come with bonus cookies inside them.

Here’s the cool pink wedge I bought!

I bought my darling a new felling wedge and then immediately ruined it myself by using it for splitting because there weren’t any steel ones around.  I was “only going to use it to push the two pieces apart” and then used it for several and then got mad at a certain round that didn’t want to be splat (proper English past tense of split) and cracked the thin edge. So I was on the lookout for a new one, and this was half the price of most of them and PINK.

Later learned you can actually grind down and sharpen the edges of those things just as if they were steel instead of plastic, so the other one isn’t a total loss and this just adds to his collection!

I loved Facebook and wouldn’t have left. Facebook was an important part of my life.

I made an account almost as soon as it wasn’t just for college students any more, and found a cousin I hadn’t heard from in decades. What great fun to look at his posts and see what he’s up to now! With pictures!

When I looked again a year later, everyone I knew was there.

The great thing about the way Facebook works is that you only see updates from the people you like. If someone’s annoying, you hide that person, and the flip side of that is the reassurance of knowing that if people are seeing your updates, it’s because they choose to. It’s nice to know you can post freely and you’re not spamming anyone.

I used Facebook for years for the “unspoken request” and when I finally escaped my twenty year sentence, I made a couple huge posts finally pouring out the truth I had been hiding for years. A bunch of people commented at once with love and support, so that in an amazing few moments I went from alone and scared to feeling greatly reassured. Friends are what we need, but it was Facebook that made that particular uplifting experience possible.

Do you remember when people first started demanding accountability from Mark Zuckerberg? Long ago someone asked him “Why would people trust you with their personal information?” and his response was “Because they’re dumb f***s.”

But I’d say it’s because they’re enjoying using the system that he invented. It’s their choice. Nobody made them sign up. They decided to trust Mark Zuckerberg, and that’s not stupider than going to the local bar to meet new friends. Facebook was a genuinely cool new concept. (Although really I’m not that impressed with MZ’s genius; with the advent of connectivity it wasn’t a great leap from message boards and personal websites to a central listing with overlapping personal circles.)

I remember when there was a rumor on Facebook that Facebook would start charging a monthly fee. Everybody flew into a frenzy, and posts circulated, “I will NEVER pay Facebook a dime!” There were petitions demanding that Facebook stay free.

Why should it stay free? Is Zuckerberg running a charity? Where’s his funding supposed to come from? Giant servers aren’t cheap, neither are software engineers.

Nothing invented by man is free. Everything is paid for by someone. If you’re not a paying customer, then you’re someone’s guest. If we are not the customers, then who is the customer? The advertisers are the customers. We are the commodity. Our time, attention and personal information is being sold to pay for our use of the Facebook environment.

Well, that was okay with me. I understood and accepted that. I liked Facebook.

The next issue is the marvelous freedom of speech. At first, Zuckerberg was on the side of freedom to a pretty amazing degree, even to announcing he would tolerate Holocaust debate on the site. That was put a stop to at the next level. The ADL ordered advertisers to pull his funding for a month. He got back in line. The ones who actually pay for the site get to decide what’s going to be on it. The ungrateful Facebook users were unwilling to pay even a dime for something they used and enjoyed every day.

You can’t expect things to be free of charge and stay free of control. So, here came the control and it got gradually worse for years, until now we have Facebook choosing a side on health issues and silencing dissent, and teaching us the correct response to having our cities burned.

I was never a giant Trump fan, and yet there is some lingering sentimentality about apple pies, Mom, The Star Spangled Banner, etc. Seems to me there’s a glamour about the office of POTUS that should entitle the holder to a certain degree of respect. At least people should be allowed to listen to what he has to say.

Wait, doesn’t that sound a little funny? If it was some unwashed nobody, “We should at least be able to hear what he has to say.”

It seemed strange to me why Trump would submit to that. He is at least an influential man with a lot of money. He has his own websites where I’m sure his fans would be glad to go to get updates. Why doesn’t he post on them? If he continues to hang around Facebook and Twitter despite the repeated slaps, that seems to reinforce the idea that those sites are IT, and that there’s really no alternative besides just staying around and meekly continuing to try.

I also have a scoff for people who whine about “censorship on big tech”. Being big doesn’t make you public. The rich people who control the big sites have as much right as anyone else to determine how their GUESTS should behave. If you don’t like it, stop being their guest.

If someone comes into my living room and annoys me with his opinions and I throw him out, that’s not censorship. That’s me keeping the atmosphere the way I like it in my living room. Big tech sites have as much right as I do to enforce their terms of service. And then I’ve heard people who SAY they are on the side of freedom and limited government, wanting to get the rules changed to force Facebook tolerate their opinions! If we have a government so coercive that they can take Facebook’s liberty away, they might take mine away, too. If Facebook.com has to give equal time to opposing voices, maybe someday JanelWasHere.com will have to do the same thing. I wouldn’t like that.

