“Where is the YOUTH?”

Well it’s here, as it happens:

Initial photos (from 3 — I think — and 16 respectively) from what will eventually be a heck of a lot of old photos and things of mine on Flickr. But not for a while yet, in full — though do enjoy these two samples.

In celebration of hibernation

Or at least a partial hibernation. The word had been that things were looking really bad for rain in SoCal this weekend, so knowing that work was about to kick in again in full starting on Monday I decided to make sure that I had taken care of all errands I needed to run before it arrived on Friday night, stocking up necessities as well as some long-term purchases, in case it got so wild out there that even poking my nose out of the door would have been a little too much.

Unsurprising, really, that in fact the rain never got as bad as it had been up north — and similarly with the wind as well — but I did enjoy the delicious feeling of security while watching the wind kick up and the rain come down that night from behind glass and in warmth, and from there on in I did pretty much as I’d planned for those two days, avoiding the rain and only stepping out quickly once or twice to get mail and the like. Hibernating, cocooning, withdrawing — call it what you will, it’s one of the things I do best, and I make no apologies for it.

There’s something about making sure you know how to live with yourself — quite literally — that encourages trying to improve what you have to hand. In part it’s what drove the impulse to clean and organize I mentioned a few days back, and this time around it was a combination of enjoying the fruits of said labor, watching movies, cooking a bit and lazing for a while, as well as further explorations of the impulse that constituted my weekend. As mentioned below, LibraryThing was the perfect thing to get fully into these last two days — I’d ordered a barcode scanner that had arrived and gave me the chance to scan in a lot of things pretty quickly, while the act of working through all the books meant some long overdue dusting took place, along with a little reorganization. Actually seeing what it all added up to — I honestly didn’t realize I owned over 1200 books, though I’m sure I had a hunch — made for very good fun. If I can pull that off with the music too, even better!

These are solitary pleasures of course — work for shut-in moments — but I like that they can provide further connections like never before (thus a distinct part of the appeal of LibraryThing is that one can network and compare with others and their collections) rather than just providing a list or database endlessly reworked. Social networking indeed, its capability clearer than ever — one need not be constantly out and about and ‘up’ in order to communicate, and as such the voice-to-the-voiceless (in personal style more than anything else, as someone like Paolo Freire would doubtless note) impulse of the wired world continues to fulfill its promise. Still, it was a weekend of hibernation and reflection in all, a fine thing for a moody weekend.

And back into the grind tomorrow. Well, we’ll see how it goes!