So, what the hell, with a new design, why not shake things up a little bit?

I heard tell from one of my friends this evening that one of said friend's co-workers got caught having porn shipped to him at work. Now, there's something to be said for at least aspiring to get up from the bottom of the food chain. Come on, having porn mags shipped to you at work? You've gotta be kidding me. In today's environment, that's begging for a lawsuit.

Repeat after me: people never cease to amaze me. Really, they don't. I wake up every morning and I actually wonder what in the world my fellow carbon-based life forms are gonna come up with to amuse me today. They never fail to impress me. The previous paragraph is my example for today.

Well, the redesign's up. Mostly. I lack a few things getting done, such as tweaking the guestbook (which is always the last to be updated). Greymatter is about 95% set up and is waiting in the background for one last thing…I have to figure out how to hack in my old entries so that all of my journal entries will function under greymatter. I'm not terribly keen on having to maintain six months' worth of my really long entries by hand every time that I want to do a page redesign.

The first line from one of my favorite books—Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Oddly appropriate: a book that starts with a young, confused woman who flees everything she knows—and ends with a grand old building in flames.

My previous entry about this will eventually scroll. For when that happens, here are three pictures:

Fire destroys Bauxite High School
by domesticat. Attempts to save Bauxite High School building
by domesticat. Bauxite High School building in flames
by domesticat.

Let me tell you what it was like to grow up in this place: Bauxite, currently population ~400. So named for the bauxite ore that was available in the area. It became a boom town in World War II. Bauxite, you may remember, is the ore from which aluminum is made—aluminum that was made into lightweight planes that helped win that war.

Let me sing a requiem for a place I loved and hated; hated for its pain and loved for its family memories.

Bauxite High School building in flames
by domesticat.

second photo, thirdphoto

This was the main building for a very small school. Given that my graduating class had 33 people in it, I think you can quickly understand that what you're seeing is the destruction of an entire school.

Sayonara, you old building, steeped with memories. You went down with quite a fight, it seems. There is, apparently, more truth than I expected in the statement "You can't go home again."

Wow. Merry Christmas to me—I just finished Ender's Game, a signed copy of which was Andy's Christmas present to me. Andy says that science fiction and mainstream literature are not quite so far apart as my classical education has drilled into me. Science fiction, he claims, is capable of providing the same depth of contemplative thought as any of the more widely-acclaimed "literature" that I read, without some of the mind-wrenching difficulty so often encountered in classical literature.Do I agree with him?

Sometimes decisions come to you quickly, in waves of intuition that you know are correct and require no reconsideration. Sometimes they take years of occasionally-returning thoughts before a final realization is made. Sometimes they languish for years, waiting for an impetus, a catalyst.

One such catalyst came for me today.

Jeff doesn't always like it that I write a journal for an audience. I do try to respect his privacy, but I don't always manage it to the level that he would like. It's all too easy sometimes to forget that things that are important to me are important to him too—but may not be things that he wants to share with the world.One of the things we've talked about that falls into a gray area is our discussion about whether or not to have children. I know that I have much more strong feelings on the subject than Jeff does or ever will—partly because I'm the female in this relationship, and thus a lot of the burden would fall on me.