Our household started the day a bit later than we had intended, but it turned out to be a delightful day despite only getting to half the events we had hoped to attend. The first one started at 9-ish, as in the a.m., at 9,000 feet. A mountain brunch. Actually Summerhaven, the mountain town where we were meeting friends for a birthday brunch, is only 8,200 ft. in elevation. But still that is quite a bit higher than Tucson at 2,650 ft. And we got there quite a bit later than 9-ish, but we were not the last to arrive.
The scenery on the way up was stunning, as always.
This is such an absolutely complex and varied ecological area. For info to beef up your geological perspective, I recommend this publication. It has a bunch of information you can use to identify geological formations at some of the well designed pull off Scenic Vistas along the way. (We were reminiscing today about how the Catalina Highway to the top of Mount Lemmon has changed from road to real highway.)
The mountains around here are called Sky Islands. To find out about the biology and biota of these islands with sea of desert all around check out the Sky Island Alliance. And if you want to find out more about connecting the islands so wildlife can migrate (No border fences!) check out the info about wildlife corridor design.
Now back to the travelogue.
The ability to experience such diverse climate, flora, and fauna in a drive up the mountain range that borders northern Tucson and takes only an hour is one of the fortunes given to you with residence in Tucson.
When I was married in the Summer of 1989 on the top of Mount Lemmon, the highest peak in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the record high temperatures in the Tucson Basin were above the 110°F mark. It was in the 80s in Lemmon Meadow where we held the ceremony and camp-o-rama reception.
So long ago, geesh, I still drank Budweiser… why I was holding a Bud when we had a keg of Harp and vat of chilled Moet Chandon I still do not know.
Mount Lemmon, by the way, was named for Sara Lemmon a botanist in the late 1800s who was the first white women to climb the peak and describe and gather botanical samples from the unique biology of the range.
So anyway, I was jumping in and out of the truck to get pics of this or that and when I came back to the truck after getting the image of Thimble Peak, I felt like the guy in the Simon and Garfunkel song, “Cecilia.”
But soon we were back to the land of Saguaros.
By the time we got back home and were to clean up and attend another birthday party… it was ready to storm and we were exhausted. The evening was spent watching Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution and then in Shanghai Express on TCM.
I’m sad that we did not make it to another friend’s birthday bash for her hubby’s 30th 39th birthday, but one of the rewards of being old enough to know better is knowing what your limits are before you have reached or exceeded them.
So that is what we did today. Sometimes I absolutely love my experiential fortunes!
A Simple Life Truth
The Quote
I ran across a variation of this quote this morning on Pinterest attributed to Shakespeare. The quote is not by William Shakespeare. It is by David Viscott from a 1993 publication Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations, as best as I can tell after researching it without having a copy of the book in my grubby ol’ hands.
The Graphic
I used GIMP (gnu image manipulation program) which is an open source program, much like Photoshop, and that requires no purchase to download, to create this image.
The image of the girl reading is a public domain image from Pixabay.com. I made the image square so it will look good when I post it on Instagram.
The Meaning
The quote itself embodies the essence of my new business project, The Women’s Legacy Project.
Small differences can change everything. Women honestly recording their lives, just regular old life, and stories and sharing them with the world may be the biggest and best gift every given by women elders to future generations.
Security Recommendations for Blogging
Here a Hack, There a Hack, Everywhere a Hack, Hack
(Updated 2015 version)
In this world where hacking seems to be de rigueur, it is becoming more and more difficult and important to have a secure blog. The attacks that began a couple years ago on WordPress sites left an especially sinister taste in my mouth. But every single node along the information superhighway can be hacked. Heartbleed infiltrated via certain models of Cisco routing equipment. Little guys and big guys are not safe. Banks are robbed in real life. Sites are hacked in real life.
It seems that there may be a staging happening for a future truly sinister attack. I am not a conspiracy theorist! (Pardon me while I stamp my feet in vehement disagreement and adjust my tinfoil hat.) War is raging. It isn’t clear what the purpose of many of these hacking attempts might be. This is one of the most worrisome aspects of the hacking.
But do what you can. Keep your site up to date via software and plugins. Don’t host abandoned sites that you aren’t keeping up on your self-hosted account just because you can. If you have an account with a host and you have three sites on it, but two of them are just for testing or to maybe be developed in the future, and these two are not kept up to date as rigorously as your primary site – take those sites down. They are veritable thru-ways for hackers. Hackers want your server, not your blog.
