We have been on this farm for five and a half years. It wasn’t even a farm when we bought it, really. It was a house, a couple of out-buildings and a pond on a little over twelve acres. There was an rusty, old wire fence around most of the perimeter, patched in places with pieces of cattle panel and baling twine, a small raised-bed garden near the well, and a couple of old peach and pear trees. That was it.
We have, by ourselves and with the help of a few friends, built a mile of fence (literally) and three sheep and goat sheds, put in a large garden, cut back brush to get pasture, painted the barn with rollers and brushes, rebuilt fences that we didn’t build right the first time, played midwife to a couple dozen sheep and goat births, and buried a few who didn’t make it.
I won’t try to speak for Vanessa (I’ve learned… the hard way), but the hardest thing I have done so far is build this damned web-page.
It’s confusing.
It’s confounding.
It’s ephemeral.
I began a couple of years ago on Valentine’s Day. I did some research on which platform to use, how to get started, and so on. I decided to use WordPress.org, rather than the simpler, free site WordPress.com. That was my first mistake, though of course I didn’t know it at the time.
I ordered a book (because in America all new adventures should begin with a purchase) titled WordPress for Dummies. That was my second mistake. When it arrived, it was 820 pages long. That’s like the size of a Russian novel.
And that was the version for Dummies–can you imagine the number of volumes in WordPress for the Reasonably Smart ? And WordPress for Those with Extremely High SAT’s would have to be delivered in boxcars.
It wasn’t just the size of the manual, either. It was the way they describe things, things I didn’t understand, with words that fled to the ragged edges of comprehension. Here’s a example, from page 289: “In the section ‘Adding Custom Fields to Your Template File,’ later in this chapter, I show you the template tag you need to add to your WordPress theme template in order to display this Custom Field, which appears in my post like this: My current Mood is: Happy, shown in Figure 5-3, where the Custom field appears an the end of my post.” WTF?!?
I just want to write about my sheep and my goats.
For a long time, I told myself the best way to learn to do this was just by doing it. So I would write a story or post some pictures, and they would be there for a while and then they’d disappear, or turn upside down. That was okay because nobody was looking at the cite anyway. It was just me playing along frontier of some dark and vast cyber universe. Then, last fall, for some reason I don’t understand, a lot of people I don’t know in real life started visiting the site and signing up to be notified of new postings, which I didn’t know how to do.
So I didn’t do anything. There were two problems, really. First, I wanted the web site to be good–when someone visited it, I wanted the experience to be pleasing. Second, I didn’t know what I was doing.
I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m tired of being a closet blogger.
So this is my coming out post.
There are some things I want to write about that I don’t think are right for FaceBook–they are either too long, or too sad, or too… something. The first is titled “Eating Lulu.” You get the idea.
My plan is to post stories on this site and link to Facebook, if I can figure out how to do that. The subscription doohickey is working now, so if you sign up for notifications, whenever I post a blog, it will come directly to your email. It even has a link for unsubscribing.
There are a lot of things I want to write about and a lot of pictures I want to post. I will have to figure things out as I go. The website is still under construction, but that’s okay. There are three or four pages already working, with half a dozen or so posts, and more to come.
I’m not sure what to do about the hundred or so people who signed up last fall. I have their email addresses, but I don’t know what to do with them. Maybe a road trip.
I feel strangely liberated….
