2004-07-13 
 

happy accidets

I was trying to be clever last night as I went about beginning an update to this site and irony got the best of me. The catalyst for the update was the RainbowMikey banner which was one of the longest "temporary" banners in all blogdom. While I did manage to update the banner to the new one you see above, Rainbow Mikey (and the page format he lived on) went and took over all my archives when I hit the wrong update button. I didn't lose any entries, but I lost any of the different ways the pages actually looked. (which, for me, showed an evolution of myself as a blogger.)

Fortunately for me, I've got most of them saved on disk and therefore can still view the evolution of this site should I become nostalgic. Unfortunately for you, I'm rather lazy...er...I mean - of course - that I have a limited bandwidth allowance each month and won't be able to copy all the old archives back over very easily.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the bannerswap. That particular picture of G and myself always makes me smile because we look (and were) happy to the point of giddiness and feeling rather elvish. Not the Elves you may know from Tolkien or other mythologies, but a very real Mikey Elf...but that's another story for another time. What you don't see (out of frame) is the little pot of fondue that we'd just gorged ourselves on. The various gifts scattered about the cozy little room. Nor would you know, without me telling you here, that it's Valentine's day. A holiday that I used to greet with speeches about enforced consumerism and the Hallmarkification of America. But on this day, G and I gave up our inner gothchildren and made the weekend completely our own. Which was, as I mentioned, a very Elvish thing to do, and a story for another...oh ok, I guess it's another time now.

There's a picture that was taken back when Dude and I still had single digit ages. We're on a family trip hiking somewhere in Austria. Someone, probably Lotte or Mom, gave us pumpkin leaf hats and snapped a picture. I used to hate that picture, because as a vain child I thought Dude was WAY cuter than me. Which he was, but that's not the point. The point is that as the years went by, I started to like the picture more and more. Partially because I always find myself cuter in retrospect, but mostly because it was one of those pictures that gets blown up, framed and shared with various family members. Someone commented once that we looked like little elves and that stuck with me. Somewhere in my midteens, I came upon the picture, and after staring at it for a while said to myself, "Yep, we're two little elves all right. What a great picture!"

From that moment onward...and perhaps subconsciously in years before, I connected Elves to myself and especially with my experiences in nature.

A MikeyElf believes in the magic of the woods. He fights on the side of good. He can feel the earth breath beneath him. He has a strong connection to unfettered water. He's a bit of a firebug, but never an arsonist. He knows that someday the wind will take him away to a higher place. He's often mischievous, but hopefully never disrespectful. He's very mischievous actually...did I mention mischief? But he never intends to cause anyone pain. In fact he sometimes is allowed to use his magic to make other people smile and those are some of his favorite times....because at heart he's still a little kid in the single digits who believes that the world has a purpose and that the purpose is good.

There's more of course. On nights like tonight I could probably continue to write an entry for hours, but I'm going to stop now. I'm allowing the Gnome side of myself rule for a while and get some stuff done. But I won't publish this tonight (Sunday) I'm going to save the new banner, and this entry as a draft and not publish it until tomorrow night. Partially because I already did an entry today that I don't want to push down yet, but also because I know nights like this don't come along very often. Tomorrow will probably find me stretched for time yet again and unable to update. So I'm playing a bit of a trick with time, which is actually very Elvish after all.

The fact that I'm part Gnome does explain how an Elf ended up living in the city and loving computers, but the history of the MikeyGnome - and an explanation of today's title - will have to wait for another day. I really do have some offline writing I need to do.

* posted by me at 12:25 AM

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