Another short night, another five hours of sleep. Five hours was fine when I was 20, but that was... uhhh... 30 years ago. Now I need ten, or at least eight. Yeah, I been taking my melatonin... does that stop working after a while, do you need to increase the dose? I guess that I could find out by doing a search...

Speaking of searches... the other night Karen found our Skip-bo cards, and she wanted to play skip-bo. But the instructions were gone, and neither of us remembered the rules. So I did a search, and there they were! The guy who'd put them up said, "I know that there are a lot of people out there who have lost their instructions..." He was right on the mark with that one. I appreciate the web, although I still sometimes forget how neat it is.

We never did get around to playing, but when we do, we'll know how!

So, I decided to uncomplicate my web life. I dropped out of a coupla rings, rings that I liked but felt guilty about being in. Ones that I really wanted to put more time into, but I felt like I didn't have the time...

But... there was one ring that I really wanted to be in, but I was afraid to apply... y'know, that old feeling..."If you don't ask, you won't be rejected..."

Last night, late, I was checking some sites out, and went to the home page of The Mandelbrot Set and I thought, what the hell, I can accept rejection...

So I applied. And in the mail this morning, I got an acceptance from Ginkgo, a lady whom I've always admired.

And just a few days ago... I said that I was not going to feel committed to doing a daily picture. That thought is out the window. In fact, I'm going to try to become a graphic artist...(that's kind of a joke...)

The Mandelbrot Set is kind of an elitist webring, in that Ginkgo determines who will be in it, and she has pretty high standards. So, here I am in an elitist webring, while I'm an ardent anti-elitist...

How did I get to be an anti-elitist? Long story, but here's the shortened version: I applied to Archipelago, and Lucy rejected me brutally, saying that my writing was pedestrian. Which, by the way, was her right... it's her ring, and her opinion.

But I was inordinately upset. How Dare She! I then proceeded to make a complete ass of myself, showing people that I have a nasty side. I also learned a lesson, I think. Thick skin is much better than thin skin. Especially in the journalling community.

At the end of that embroglio, I apologized to Lucy, and she relented, saying that yes, I could come on board. Well, I had mostly recovered my senses by this time, and told her that it was way too soon, maybe later. The fact was, I was way to embarrassed at the time. I'm afraid that Lucy still has bad feelings about me... but I have none towards her. I'm on her notify list, and I continue to enjoy her entries.

Actually, I think that she learned a lesson, too... she stopped her policy of telling people why they were rejected. Y'see, I was not the only one...

Well, this seems to be a meta entry... one where I speak more about the journalling community than I usually do... and I usually don't at all.

There has been a thread on journal-l over the last week... Gabby proposed the idea in her January first entry that the online journal was dead. Everything was dreck.

This upset a lot of people on the list, and it looked a lot like diary-l for a while there. Diary-l is noted for smash-mouth action on most days... however, diary-l has been very quiet for the last week.

There is, maybe, a conservation law pertaining to online journalling. There is only so much venom to distribute, and if it doesn't go one place it goes another...

Entering into the discussion were hit count sluts and elitist rings/journallers, the pimping of one's own site and other's sites and popularity in general.

And I started wondering about... why I'm not famous, already. Why I'm not popular. I seem to have a rather unique place in the journalling community... everyone has heard of me, but nobody links to me. Well, comparatively, anyway.

Yes, it's a cat. I don't allow cats on my head, only turtles and turkeys...

A while ago, maybe eighteen months, I wrote to a new journaller, telling her that I enjoyed her journal. She wrote back, gushing about how the famous nilknarf had written her... made me feel pretty important for about three seconds. She has since departed the scene, unfortunately.

As so many online journals have...

1009 days. Of dreck and pedestrian writing... (BFG)... for a nice list of journallers who have survived the ravages of time... I'm real close to the bottom on this one.

I generally have about 40 people come here on a daily basis, according to the counters that I've used in the past. For some reason or another, and I'm glad of it, I can't get a simple hit count off of the server logs. Everything that loads counts as a hit, graphics included, so it there are ten pictures on a page, and someone visits that page and lets everything load, that counts as eleven hits. So the numbers don't really mean anything.

And they actually don't. I mean, they would if I was getting paid for them... but I'm not. Yeah, I like to have people reading what I write... especially when they let me know or when they sign the guestbook...

I've got so much to do today, and so little energy. I'm going to call Marva and have coffee, hopefully, and I want to get some more work done around here, too. I need to be able to focus better on the jobs I do, and not just go willy-nilly from one to the other, never finishing anything... the problem is, there is just too damned much to be done. Everywhere I look, I'm reminded of something else that needs doing. Most of it is stuff of an organizational nature... get all of my tools in one place, get the computer desk cleaned and papers put where they should be, move the cabinets from the computer room to the new utility area, move Karen's desk from the utility area to the computer room...

And, between here and the utility room, I can see several other major tasks that need to be done. There is absolutely noplace in this house that I can go without seeing... a job that I have to do.

Damn, it's discouraging!

More later, maybe.