Your chip embedded credit card info can be scanned from a distance, stolen, if you do not employ an RFID shield to protect your cards. Mortgages, bank accounts, and credit companies have all lost private data, client data. And these data losses are from these major sites.
So it isn’t surprising that hundreds of thousands of smaller sites have been hacked.
Hosting
I have moved my business from a self-hosted to a managed host. I may also be moving to another hosting company for my non-commercial site. Because I am an impoverished blogger I will be learning how to maintain much of the site myself; it may take a while, but it will be worth it. Managed and maintained are different things in the hosting world, but I will take that on at another time.
Why am I switching?
I need a different hosting company. I need a server company that I trust and that will be reliable and can let me know if anything looks flaky. Fiduciary responsibility mandates I do the best I can. I need to know that I will have backup that will kick in should anything happen at their primary location. I want a U.S. based company. I want a company that will take it seriously if sites that share a server with me suddenly look like Swiss cheese from a security standpoint.
Many hacks of websites are simply to use the websites as tunnels to the servers. I want to work with companies who are diligent in their attempts to foil hackers.
As a semiotic anthropologist I know something about information, more than most, but I do not know that much about computer security although I probably know a lot more than most bloggers. This is the most straight forward account I have found of security and the current situation bloggers are facing:
While these attacks against popular content management systems are nothing new, the sudden increase is a bit worrying. Until the botnet in question is taken down, however, there is not much that can be done aside from ensuring you are taking every precaution. That includes using a solid username and password combination as well as ensuring your CMS and plugins are up-to-date. From: The Next Web.
Tucson is a cool place that attracts cool people. That is a metaphor folks, it is hotter than blazes here in Tucson right now. I like supporting local community, and I like supporting local businesses. And Tucson is a blue oasis in a sea of red. And it has good karma. People have lived here for thousands and thousands of years; some say humans have been here for over 10,000 years. You can read more about community and good juice or strong referral and reputation credentials in the second part of my Juice, Juju, Karma, and The Business of Blogging.
It is difficult to decide what is the best platform for you. I hate to say it, but if you are a small blogger that operates as a small business working on the solo-preneur model, you may be up a creek without a paddle. Security costs. Ad Sense and Etsy incomes just are not going to cover a hiring a developer to create a Drupal site for you. (Think tens of thousands of buckos.) If you are someone like me who is thinking about being able to sell digital downloads in the near future you know that you need a site over which you have control. No one will take a iwantafreewebsite.blogspot.com seriously as a major business. If you do not have control over your own website and do not own your domain, which is your basic online branded identity, you do not own the most important intellectual property associated with your blog.
This is why most bloggers who leave their blahblah.blogspot.com or blahblah.wordpress.com sites for self-hosted websites do so. There are other popular platforms used for blog hosting, but WordPress has the largest percentage of the blog market. Some would argue that makes it a reason to not use WordPress as it makes it a huge target. At one time that might have been an issue, but now with increased security and the general growth and maturity of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, the argument is moot. The company has very specifically addressed security with the purchase and incorporation of Akismet and Brute Protect.
Most of the bloggers I interact with on a regular basis are either running collaborative sites or will be selling digital products if they are not already doing so. With the hacking, the vast number of plugins a blogger has to use to have a sophisticated site you, it is not unreasonable to have to do several updates a week to keep up-to-date with security releases.
I was VERY uncomfortable with my attempts to create a pay site on a self-hosted WordPress site. By the time I added up my costs for a somewhat secure framework, a responsive child theme, a payment gateway, social media, and curation plugins I am spending way too much money and time with too many different sellers, plugins and updates, for products that while they are much safer than the free versions of similar products, are by no means guaranteed to be secure. If I am going to have to do all that I want a system where my efforts will allow me to scale up to add e-commerce, meeting software, webinar, direct feeds from my social media accounts, and integration with them for posting, and publication software.
So I am now hosting my business site through a well-established provider on which my ecommerce will be channeled on Rainmaker. And surprise, surprise, this is a WordPress-derived platform.
As long as I own my domain, and keep backups of my content, I would rather deal with one known agent rather than a dozen vendors from who knows where.
Feel free to ask questions. I will attempt to answer them, and if I can’t do that, I will talk to my network and get the answers.
What Living Your Legacy Now Means
This site, The Women’s Legacy Project, proclaims “Live your legacy now!” This phrase of course has as many interpretations as there are people who see it. Our editor and publisher thought you might like to know what she meant by the trademark phrase. We hope you enjoy her writing about the Trademark/slogan.
The following image summarizes the essence of what the site encourages women, and men, to do when thoughts logically turn to legacy.
