February 16, 2007
Friday 

It was snowing softly when I went out on Tuesday morning. I wanted to buy West, the new CD by Lucinda Williams, being released that day. I’m not a devotee of country music, and before about a month ago I had never heard of Lucinda Williams, but the college-operated radio station I listen to was heavily promoting the new release, with almost incessant playing of the first track, “Are You All Right?” Its haunting melody and repeated concern for the well-being of someone the singer loves and misses captures exactly the feelings I have for the people in my life whom I’ve been out of touch with, who have put themselves out of touch with me, who have gone away with no word of farewell.

Before I left the house I found out by way of a phone call from our lawn service that we had inadvertently taken ourselves off their snow plowing list. With estimates of the coming storm varying from “2 to 6” to “6 to 10” to “the sky’s the limit,” I was concerned. We have a two-car garage but only a one-car driveway. The driveway is about 70 feet long, the end extending past the garage wall and providing a place for Lynn’s car when she is at home and a narrow turnaround for me. It needs to be clear. (I like it to be shoveled down to the black macadam, but the way it’s shaded by our roofline, that rarely happens in any significant snowfall.)

The snow fell most of Tuesday and on into Wednesday. It was a heavy, clattery snow, much of it probably the variety called “graupel,” a pebbly precipitate that results when a snowflake becomes encased in ice. There was wind, and by midmorning Wednesday only weak sunlight penetrated the cloud cover and the temperature hovered near 10°.

Our driveway was cleared by an energetic and motivated young man named Jamar, who lives down the street and who is earning money to finance an educational trip to China this summer. We bought pasta and popcorn from him at Christmas. He’s a slight boy, only a ninth grader, with a sweet smile and a pleasant manner. He had to work hard, hacking at the ice with a pick to break it up before heaving heavy shovelfuls onto the lawn.

And of course, not long after he’d made a channel something like a cattle chute that we have to maneuver our cars into carefully, the township snowplow came by at about 80 miles per hour and dumped a mound of the icy crap about three feet high right in front of the spot where the driveway joins the street. Add to that the fact that our neighbor across the street insists on parking his car directly across from our driveway, rather than in his driveway or in his garage or in a long section of the curb that doesn’t interfere with anybody’s driveway.

Lhude sing Goddamm indeed.

I didn’t leave the house the rest of Tuesday, nor Wednesday, nor Thursday either. There was more snow, and another pass by the snowplow. Jamar came down late this afternoon and did some more hacking and chipping. The temperature hasn’t risen above freezing for more than an hour or two since Monday, but the steady sunlight today softened the crust somewhat. Nevertheless, he’s certainly earning his trip money as he digs to China.

“Digging to China” is a metaphor for any big, almost impossible job. Today I found myself facing my own big dig. This site is “powered by WordPress,” a content management system that is easy enough for a techno-stupid writer like me to use.

Until something goes wrong.

Last night I upgraded to the latest version of the software, something I think I had to do before next Tuesday, when some changes at my host will make older versions stop working. The upgrade is simple — you just click on a single link and let the automated process take over.

Everything went smoothly. But then this morning I tried to get a “permalink” (the web address that a piece will always have as long as it remains on the system) to send to a friend who, I learned, is acquainted with the subject of a December piece. Nothing but the beautiful blue 404 “you’ve hit a rip in the tent” screen. Every single piece except for the current front page post was missing. Oh, the data was there, wherever WordPress stashes the data, because I could see it in the editing screen, but I couldn’t publish it.

It took all day to resolve the problem. Generous people who know what they’re doing tried to help me by e-mail. One problem with that is that my level of understanding of the technical aspects of coding my words for presentation to readers is, at best, rudimentary.

Finally, from a suggestion I read on a forum I’ll never find again, I decided to make a change in the way the software builds the permalinks. (That sentence is the most technical I can write and represents the limit of my expertise.) Suddenly, everything is working again.

What this means, however, is that I will have to go back and redo all of the internal links on all of my pages, about 300 pages with sometimes two or three links in all.

I was tense and distracted all day. I kept reminding myself that I am warm, well-fed, and with little actual need to go anywhere, that I can afford to pay someone to clear my driveway, and that I am not sitting on I-78 or the tarmac at an airport for ten or twelve hours.

I’ve already started the reconstruction. I’ve re-read pieces I haven’t seen in a while and been able to fix some typos and some inelegancies of expression. The job is time-consuming and can become tedious, but, considering everything else, my dig to China will be not unpleasant.