Refocusing

I seem to be in a constant state of refocusing what I spend my time doing. I think about the kinds of sites that used to occupy the right side of this screen and what is now there and it is quite jarring. The latest changes are the demise of my Facebook and Flickr accounts over the last week. I've not logged into our Flickr account once in 2012, and Facebook just seems to be cluttered up with less signal and more noise from "friends" I've not laid eyes on in 30 years or more, and with whom I have less in common than the illegal immigrants living upstairs. Every attempt to inject some sort of relevance was unsuccessful and when you add in the constant Big-Brother-Is-Watching creepiness that seems coded into all things Facebookian, and the new interface that seems to insure that if anyone posts something truly important, Facebook will make every effort to hide it in favor of someone's bowel movement narrative, and, well, I'm done.

Flickr was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time, but instead became and endless time suck that really added nothing to my life. Growing up in the 1970's, one of the most dreaded things in existence was the Vacation Slide Show where a host would force his (invariably it was a  male who performed this particular torture) guests to sit in a dark room while he projected blurry, badly composed shots of the family's latest "Ha ha we went someplace awesome while you mortals were stuck here working" brag-cation. As perverse and anti-social as that was, Flickr takes it to a whole new level of pathology by inducing me to inflict the torture on myself through its creepy "someone commented on your photo so the polite thing to is to make them your "friend" and go look at their photos and make comments and you really really REALLY want to do the polite thing" passive-aggressive meme. No thanks.

We spent yesterday (our only day off together in the month of February thanks to stupid library people) visiting with my parents in their snowbird nest over on the other side of Florida. When we first got there, it looked like the weather was going to make it a dreary visit, but the sky cleared, the temp ran up to around 80 degrees, and we ended up getting in a couple bike rides, some music, dinner, Dairy Queen and a movie/how-do-we-work-this-DVD-thing teachable moment. (And people wonder why I don't set my parents up on the internet....)

Well, almost time to leave for another exciting day of shelving books and dealing with stupid people.