I’m thinking that maybe I won’t even bother trying to restore my site here. They didn’t have a backup, so there’s nothing newer out there than what I’ve got on my home computer. And I don’t really want to learn how to restore a gzip’d file, and go through all the work of restoring everything, when I’m almost certainly going to have to do it all over again in a bit.
The only problem with that is that we’re in a bit of a tight/overextended spot at the moment, so I’m not too sure about the feasibility of moving for at least another week. Thus, in typical fashion, I’m proceeding by doing nothing.
Besides, I still feel like I’m in limbo. We had another snow day today; the farthest I’ve gotten out of the house is down to the mailbox to send a thank-you card to my grandmother. It felt like walking through a slushie: the snow is several inches deep in our yard, but thoroughly wet. Quite nasty. I’m accustomed to snow that appears and disappears over the course of a single day, maybe two; this is disconcerting.
And at the same time, I want to reconsider the structure of my site. It’s evolved over the last couple of years into something…I just don’t know if it’s what I really want, or what makes sense. I also want to put more emphasis on non-blog projects, especially photos; maybe some more code things?
I don’t think I’ll be reinstalling WordPress, either. For all that I’m in favor of diversity in software, it just isn’t as robust as Movable Type: much harder to customize. Although I suppose it was nice, the one time I tried it, to be able to actually understand the source code!
Last night, I was in a blue mood, and C was out for a bit; I almost just went to bed, but then decided instead to go run around in the snow. I’m very glad I did. It was amazing. The snow came up to the middle of my calf (maybe 10 inches) in most of the yard, and I could even feel that I was standing on top of some of the older snow, not all the way on the ground. The raised beds were just rounded humps in the snow.
It had switched to rain, an icy pellet-like rain, but the snow hadn’t gotten that slushy feel to it yet, and was still crisp from a whole day of light, fluffy snowfall. One of the drains for the gutter had an enormous icicle coming out of it, with water dripping off like a stalagtite. The small branches of the aspens, the rose bush, the grapevine in the chainlink fence, and my little bit of metal art in the garden were all covered with ice, a thin clear coating. I guess we were lucky, since that condition reminded me very much of the “great freeze of ’96,” when trees all over the area broke under the strain of ice, and this time, no such problems, at least not here.
I tried making a snow angel, something I’d only ever seen in movies, and was spectacularly unsuccessful. The snow was too crisp and dense for my arms to move easily, and I got quite wet, too. But all in all, I’m glad I took that run-around. The exercise, and the silliness of playing in the snow, raised my spirits.
The snow will be gone in a few days, but this one will be something to remember. (Plus I have lots of pictures!)
Later: since one of the things I lost with the crash was a very long article about my experiences of this last year (anybody got a cached copy?!), it seems only appropriate to post a page of all the site designs I had in 2003. [I’ll put this back eventually, I promise.]