I restricted access to Scrawlspace during my breakup and divorce for fear that there would be some sort of unforeseeable repercussions from making the process public. I wanted my farflung friends and family to be able to keep up, but not necessarily the world. Now I'm much less concerned about that, and in looking back over the entries for the past year, there's really very little that could be considered sensitive information. So I'm purging anything that mentions names of people I think might not want to be named, or that potentially falls into the Too Much Information category. When the survey and edit is complete, I'll remove the need for permissions to get to the blog. Just so ya know.
On the subject of old blog entries: a few months ago, Grayson's computer died. Well, it had help. It was sputtering and I asked Grayson's dad to take a look at it. Apparently he attempted major surgery and NOW it's dead. I asked him to try to recover the photographs from the corpse's hard drive. This is one of the major drawbacks to digital photography. One electronic glitch and ZZZZZZZKK! your kid's entire photographic childhood is gone.
In the process of recovering photos (which, thankfully, he was able to do,) G also ran across the original Scrawlspace... the "online journal" (as we called 'em back then) I kept prior to Grayson's birth and during the early years of his childhood. Back in the day, if you wanted an online journal, you had to get a web design software package like Frontpage and build your own website. I spent untold hundreds of hours designing and crafting my page, plus untold hundreds more writing and posting. Then one day my former husband told me that he had asked our internet provider to take down Scrawlspace because it was too easy for the stalkers on his online chatrooms to find out his RealWorld identity by finding my blog. Then the home computer crashed and after he disassembled and reassembled it, the original Scrawlspace file was mysteriously missing.
Well, now it's been resurrected. God knows how I'll access it, since I have no computer and if I did it sure wouldn't have FrontPage on it. But we'll see. It's nice to know it's out there. Somewhere. Losing a journal, even to cyberspace, is like losing a chunk of your life. Especially when your actual memory of your life is as faulty and thin as mine is. I barely remember what I had for breakfast, much less what my life was like in the heady early-marriage days before Grayson was born. What did I do with all that time?
Oh yeah, that's right.... I built Scrawlspace.
On Saturday night I drove out to Stilwell for part of a board retreat for Dreamer Concepts. The full board (I'm only an intern) spent the whole weekend out there coming up with strategic plans and fundraising ideas and all that other tedious stuff boards do. I had been invited out for the dinner afterward.
It's been awhile since I did much driving around rural Oklahoma. The retreat was set at the family farm of one of the members, and it was well out in the country. The sun was beginning to head downward as I started out, and as I drove south then west then south again, the sunset seemed to rotate around me through a long long dusk.Oklahoma has fantastic sunsets. The landscape is flat enough to allow you to view the sun all the way down to the horizon in most places, but rolls enough to provide some nice contrast. Up and you see the sunset spread out at your feet like a fiery lake. Down and it seems to blaze up over the hilltop. And the clouds and colors are ridiculous. Anyone naive enough to paint such a skyscape would be ridiculed for being precious. But there it is. Big as life time and time again.
Just as the last light was beginning to leave in the west, a lightning storm started up to the east, and I drove between them: a pool of blue and gold light to my right, and white lightning to my left. A wonderful, wonderful fantasy of a drive.Later, after dinner we all went outside to find that the sky had cleared and the stars were out. In the pitch black country night you could really see them, and we were trying stupidly to identify constellations and stars until of course someone whipped out their iPhone astronomy app and we were able to hold it up to see what was what. A weird technological twist to an ancient activity.
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