“I don’t like to doze by the fire,” says Jo Marsh in Lousia May Alcott’s Little Women. “I like adventures, and I’m going to find some.”
I was ten when I read those words, and I’ve been doing my best to live up to Jo’s philosophy ever since. Mostly, it’s been grand. However, as you’ve no doubt discovered, you don’t always get to choose your adventures. Some reach out of nowhere, grab you by the ankle, refuse to let go, and — like Jacob’s angel in the Book of Genesis — force you to wrestle with them until light dawns.
I’ve been tussling with one such adventure lately: the angel/demon of modern technology. Three months ago, the company hosting my website and blog casually mentioned they’d decided to shut down that side of their business. Just a quick heads-up that at an unspecified but horrifyingly close date, they would be erasing everything I’ve posted on their site since 2011: 612 blog posts, countless snippets of travel advice, my readers’ insightful and entertaining comments, the whole kit and caboodle.
Don’t panic, I told myself. Breathe! Cope!
I consulted savvy humans and chatbots Claude and Gemini. The prevailing wisdom suggested hiring a specialist to manage the migration, which would cost thousands. Transferring and reformatting the blog posts might run $200 apiece. Did I mention there were 612 of them?
“That would have cost …” tapping of keys “… $122,400,” said Amrit, the gifted techie who, for a modest hourly rate, has been helping me transfer my text and photos to their new home.
“A tad more than I’d hoped to spend,” I replied.
Amrit works out of a neighborhood tech support shop and seems to find my emergency rescue operation an entertaining little challenge. For weeks he’s been saying things like, “Sure, we can make that happen. All we need to do is <!DOCTYPE html> <html><body> <h2>Demo JavaScript in Body</h2> <p id=”demo”>A Paragraph.</p> <button type=”button” onclick=”myFunction()”>Try it</button> <script> function myFunction() { document.getElementById(“demo”).innerHTML = “Paragraph changed.”;}</script></body></html>.”
I always nod as if I understand completely and then go back to doing my part: fixing formatting discombobulated by the transfer. Each post arrived with the photos clustered together at the top like worried sheep and sporadic line breaks disrupting the text like a drunk falling down a flight of stairs. So far I’ve untangled the posts going back to October 2025. So only 584 left to go.
I’ve revamped the content and graphics on every page of the website — a crash course in navigating my new host’s very different technology. Basically I’ve been devoting every spare minute to the project for months. This week, with light finally appearing at the end of the tunnel, I suggested to Rich that we take a short getaway to the nearby city of Santa Rosa, with stops along the way to check off a few things on our to-do list.
We drove north Wednesday morning, taking a brief detour to turn in our primary ballots at the Civic Center. Voting always makes me think of my grandmother and the thrill she felt stepping into a polling place for the first time in 1920, thanks to 72 years of hard work by uppity women. As Thomas Jefferson said, “We do not have a government by the majority. We have a government by the majority who participate.”
These days I’m doing my best to be a good citizen — and a good senior citizen. I don’t want to stumble heedlessly into the future, reeling with surprise at each untoward event that overtakes me. To the greatest extent possible, I want to stroll through the years ahead with grace and a twinkle in my eye. And that’s going to take some planning. Rich has been researching useful support services that will let us age in place, and this month he discovered something called a daily money manager.
Now, you may be blessed with family members living nearby who have good sense, kind hearts, sophisticated financial skills, and plenty of extra time each week to spend untangling your muddled paperwork. We are not. So we were intrigued by the idea that a daily money manager might someday step in to make sure our automatic bill payments go through, library fines get cleared, and suspicious activities on our credit cards are investigated. But who do you trust to do that? And who is going to keep an eye on them?
When Rich found the American Association of Daily Money Managers we started checking out local members. One had an office along our route, and we’d made an appointment to drop in for a chat.
She explained they provide financial services for those incapable of managing their own affairs or sensible enough to prefer offloading pesky chores to free up time for other pursuits. She outlined the vast array of financial services and heartwarming personal attention she was prepared to provide at a rate of $225/hour. There was more, but I got distracted by this coaster sitting on her desk.
And they say mortality humor is a dying art. This was right up there with Oscar Wilde’s last words: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go.” And comedian Bob Monkhouse’s line, “I want to die like my father, peacefully in his sleep, not screaming and terrified, like his passengers.” These days, as Ellie remarks in the video game The Last of Us, “People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.”
Paranormal fiction author Rose Pressey wrote, “If you’ve got it, haunt it.” Which brings us to my favorite ghost-ridden building — and our next stop — Hotel La Rose in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square.
Built in 1907 of brooding grey stone, decorated in period gloom, La Rose is rife with legends about a family’s grisly massacre in Room 42, or possibly Room 24, depending on who’s telling the tale. (We suspect the ghosts may be dyslexic.)
This was our fourth stay, but disappointingly, we’ve never seen the woman in white passing through doors or Daniel, the little boy said to haunt the elevator. Checking in, I asked the clerk if she’d experienced anything … strange.
“No,” she said. “But I’ve only been here a year. The night clerk has been here 20 years, and she sees the ghosts. And talks to them.” Yes, the legends live on.
Rich and I spent the evening at a street fair, dined at our favorite Italian taverna, enjoyed a phantom-free night at La Rose, and spent the morning treasure-hunting in antique stores. I returned home rested, refreshed, and ready to launch this new website.
(Drumroll, please.) Welcome to my blog 2.0.
You’ll notice differences in style and navigation. It’s a work in progress, and I hope you’ll share feedback in the comments section below. The first time you comment, be prepared to enter your email. (Don’t want to leave it? Make one up! It’s just meant to show you’re human, so I can avoid being flooded with spam that’s a time-consuming nuisance to remove.) After that, you’re automatically cleared to go directly to writing your comments.
Whew! I still can’t believe we pulled it off. Today Amrit is basking in the glow of achieving a tech miracle. I’m overjoyed at preserving fifteen years of work. And Rich is ecstatic that we saved more than $122,000 on the blog section alone. How sweet it is.
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