Wouldn’t you rather be doing things that are adding great memories and stories to your legacy rather than laboring over scrapbooks and written pages? Most people would say, “Yes!’
As a writer trained to be a semiotic anthropologist I can wax on and on about minuetia of generational systems of women and communication, ad nauseum, but rather than do that. I am listing some of the essential meanings and contexts of this phrase to me:
- Bucket lists are far too often filled with “Things I wish I had done” items, and are inherently sad, as they are filled with regret and what I like to call, woulda, coulda, shoulda.
- The only moment we have is now. Live in the moment. Do what you want to do!
- “…he [who is] not busy being born is busy dying…” –Bob Dylan
- Leaving kick ass stories behind once you are gone requires living a kick ass life. Go kick ass!
- Digital footprints make it easy to toss a collection of words and images together; so, do this collection building while you are out doing amazing things.
- Living long enough to be reflective gives you the “life credentials” to go do what you have always wanted to do.
- Where there is a will, there is a way!
- Your legacy once you are gone, can be reshaped by others, unless you live such an inspiring, audacious, and monument building life. So go do the latter.
- Live life as you want to be remembered. As Bonnie Raitt lyrics say, “Let’s give ’em something to talk about.”
Of course these are my words and my interpretations. Yours are just as valid as mine. Go live a full life, and encourage others to do so as well.
Aloneness and Memory
BEING AND BELONGING
I am alone.
I always have been alone.
This aloneness is different.
Ultimately it is the state we all are in all of the time. Consciousness is isolated inside our biological bodies. I have friends who would argue that our core essence can travel beyond our bodies, but for most people, this is not how the world is viewed.
All of my siblings, my four brothers, are dead. My parents are dead. The person I considered a best friend when I was young, and such considerations were more important than anything else in the world, died when she was 21.
I try not to dwell on these facts, but I probably think about this sort of thing more than most people. I try not to bemoan my situation, as I did not lose my family in a single violent event. They are all gone none-the-less.
I am not sure what the word for this state of being is. I have a marriage and a child. Both are in their mid-20s. I am not without family or love. But the family of my birth is gone. Orphan implies that I lost my parents when I was a child. So that is not the right word to describe my state of being and it does not address the lack of siblings. If I speak of the family of my birth it sounds like I was adopted. And I was not adopted. But my natal family is gone.
SYNCRONICITY
There are times I feel as though I am not alone in the universe and that the presence of the universe itself is with me. The feeling comes from where synchronicity bubbles up and nudges at me. Such an event happened last evening.
As I wrote the above words about being alone last evening, I decided to mend some fences and build a stile to access the separate fields of inquiry where my husband and I spend our time. He likes to go to the movies. I saw that a film, Mr Holmes, I thought we would both want to watch, enjoy might be too upbeat a term, was showing at a local Indy cinema, The Loft.
I knew little of the film other than having heard it was quite good, and that I wanted to see Ian McKellan portray a non-wizardly character. It was excellent, thought-producing, and, to me, relevant.
Synchronicity seemed to dance through my brain as I watched the film develop the very interplay of ideas that I had begun writing about earlier in the day: aging and how the process elucidates the existential aloneness which intensifies through time as peers, and those we know, disappear.
CONSTRUCTING MEMORY
The past exists only in memories and when there is no one who shares your memories, how can an event be validated? Holmes, age 93, grappled with senility and the forgetting of the details of the case from decades ago that apparently so shook his belief in his own abilities that he retired from detective work.
Ultimately understanding that facts, while essential to material stories, are nothing without interpretation. The interpretations we choose to share with others often have more significance than any complete inventory of facts.
Two of my own brothers, the two who passed away this past year, both suffered from dementia or senility. I have thought a great deal about what they knew and chose to share or not and literally take to the grave with them. The metaphor of wasps of who attack and live on versus bees that give all for the colony in Mr. Holmes gave me a new frame for contemplating my brothers’ actions and my own.
CONSTRUCTING MEANING
This timeless existential pondering of communication and community coexists with the loneness that is the essential state of being. Self-sacrifice for the good of the community theme entwines the characters through the apiary sub-plot and I cannot help but think of how material concerns, facts, isolated one brother who suffered greatly, and how another brother who was most concerned with love was happy.
Infinite permutations of the Mr. Holmes story exist in life, but I am content to irrationally take comfort from the synchronicity of choosing to see this film as I began to write about losing my last sibling during a visit to the city and region of the midwest in which he lived. Does this logically mean anything? But it has meaning for me.