I used to hang around message boards in olden days. Sometimes on a board about a specific topic, where everyone’s chatting away happily about the designated topic, someone new joins and starts shooting her mouth off. An argument gets started, a moderator steps in to muffle the troublemaker, and the troublemaker yells, “This is America! I have freedom of speech!” But actually– no. There is freedom of speech on the sidewalk, but not in someone else’s yard. There is freedom of speech on the internet, but not on someone else’s website which is not your website and you haven’t paid for.

Maybe the problem is that some people equate Facebook and Twitter with “the internet”. The internet is free. Facebook and Twitter are private. Facebook and Twitter are to the internet what cafes and bars are to the street. You can do as you like on the sidewalk, but you can’t go into Starbucks and start preaching, singing opera, or jumping on the furniture. They let you in only if you agree to act the way they expect you to act.

Anybody can buy their own home on the internet. It’s $14 a year. You get a domain, “www.yourname.com”, and a domain is just like it sounds. It’s your demesne. It’s your private property. That’s your living room. Your home is your castle. If you violate the law of the land, then a judge can issue a court order and yank your website, but in America at least there’s due process before your right to freedom of expression is taken away from you. So, run your mouth! On YOUR domain.

You also have to pay for monthly hosting, which can sometimes be as little as $4 a month although that’s probably not with a host who will support your privacy. Don’t need to say anything inflammatory? Then you can use a cheap host. Behave yourself. Be a good, quiet little citizen. If enough people do that, then nobody’s paying for the hosts who support privacy, and voila, pretty soon, no more hosts who support privacy. Do you remember the olden days when internet access came with a free website? Whoops, I mean “a website included in the fee” 🙂 But people didn’t bother to learn how to use their websites and nowadays it’s rare to find internet service that includes a site. You’re expected to use “free” social media profiles instead.

And yet understanding all this!

I still loved Facebook and would have stayed. Facebook fills a need. It’s a wonderful service for its original intention, which, as I understand it, is posting status updates about what we had for lunch and sharing pictures of kids and pets with our relatives. That’s all I ever wanted to do there. It was fun. It was cozy. Everyone I knew was there. If I go there to cry, a dozen people tell me it’s going to be okay. If I post about my accomplishments, a dozen people cheer and pat me on the back. I can effortlessly keep up with the people whose lives I’m following.

But then came the very last straw.

Someone commented about my mother’s Facebook profile, and I remembered that she had one. I had set it up for her some six or eight years ago at her request, but she hadn’t looked at it since. She had long since forgotten it existed. I asked if she still wanted it, and she said no, to go ahead and delete it.

I tried to sign in as her. I still had the password. Facebook wanted to send me a code by email to confirm. I entered the code. They wanted to send me a code by text message. I entered that, too. They still didn’t believe me and wanted A PHOTO OF HER DRIVER’S LICENSE.

What?

And that’s the end. There is no chance of getting that. She can barely talk any more, certainly doesn’t know how to take a picture with her phone, let alone how to send it to me. She would never consent to such a thing anyway. So that’s the end of that, and “her” Facebook profile will probably be there until doomsday.

That made me worry. Does Facebook really think it has a right to someone’s government issued ID to confirm identity? I checked the internet and sure enough, it’s actually been going on for a while. Apparently the most common triggers for “verification” are either making a political post that goes viral, or if someone manually flags a profile. People get locked out of their accounts and that’s it. There’s no appeal. You can’t exactly talk to a customer service representative– we don’t PAY for Facebook, remember, so we’re not customers.

Either cough up images of your ID or you’re locked out.

We all have our limits and that one is over mine. It’s not going to happen. I’m not coughing up PAPERS, PLEASE, to some stupid website to regain access to a profile that I created years ago with only an email address.

At that point, I felt urgency. I’d been on Facebook for years, posting every detail and a thousand photos. The thought of being locked out, and yet all that material still up and visible to others as “Janel” as if they represented me, and not even being able to delete it, was unthinkable.

Boy, it hurt, but “my” Facebook profile had to go IMMEDIATELY.

I had so completely relaxed into Facebook by then that there were dozens of “friends” for whom I had no other contact information. I sent out a bunch of messages asking for said contact– while worrying because I know sending out a bunch of PMs is “potentially annoying behavior” that can get you flagged!

I had a sense of racing against the clock. I wanted to get it done quickly and get out of here before Facebook’s algorithm catches me.

