Twenty years, give or take.

White tiles spell out the word “TWENTY” twice, once right aligned and straight, once left alagned with the W slightly askew
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I’ve mostly forgotten about this site, even though I keep paying for it every year. Which means this very website that your eyeballs are resting on right this minute has turned 20. I’ve definitely not used it to its potential, though that’s probably because I’m not that interesting 😉 I started off using Greymatter as my blogging platform, then grudgingly made my way onto WordPress, where I’ve been for over a decade now. I can’t really recall what life was like twenty years ago.

You *might* know, if you’ve been around as long as me, that I bought my first domain the night I finished my last college class (no idea what class that was, though it was probably math, because for some reason that class was always the last to end each semester). It was so late that it ended up being the next day by the time I completed the purchase (the internet was just a little slower in the early 2000s). I’ll never forget which day I have to renew my domain because it turned out it’s my parents’ anniversary and the birthday of a couple of friends though that was completely unplanned. I had no idea what day it was at the time.

Back then we were still using forums and telnet. I learned HTML because I clicked a button that turned my WYSIWYG site (theglobe.net represent, yeah!) into a site I had to code. And now everything’s back to blocks instead of code anyway. Plus ça change, eh?

This site is just barely older than my job, and only a few years older than my NaNoWriMo career. I feel like life before the website was more exciting than the time that came after. Sure, since then I’ve bought a car and a house and gotten married (want to watch so-bad-they’re-funny movies with my hubby Mister Fox Guy?) and wrote upwards of 900,000 words that are probably destined to remain unpublished, but those seem like little things in the grand scheme of the world. Eh, I’m content to be a little cog. In theory I have not caught COVID yet, though I’ve had a moment when I thought I’d messed up two years of social distancing and masking (masks work, people, why is this so hard to deal with?). The world is changed, sayeth Galadriel, speaking of another thing that’s had its twentieth anniversary.

I used to use Blogger like I use Twitter now (feel free to browse the archives if you want to, lol) so maybe I’ll come back here more often if my preferred method of shouting into the void becomes a hellhole due to corporate greed. Who knows what the future holds? If this website is any indication, it’s more of the same. Take care of yourselves, read more books, and do what brings you joy.

10 years

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etoiline.com is officially ten years old today. Around midnight, April 24, 2002, I finally completed the transaction for the domain and started working on the website. I was so into it that I forgot the fact that it would renew each year on my parents’ anniversary.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad! I love you so much and I’m so glad you’re still together.
Back then, I’d had my last final (probably math or something else engineering related) and most likely track practice (we were trying to qualify for Nationals, which didn’t end up working out, alas) and then I got back to the dorm. I realized that I didn’t have much to do for the next week or so (I got to stay in the dorm a little longer than most since I was a senior and still participating in sports) and I’d wanted to buy a domain for a while, so lo, I did.
The word ‘etoiline’ comes from a story I wrote while I was in high school. Yes, it’s a derivative of the French word for star. The story is probably a trunk novel  by now, but it’s still got a lot of good stuff in it, and I’m sure I’ll be mining it for years to come. One of these days I’ll get around to purchasing a domain with my name in it. But I’m not a famous author yet. I doubt anyone is really looking for me that hard.
I don’t have the first entries from that blog easily available. I was using a different blogging platform at the time, and though the entries are saved, I have no idea where they are. I think they were little things like “Hello, world” and “I read this book today.” The blog hasn’t evolved much 😉
I wanted to a) have a new layout for the site and b) write you a short story, but I’m not the speediest web designer and whenever I try to write short stories they end up being pretty long. So you’ll just have to wait for the new layout and pester me for the next story. Any blog topic ideas are welcome.
Odd to think that it’s been ten years. Ten years since I finished my last college course, as well. How time flies.
Happy birthday to Kate and Gordon, too.
See you at the St. Charles Artwalk this weekend? I hope so. Come keep me company and see great art.

9 times

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I’ve renewed the domain for etoiline.com 9 times as of yesterday. That’s scary close to 10, which means I’ll have been blogging intermittently for a decade next year. Wow. Guess I should update more often, eh? And my parents have been married for 35 years, which is spectacular and sweet. I love you both.

