Hope everyone had/is having/will have a great holiday. The blog here is not. The comment spam has continued to the point where I’ve closed the comments and pings for now. I won’t have time for two blogs for the next few weeks anyway, so any blogging I can do will be at Blogger, where word verification has stopped the spammers, at least so far. I’ll revisit the whole thing in a few weeks.

The Ageless Project is on BloggerBuzz. BloggerBuzz quotes from the AP article by Carla Johnson. Congratulations to The Ageless Project for getting some well deserved attention.

It started out innocently enough. I was renewing the registration for u-melt.com for my son’s band’s site. It needed to be done. I was doing it. Simple, right? Then, somehow or other, by the time I was finished I’d also registered otherplans.org. So, in a few days, that should be pointing to this site. Blogsome doesn’t have domain mapping like Typepad does, as far as I know. Well, it’s free, so no complaints there. I’ll probably just use the URL forwarding that the registrar provides. I’m using it for u-melt with no problems, although I really should move the DNS on that one to the site’s host. It’s only been a year.

That domain was an accidental one, too, but it wasn’t my accident that time. The band was going back and forth between calling itself U-Melt and UMelt and somehow an important piece of advertising went out with www.u-melt.com printed on it. I got an urgent e-mail from the manager asking if we could get that registered by the time the mail arrived at its destination. Turned out we could. I turned on URL forwarding on the theory that it would be a lot quicker than having it resolve to the hosting server and it seems I never remembered to change it.

Also in a few days I should be able to receive e-mail at pat AT otherplans.org. I have to set that up, too, once the mx servers have resolved. And, I still have a year on zenyenta.com. And then there’s another one that I never use at all anymore. Oh, and I have one that was for the previous version of the band and I should try to sell. My attempts to simplify seem to be backfiring left and right.

I’m not totally comfortable with the merging of my two blogs and am kind of back in the same boat I was in before. They’ve both developed a personality of their own, without my planning or intending it. They’re different personalities, too. Other Plans grew is about adjusting, accepting change and being flexible, when it has a theme at all. Bending so as not to break is the goal here.

ZenYenta, on the other hand, has no desire to bend to the current political winds. She believes her country has been taken over by forces which are hostile or at least indifferent to the well being of humanity in general and the citizens of this country in particular and that bending equals capitulation. In fact, outrage over the political landscape in this country took over that blog, without that being the original intention. It gets shrill without apology. There’s plenty of reason for being shrill.

Both blogs are honest personal expressions from the same person. They just don’t seem to go together well. It’s been an interesting exercise, though. I think it explains the funk I’ve been in, and I have been in quite a funk. I didn’t know if it was caused by medication, stress, or what. Maybe it’s because as personal life becomes more challenging to navigate, the body politic seems determined to make life on earth impossible in every way they can think of. Or maybe it’s just caused because it’s not much easier to merge these two different attitudes in life than it is in blogging. I’m not very good at compartmentalizing.

That last post worked fine, exept for the categories. That didn\’t seem to go as well. Giving it another shot.

Update: When I post with Zoundry, it gets the categories and allows me to choose them. They’re listed correctly when I login but I have to open the post on the web and then save it to get to show on the blog. Sounds like a bug on one end or the other.

Further Update: Hmm..upon looking at it further, it’s all screwed up. OK, no Zoundry for Blogsome at the moment.

This is by way of being a test post. I\’ve been tweaking and now I finally seem to have Zoundry working with Blogsome. Zoundry is a blogging client that I like a lot. It works with Blogger, but when I tried it a while back I couldn\’t get it to connect with Blogsome. Now it does. So here goes..If this works, then the next thing is to categorize all the links. That\’s going to take a while, so if you were linked here previously and your link disappears, it\’ll probably be back once the assigned category is up.

Technorati : Blogsome Blogging Zoundry

Political Cortex, a new collaborative, progressive site opened yesterday. It’s operated on the Scoop platform and it aims to give a voice to all its members. If you sign up now, you can get your desired username. I got my first name. I should be able to remember that.

I don’t know how much I’ll contribute, but I read one of its writers, S.M. Dixon, on a regular basis and find his site an invaluable source of news and information, especially on busy days when there’s not much time to check everything out.

Anyway, welcome to blogtopia (yes, skippy coined that term), Political Cortex. And best of luck in your mission.

I hope I’m back, at least part time. I’m not even sure where I’ve been. There were health issues. I won’t even bore you with the details this time. It’s probably just a matter of having to take things that depress one’s immune system. You really miss your immune system when it’s not doing its job. Between those problems, the routine doctor visits and tests and the fact that getting medication means frequent trips a bit farther afield than my neighborhood pharmacists, there are fewer hours left for extras.

Then there was some devastating news that a friend got. It was so bad that it was hard to think about anything else for a while.

And there are the not so bad things like planning my daughter’s baby shower. Now I know that mothers aren’t supposed to give showers. I was raised right. My own mother came from Connecticut so you know she taught us well. However, there’s local custom, too, and that’s how things are done here more often than not. So, together with her aunt, I’m putting together this shower. I’m like the last person in the world to be doing something like that. I’m terrible at these things. She’d be great at it, and that makes it worse. You want to do as good a job as the guest of honor would, but that seems unlikely. Her aunt, my sister and co-conspirator, is even less the Martha Stewart type than I am.

My son’s band is thinking it’s time for a redesign of their site. If I’m going to continue to update it and manage it, I’d just as soon do the designing, too. It’s a lot harder to maintain something that someone else has done. I’m not getting inspired, though. Or, more accurately, I get half-inspired a lot. I’ve started a bunch of different designs only to decide that they wouldn’t do after I’ve spend a few hours on them.