Out of all the people I knew in real life, but wasn’t sure off the top of my head I had a phone number or email address for, maybe five responded.

Yay for having friends.

Yay for Facebook’s handy tool for downloading everything! It allowed me to download a 2 gb file with all the pictures, comments, replies, messages, from my entire history of participation. I checked it enough to feel like, yes, that’s everything, or at least “more than enough”, then pulled the plug.

Actually there was a sleep in the middle of this operation. I was locked out of my mother’s profile in the late evening, looked into the problem a little bit, realized “I need to get off Facebook immediately”, and then went to bed. I woke up in the morning with an ominous sense of dread and a pang of regret, because, “I love Facebook! I don’t want to leave! I’m going to be so lonely!”

I’ve always felt sorry for those losers who post on Facebook that they’re leaving Facebook for some snotty reason or other, telling us that Facebook is soooo stupid– ON FACEBOOK. Because without Facebook they don’t have a platform. There’s plenty of sites where you can howl into space but nobody will hear you. So they get in their parting shot, leave Facebook with a prideful huff, and vanish down the memory hole.

I didn’t want to be one of those people. Forgotten. No more audience for my adorable photos. Stuck trying to keep up email conversations, wondering if people are getting tired of me and wishing I would quit so that they wouldn’t feel obligated to write back. Or they don’t write back and the conversation dies and I never hear from them again– although it’s usually me who is guilty of not replying.

Well, I got out of bed, walked over to the computer and deleted my Facebook.

Now what?

What will I do instead? That’s the dilemma and challenge. It is the friends themselves who are valuable. If friends are valuable, then I’m just going to have to put in some honest effort. I’m going to have to think of something. Friends and family are important and we must find a way to communicate.

I’ve been making more phone calls. I’ve been writing more emails. Not very many more. But I’ve been trying. For my birthday I got two texts and one phone call, which is rather cold and silent compared to the piles of FB comments that I’d usually get just because Facebook friends (and relative strangers) type a greeting into the birthday box to make it go away. Hey. It was still nice.

But then, have I said happy birthday to anyone this year besides immediate family? Do I even know anyone’s birthday besides immediate family? Maybe I need a birthday list on the wall like the olden days. Maybe I need to put in some EFFORT.

For my birthday, I had a couple of kids and one wonderful husband with me in real life and we ate cake! That makes me the luckiest person!

I haven’t shared any photos of the occasion because I still haven’t figured out a convenient way to do it. I have my website, of course, but sharing quite everything to the world at large might be a bit much. If I really want to live by my own advice and use only services that I have a right to use, I’d have to either password protect a page, or email the photos straight to those people whom I think might want them.

Sigh.

It’s such a bother. It’s not easy and smooth and fun like on Facebook.

I wish I could have stayed.

Now. If you want to get technical (and I love getting technical), Facebook rejected me, not the other way around. I hadn’t noticed their terms of service changed, because, like most people, I had been agreeing to the updates without reading them. The latest Facebook TOS says you have to use your legal name. If you don’t agree, then you’re not complying with the terms and you’re obligated to remove your profile and go away. Otherwise you’re lying, stealing, and breaking a voluntary contract.

There is an interesting Facebook alternative called MeWe. It claims to care about your privacy and offers levels of membership. Do we trust Weinstein more than Zuckerberg? MeWe is endorsed by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet as the rest of us know it, i.e. the World Wide Web. That’s the www part of the URL and was a stunning leap forward in communication, a total world changer, allowing all of us the visibility of all of us.

MeWe’s TOS includes permission to call yourself by any handle you prefer. That’s something, at least. So I go there when I’m particularly missing Facebook. There are kittens to giggle over and funnies to share with the three people I know who have accounts. I can post about my breakfast. Will MeWe succeed? That depends on whether it gets customers who care enough about freedom and privacy to pay for subscriptions. I would if I had extra money, just to make the point, but I already have an online presence and that’s enough spending for now.

Update: I made a Facebook profile. Some local organizations don’t even do mailing lists any more. They only have a Facebook page, probably because it’s easy. My new Facebook profile consists only of my name and link. I’m not treated well. If I comment, even on family, my comments get held for moderation. So– NOPE. I won’t comment. Phooey on you. I’m just here to look, kinda like walking by the party and looking in the windows.

Whatever. This is my home, HERE. Welcome to my site.

I had a butterfly apron I couldn’t use for an apron because I don’t like the shape. I was waiting for some use for the butterflies as motifs. Finally, the first use! Patching a hole in a screen. I zigzagged around the butterfly, then tacked it to the screen by hand. When the sun comes through, it looks intentional!