Is this work?

Kinda lazy day. Only kinda.

I got up early-ish in the morning, made a double Nespresso (two pods one after the other), and started working on my blog migration. You see, the text of the blog has moved over to WP, but the images haven’t really. As of right now, they are all still pointing at the doomed Typepad site, which is currently the only repository of information tying each photo to the post where it appears.

This migration is supposed to have happened more seamlessly, and possibly is a result of bandwidth demands on Typepad’s servers as an unknown number of other folks like me try to download everything in a span of originally 35 days. Now 13 days.

Despite not being at all monetized, I shelled out for the WordPress Business Plan so I would not be alone and have to figure out how to work it under time pressure and while out of the country. Now I am negatively monetized, and I am not sorry. I have access to their good tech support. I will be the opposite of sorry if they manage to save (rescue, but also download) my media library and links.

Thanks to the Business Plan, for the time being, I have been helped first by being able to access an unusually informative assist chatbot and eventually, when my troubles exhausted the fancy troubleshooting manual that is the essence of a chatbot, by a very friendly and supportive human named Arun, who said kind things to me that made me feel like I deserved help because after all I have “nearly two decades of blogging” to be proud of.

And here I was feeling apologetic because my ginormous export file is so big it’s gumming up the works.

Thanks, Arun. (Although I now am also reeling in the years. I once blogged a newborn baby who is now a college freshman.)

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So that was a big chunk of my morning, I sat there, typing on this laptop that Mark got and cloned to his home computer just in case he needed to deal with something other than work, going through Nespresso pods, following tech support instructions, and contemplating whether this was vacation or work.

At first I was kind of grumbly. Here I am on vacation struggling with tech support. It’s like work!

But then I remembered that I do this for free because I like writing stuff. That I have no interest in growing my audience except to get to meet new people I like to exchange comments with, maybe even argue a little, but thoughtful and kind people who are fun to argue with and fun to agree with.

And I realized that being over here, away from our demanding stuff, unable to attend meetings or take the kids to scheduled activities for this short time, is actually one of the things that vacation is for. Giving breathing space to reconnect with, you know, hobbies. Things we do because we like them.

And hobbies do often include frustrating moments that suck up your time in between the fun, flowy parts.

So perhaps the compelled blog migration could not have come at a better time for me. I have the space for it. Let’s hope Arun at WordPress can find the bandwidth for it!

(ADDED LATER. Jamie is trying to do what I am doing. Her new blog is here.)

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In between exchanging messages with WordPress, I helped Leo with his geometry work for a while, and then around when Arun at WordPress said he needed time to dig into my files and he would check back later, we closed the laptop and the books and headed out separately.

I took Simon to the toy store to buy a souvenir plush marmot (we declined to buy the one with a battery that made it whistle) and then to the bookstore to select three Asterix books we don’t have. (I read them aloud to him and translate as we go. Fun for both of us.) Then we went out for pizza and a salade Savoyarde, basically crisp lettuce and tomato buried in slices of hardboiled egg, lardons of bacon, and little squares of local cheese. Sort of a chef salad, really.

Meanwhile, Mark accompanied Leo to the train station, as due diligence requires of parents these days, to meet Leo’s Friend From The Internet. The Friend turned out to be exactly who he said he was, a delightfully nerdy 16yo Swiss kid with blue hair, perfect British-accented English, and a bag full of Swiss snack food for us all to try.

Mark left Leo and his FFTI after he confirmed their mutual harmlessness and met us at the restaurant where he finished off our lunches and my glass of wine. We got ice cream (mine: chocolate with orange peel in) and went back to the rented house where I checked my messages and, finding none, napped on and off for the next five hours or so.

Another activity that is entirely okay on vacation, as I am slowly accepting.

(Mark had to work though. We had ti squeeze dinner in between a meeting that ended at 7 pm and a meeting that started at 9 pm. I was skeptical we could do it, but it worked. Duck!)