I think I’m going to take S.M. Dixon’s advice and consolidate, at least for now. If the comment spam can be controlled I’ll do my blogging here. Otherwise I’ll have to bring it over to Blogger. The one blog will have to accomodate my political rants along with the personal stuff.

I’m not in a position to post much political content anyway, because I can’t keep up the way I have until recently. I don’t mean I’m not paying attention, but in this world of blogging and 24/7 news, “not keeping up” can mean not finding out about a development for a few hours or a day. I was better at it this summer when I was home getting treatments. Now that I’m back at work I find that life is too demanding right now for me to be able to make much of a contribution to the lefty blogoshpere, but I’ll be reading it and rooting for it.

I’m trying to catch up with some of my favorite blogs. I see that Ronnie’s been sick, but seems to be OK now. Waiter Rant is redesigned again. Jude is away in New Zealand and Millie is going strong and still having a good time. The Reality Base, formerly Semidi is now Semidi Says and is redesigned once again. I’ll have to change it on the blogroll again. I still have a bunch to catch up with. And a lot of invitations to write.

I just noticed that this blog has been accepted to The Ageless Project. That puts it in some great company. I’m going to have to work on being worthy, as soon as possible.

Thanks very much to The Ageless Project.

Earlier this week, before the discussion of older bloggers came up here, I told my son I’d made a resolution about my old age, should I get to have one. I told him that the best thing I could do for him, his sister, or anyone else who might end up with me in later years is to keep up with technology to the point where I stay fluent in the basics. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Despite the fact that most of my immediate circle of family and friends erroneously think of me as a geek, I’ve already fallen behind. The web is still a pretty comfortable place, but the whole Pod thing has left me in the dust. I know nothing of Podcasts, for instance. I better catch up.

Then there’s the television. It’s not just about changing the channel anymore. It’s about keeping track of a couple of hundred channels that keep changing their numbers. Frankly the TV guides were never designed for so many channels. I find it easier to check listings on the web and my husband, who is the main TV watcher, just surfs most of the time. If my husband falls asleep watching a DVD, my method of switching back to the television is just to randomly hit various buttons until I get a channel. And then there’s Tivo. We don’t have it, so I can’t really help not knowing how to use it, but in general, I have some catching up to do. I haven’t had time for much television in recent years, and now using one is something akin to a skill. I’ve got to get up to speed on it.

What I’ve learned from watching my mother is the reason for this resolution. She was always happiest working. After retiring from teaching, which was her second career, she and my father went into the antiques business full time. They’d been doing it on weekends for several years. Sadly, my father died with his boots on after only six months. He was at an auction at the time. It was the way he’d have wanted to go. A year later we opened a used book and record store with her and kept that up for almost a decade. After that she went to work part time in a book store. When it became a physical impossibility to keep that up she volunteered - at the library, the pantry for the sick, the food pantry and the church thrift shop. She participated in and sometimes led various reading groups. Throughout she kept up an active and busy social life. Sounds great, right? Yes, but what I see now is that you’ve got to have some kind of plan for reduced mobility.

We could kind of see it coming. Not the memory problems. We never saw that one coming. But before that, we were starting to worry when she went out alone. There were three separate incidents where she took a fall that landed her in the emergency room. One in particular was really frightening because it was while crossing a busy road and she could easily have been hit by a car. Then there was the fact that her circle of friends was starting to shrink. She was too busy to really notice, but it was inevitable. She didn’t belong to any senior groups, where there would be a steady supply of new members and her old acquaintances were moving to Florida or giving up driving. She did a lot of the driving when she and her friends were out and about. Now there are only two left who still drive.

It was with this in mind that we tried to encourage an interest in a computer and the internet. We helped her buy her first one when she was about Millie Garfield’s age. She learned to do e-mail and to find the news but she never really took to it. To get truly comfortable with technology, you have to explore a little and try to figure things out for yourself sometimes. That, she never did. She used to like to write and did some of it in her first career. As recently as a year ago, I suggested she start a blog but although her mental state wasn’t even close to what it is now, it seemed to be too late. She never really cared for any kind of electronic communication. She never watched television. She hated it, really, and couldn’t exactly remember how to turn it on and off, even when it was simpler than it is now.

Now she’s home more than she wants to be and by winter she’ll be home even more. She has short term memory loss, but she’s not out of it in every sense. She still reads, but even the most avid reader needs a little change. She gets bored, all the more so because she has so few resources that she’s comfortable with here in the house. She can use the telephone, the microwave and the toaster oven. If she’d used the computer and the television enough so that the basics were truly ingrained in her memory back beforer she started to lose the ability to remember new things, she’d be able to use them now. And she’d be happier than she is now. She’d be connected to the world whenver she wanted to be, on her own schedule. She’d be in control of something very important. Even television isn’t so bad when you’ve got hundreds of channels to choose from and a lot of time to fill. And she loved movies. Going out to see them is not really something she can do now. It would be really nice for her if she could take advantage of the movie channels that are available. I’m going to try getting her a DVD player if I can find one that seems extremely simple to operate. That, at least, might be something she could enjoy.

So, my resolution is to be able to use whatever information and communication technology is readily available in most homes at such time as I get to the point of being unable to get out in the world at will. You can’t control everything. You might not be able to help being dependent on others for transportation maybe other things as well, but I resolve to be able to keep myself amused and engaged as long as possible. And I’m kind of looking forward to having more time for blogging, or whatever it is we’ll be doing by then.