Sometimes we do things in the name of keeping ourselves sane and call it a little reward. (Really, we are keeping ourselves insane by indulging obsessive-compulsive behavior, but let's not split hairs.) Usually that little tickle at the back of my head can be soothed by going out and buying a stack of books or CDs. (I work just a couple of blocks from both a Barnes & Noble and a Tower Records, which is very dangerous in this regard—but then again, who in Manhattan can't say the same thing?) The latest tickle, though, required some more vigorous scratching. It happens once every year or so.
I've redesigned my Web site.
I've been working on this, little by little, stage by stage, for several weeks. Now it's pretty much done. I've even indulged that geekiest of yearnings and created styles for my LiveJournal so it blends in seamlessly with the rest of my site. I'm unaccountably happy with the result, and now I'm done.
Almost.
There are some folks who've been following my Web site since it debuted almost five years ago, and occasionally one of them sends me an email reminiscing about the old classic look of the site. (That was way back when funky tiling background images were still cool—remember that? Since I dealt with ex-Mormon issues on my site, I used a coffee-bean background.) I thought I would establish an area called the Museum—where old fans could drop by and look at some pages dressed up in the former "looks" of my site. Since there have been four or five different looks, I was planning to create four or five different galleries.
Happily, a few days ago, I dug through my stacks of old Zip disks, looking for the one on which I'd archived my old Web sites. I dug, and dug, and dug. After half an hour of popping disks into the drive, I realized that my Zip drive is now randomly scrambling the contents of about half the disks it reads.
The Museum ain't never gonna happen. My archives are scrambled. My obsessive-compulsive brain is having a hell of time assimilating this.
Maybe a moment of silence will help. Join me.
