Relative Something

A few highlights from this weekend at the lake with Cyndie and her mom:

• Cyndie surprised us with some letters she recently uncovered in our archives at home while she was looking for something else. There were almost a dozen, still in their stamped envelopes, written to her by her family while Cyndie was going to school in Spain back in 1977. The amount of detail that Marie (unsurprisingly) wrote gave us a fascinating window into that time of our past. Cyndie had grand plans to have a friend join her after the school session ended to travel around Europe, but had to scrap that adventure when she became dangerously ill and had to return home. Apparently it was wicked cold in the Twin Cities that winter, and the high school hockey team Steve played with was having a winning season. Those subjects were among several that received repeated mentions.

• I spent a chunk of time working on a website for my high school class that we will use in promoting our 50th reunion next summer. Using text messaging to communicate ideas and get feedback from my sub-committee back in the Twin Cities, I was able to make good progress on customizing a pre-formatted site from a service into something more aligned with our sensibilities. You know, changing corny into cool. My classmates deserve something that better reflects who we were back in the 1970s, when “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H” were on television. That was back when our generation figured we were going to change the… Never mind.

• Yesterday afternoon, when I found myself getting nowhere in a struggle to outsmart the site’s formatting, I phoned my software-savvy son, Julian, for advice. We linked up so he could see my screen, allowing him to guide my explorations as we unraveled how the available features could be coped with to achieve my goals. It seemed promising when he discovered I could open a view of the source code. Using his code-writing skills, he would text me a block of code to insert into my draft. It is such a thrill when progress is made. I laughed out loud over the fact that we were pulling off our successes with him at home in the Cities, and me on a laptop in the sunroom at the lake. Alas, in the end, I had to settle for a compromise from my ideal when it became obvious that the host software was overriding our customizations at a certain point.

Now that I think on it, this isn’t much different than the battles I wage against the regular “upgrades” to my WordPress platform that are intended to make it easier to use but often end up preventing me from executing the preferred formatting I’ve been using for years. It’s tough being a dinosaur in today’s world.

[insert Tyrannosaurus rex roar here]

.

.