Obviously, I’ve upgraded.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me, re: Pivot, was when the latest version’s new WYSIWYG editor “scrunched” all the text in posts. Gone were my deliciously clean paragraph breaks. Gone! And what was the response in their support forum?
“It’s a feature, not a bug,” essentially. What they said in response to those who raised the issue was that it never should have worked like that in the first place – “worked like that” meaning “looked decent,” apparently – and so they weren’t terribly interested in fixing it. At least, that’s how it came off to me.
Couple that with the fact that the Pivot-to-Wordpress script reached version 2.0 and in a test run it processed everything cleanly without the funky line-breaks from the time before? Yeah. I was sold.
So now I’m on WordPress. And I’m going to convert Pigs Are Good People shortly. There are a few little weird things (it adds a “below the fold” type “read the rest of…” link to everything, but that may be an artifact of the converter script), but overall I am very pleased.
Clearly, I am still sorting out the theme. I’m going to end up just making one of my own, probably, all black and dull like before, but hey. It’s simple, and I’m a creature of habit.
This morning I stopped at the gas station on the way to work to pick up a soda and a sandwich. It was bitter cold, rain coming down hard and the wind whipping around. As I walked out of the BP, a wave of memory hit me smack in the face: a strong smell of diesel fuel carried on the cold, wet wind. As that smell hit me, and the frigid air blasted me with water, I was instantly back in Russia in 1994/1995.
The apartment block where my host family lived was entered from the rear, the main doors being off a small courtyard designed as a common space between four apartment blocks. To get from the "front" entrance to the street, we would walk out the doors, through the courtyard and down a little alleyway that opened onto the sidewalk. There was a cart vendor who always set up shop in the mornings in that alleyway, catching everyone in the building as they left for the day. Anna (our host mother) would buy these little green packs of brown cigarettes – 120′s marketed to women, a sort of Russian equivalent of Virginia Slims – and smoke one with us before we crossed the street and entered the metro station. Her husband, Sergei, pretended to believe that she had quit several months earlier. We would talk about the coming day and Anna would chat with the vendor and translate small-talk for us and then we would step out of the alleyway into the broad avenue that separated us from the subway station.
Moscow is, despite not really having streets for it, a town that drives just as much as it rides the metro. It’s a lot like New York in that respect – people always say you don’t need a car in New York, but there sure are a lot of them anyway. The streets are always packed in Moscow, everyone taking the white and yellow lines as gentle suggestions more than hard and fast rules. Every morning, when we stepped out of that alleyway, the wind that whipped between the rows of tall blocks of apartments would grab us and pull, shove ice right up our noses, the air always wet with snow and heavy with the smell of diesel fuel. It would just shoot up my nostrils and right to my brain, and it was the same every morning.
So when that happened at the BP today, I stopped in the middle of the parking lot and just stood there and sucked it in, breathed deep and let it rain right down on me because for a few moments it was ten years ago and I was in Russia again. I’ve always said I wanted to go back some day, and honestly, this morning, it felt like I had.
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If you’re following the saga of one of my D&D characters, a new entry is up over at Pigs Are Good People. It’s titled "Three Slaads, Two Dragons and One Long Walk," and it summarizes the last two sessions. With NaNoWriMo over for another year, I’ll hopefully be a little quicker on the draw with these updates in future.
Speaking of NaNoWriMo, in each of the places on iBiblio where I’ve tucked away my NaNovels (2003, 2004, 2005) I have posted a page that describes them and provides a link to the PDF version of each.
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