Hope you all had a happy Easter. Things are crazy around here, what with the tornado hitting the airport and friends and family on their way to weddings. Next weekend is the St.Charles Artwalk (see both my parents’ work!), as well as the STL Bookfair, so you’ve got plenty to keep you busy.

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cloudy

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wordle-tagcloud-sm.jpg
The title describes the day as well as the picture. Those are my del.icio.us tags. Get your own pretty tag cloud from your del.icio.us tags or your own text at http://wordle.net/create 🙂 By way of Bear’s LJ.
Hope we get to play tonight. This is, of course, the only night with predicted rain. Lovely.

Celebrate (lots)

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This is a big day.
Happy Anniversary to my parents. I’m so proud of you for staying together and staying in love. <3 <3 <3
Happy Birthday to Kate and Gordon! 🙂 *party*
And this website turns six. Six years I’ve been doing this. Six years of very infrequent blogging and not so often with the layout changes…
I really should have gotten a new layout up. I’ve got one almost ready, but I’ve been a bit stymied by the changes MT4 made to their default code, so it’s…not…quite…there yet. Soon.
Still writing, still reading, still dreaming. Have a great day, folks.

off the edge of the map

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Here there be monsters…
So here you go. After nearly a year, a new layout. Pirates, again. Sorry for the long wait. Things in RL decided to be more important. Besides, I really liked the old layout. This one isn’t so fancy, but I had fun with it.
Tonight I get to see PotC 3 with Leah at 9:30. Yay for advance showings! Will let you know all about it tomorrow.
Boo for my poor little iBook which is currently (hoepfully) on its way to the Apple Depot to get a new logic board. Maybe. It has been acting really funny, but of course it acts fine for the people at the Apple Store. I actually stopped in twice, and neither time did the laptop go wonky. I made them take it anyway. It’s still under warranty, after all. Here’s hoping it doesn’t get erased. At least I have my story file.

AttS is five

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Yes, I’m late on posting. But lest you thought I’d forgotten what a momentous day it is today, I thought I should put something up…
It’s Kate’s (friend) and Gordon’s (coworker) and Leah’s boyfriend Peter’s (you need more clarification?!) birthday today. (triple yay!)
My parents have been married for 31 years. (double yay!)
This website has been live for 5 years. (yay!)
Anything else I’ve forgotten? Aside from the writer’s meetup tonight…
Hard to believe I’ve been writing on this thing for five years. Just like it’s hard to believe that a) it’s been five years since I rocked it at the UAA championships in GA and b) I was actually *in* GA this past weekend. I’m not completely recovered, but I do have a nice tan 😉
I promise you that there will be a new layout this year. Yes, I have had the same Pirates 2 layout since the movie came out last year, and *of course* I know that the 3rd comes out next month. I actually have three layouts started, just not finished. I’ll get one up soon. Possibly after neurobio ends.
Thanks for reading. Let’s see how long I can stick it out.

headache

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Alrighty then. Etoiline is now hosted at Site5.com. Seems like a great deal, and everything seems to be working on their end. On MY end, however…this is mainly a test post to see if MT is acting up, because the other big database hog on my site is my gallery, which is most vociferously protesting working. Unfortunately before I changed DNS settings, I didn’t look at the gallery installation and turn something off I should have before I ported it over. And I can’t change it without changing the DNS settings back, but when I tried to do that earlier, the domain didn’t resolve, when putting it at the new site took rather little time…maybe I’m just too impatient.
I just want to do a clean install of the whole thing, but I really don’t want to have to relabel everything…

tech support

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So yesterday we finally got hi-speed internet for the apartment. Joy. But it certainly wasn’t without its hassles.
First, we ordered it last week and never got a tracking number for the modem. Since our service was confirmed to be activated yesterday, I started looking at my account over the weekend to see if I could find out what was wrong. I finally realized monday night that for some reason the shipping address, which I’m pretty sure I specified as being the same as the billing address, only had our apartment number and not the street address. I called AT&T tuesday to see what could be done, and see if they had a tracking number for me. Lo and behold it was wrong there too, and of course they had already shipped it (which is good, I suppose, but don’t you think someone would have noticed that it had no street number?)

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