Starting a Blog

If you haven’t noticed already, I’m new to this whole blogging thing. As I get older, I find that certain aspects of technology are passing me by; I guess that’s how it happens when you become a gentleman of mature years. I recall some of the phone calls I used to have providing basic tech support to my father when he started using his laptop:

“Son, I want to move some stuff I wrote to another place; how do I do that?”

“What is it you are trying to copy?”

“Well, I have two pages open, and I want to take stuff from one and put it into the other.”

“Are you using Word?”

“Maybe its some kind of program where you can type stuff.”

“I’m guessing its Word. Ok, so you have two pages open. Just highlight the text you want to transfer.”

“Highlight the text?”

“Yes.”

“How do you do that?”

“Hold down the left mouse button and move the cursor over the stuff you wrote that you want to move.”

(Long pause) “Move the cursor?”

“Yes, the little bar that appears at the beginning of the line.”

“OK. Hey, now its all shaded blue.”

“That would be highlighting, Dad.”

“You know, you always had a problem with sarcasm.”

“This is not the time to discuss my personal failings, Father.” (I’d switch from “dad” to “father” when I was getting a little exasperated, so he had me there.) “Just hit control and C to copy it.”

“Control C? At the same time?”

“You have no idea how to copy something on the computer, do you, Father?”

“Are you suggesting I don’t know how to copy things?”

“OK, now I know you don’t know. Did it ever occur to you to read the manual or hit the help button before you call with these questions?”

“Listen, asshole, this is your aged father looking for a little guidance; don’t get angry.”

And things would go downhill from there. Now I’m experiencing some instant karma; as Mel Brooks said, “We mock what we will become.” So, I’m learning how to blog a little at a time. I started on Blogger when I was in Japan. On the positive side, Blogger is pretty simple, but it’s also clunky and difficult to format, and I struggled at times to make it work. WordPress is much more versatile, but its also more complex and hard to learn with its thousand bewildering options. I’ll eventually get it down, but bear with me, gentle reader. In any case, I’ve decided to transfer my Japan blog to this platform, just in case Google decides to stop supporting Blogger; plus, they folded up like a cheap card table on renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America; screw them and the horse they rode in on. So, if you are reading this and wondering why the Japan posts are here now, you have your answer.