OpenDiary and the Modern Blog

 A few years back, OpenDiary.com came back to life. OpenDiary was one of the earliest online-journal sites; I started using it in May of 2001 because a few of my friends were on it. People didn't really know what to make of an online diary at the time; I saw many folks write things that I felt really should not be available to anyone with a web browser. 

At one point in its original life, back in 2001 or 2002, OpenDiary tried to monetize the site in the most disastrous way possible: they split the site into a paid site and a free site, with no mechanisms in place to make it easy to use whichever site you weren't keeping your diary on. I would have been perfectly happy to give OpenDiary money for my existing account on OD, but I didn't want to lose all my connections with people who weren't giving OpenDiary money -- and that's what paying for an account did. Eventually, OD realized that this was catastrophic and re-merged the two sites, with attendant additional problems, but by then most of the user base had moved on. I went to LiveJournal (and eventually migrated to DreamWidth.)  

I used my OpenDiary account for some time after I'd stopped posting there, but only to read my friend Krud's entries.   At some point, I lost the password to my OpenDiary, and was not able to recover it despite multiple efforts. 

But when the site owner resurrected it, I contacted them and they restored access to my old account. In an effort to learn from my mistakes, I scraped my entries and the comments to them into EverNote. (And now I need a backup for EverNote, because apparently I haven't learned that much from my mistakes). While I was scraping them (a fairly manual process; I think OpenDiary has a download option for entries but not the comments on them), I read through them. I was surprised by what a short period I used the site: I started in May 2001 and by March of 2003 I had pretty much stopped using the site in favor of LiveJournal. In my mind, it looms much larger. 

Partly it looms larger for the other thing that struck me about my time on it: I posted so much in my first months as a user.  I opened OpenDiary every day during lunch at work. While I ate, I would read any new entries from my friends. When I finished eating, I'd write something-or-other, with no particular concern about whether it was organized, or interesting, or 'long enough to justify an entry'. Beyond that regular window, I'd often post multiple times in a day.

The early days of my LiveJournal/Dreamwidth are a little like that, too -- less so, because by 2002 I wasn't posting as much, and because I was posting on both sites (and generally not cross-posting.)  But I still had that same "I want to post frequently" and "I don't care how orderly or interesting it is" attitude. I wrote so many entries about working on Prophecy. So many. They're not even very interesting to me. :D

When I saw a boosted post on Fediverse a few days ago about how blogs were better before we all got so formal about them, it reminded me of this. Sometimes I think "well, it's because I started microblogging and microblogging took the 'here's just a quick thought' niche." But the truth is: I don't post much on my microblog, either. My feed on mastodon.art/@rowyn is mostly the daily Apothecaria journal pages plus boosts of other folks' posts. I often think of things I'd like to write, but I don't actually, you know. WRITE THEM.  Anywhere.

I think about this subject often. This isn't the first time and it won't be the last time.  I keep trying to encourage myself to post more here, but I don't actually post more. the_gneech started posting more frequently back in November and I thought about using that as motivation to Post MOAR but did not. I've posted around 25 times this year and about half of that is monthly/yearly review stuff. I am grateful to have that much, because the digital breadcrumbs of my life are most of how I remember what happened when. 

But I still wish I had more.

So here is yet another statement of intent: I'm gonna post more often, and it's gonna be more incoherent whatever because I miss having a bunch of incoherent whatever documenting my life. 

Semi-retired

In keeping with my resolve to post "more incoherent whatever": a Second Post in One Day!  Because my first post was too organized. It had a subject and theme and everything. This is the exact opposite of my intent!

So it's two days after Christmas and I'm sitting at Pretend Coffee Shop playing 4thewords and trying to remember what else I wanted to write about. Hmm.

This is the last week of 2023, and it's my last week as a "part time" employee. In 2024, I'll be an "occasional" employee at the bank, and working just seven hours a week. I'm looking at it as "semi-retirement".

It's been a long time coming: somewhere between 2015 and 2017, I told my manager that I planned to retire in the next year or two.

My plan was derailed in 2017 when Lut was diagnosed with cancer and I realized that supporting both of us on my retirement savings was unrealistic. But continuing to work full-time while being a primary caregiver was exhausting, and I dropped to 32 hours a week in 2018.

In 2019, I dropped to 20 hours a week.

A week or three after Terrycloth’s death in 2023, I learned that he had left me some money -- I hadn’t been expecting that because he’d talked about leaving his assets to his family (and he did leave most of his wealth to them). But he left me a significant amount, half or a third as much as I’d already saved myself for retirement.

And I decided I was pretty much done with working a day job.

I like my workplace and my team and I still have skills that none of them can quite match. I didn’t want to quit completely and leave them in the lurch, and it would be convenient for tax purposes to still have some earned income (beyond the little trickle I get from book sales).

After speaking with my manager in September, I started using my accumulated PTO to take 7 hours off each week. I’ve been working 13-hour weeks since September. This week is my last 13-hour week. In 2024, I drop to 7 hours a week.

I don’t know how long I’ll be working 7 hours a week. It’s something like “until I and/or my manager and/or company HR gets sick of it.” It’s not clear who will get tired of it first. Apparently it’s something of a struggle to convince HR that it’s worth it to have employees who work less than 20 hours per week. My current manager started in her post this year and doesn’t know me all that well; unlike my previous two managers, I’m not sure she’ll consider me worth the ongoing headache of explaining the presence of an intermittent employee. And I don’t know myself yet if I’ll like having the structure of one workday per week or if I’ll still feel like logging in is a drag.

This bank has been purchased and merged with another bank twice since I first started back in 1997, with my years-of-service carried over to each new owner. I’ve been working here for twenty-six years. I don’t think I’ve taken more than two consecutive weeks off in all that time.

Although I am even less likely to take consecutive weeks off when I’m only working 7 hours each week. I already have a six-day weekend and I work remotely -- even if I wanted to travel for a few weeks at a time, I could easily login for 7 hours a week while doing so. It has become very easy to put in my hours each week without going through the bother of keeping my employer apprised of whatever else I happen to be doing. I'd have to tell them if I was spending several weeks working from another state, because that can impact employment law. But I don't like traveling that much, and my favorite person to visit -- Terrycloth -- passed away. Plus, I don't like leaving Lut alone for very long and he has negative interest in travelling himself. Odds are I won't be going on trips that last more than 6 days.

Anyway, I'm excited to finally be mostly-retired. "Retirement" has been my goal since I started working for the bank in 1997. In 1998, my optimistic vision of when I could retire was "2005" and my "this is as long as it could possibly take" was 2017. I am long past due. (At least I reduced my hours in 2017?)

I spent some time reconstructing expenses for the last two years and made a budget for the first time in 20-something years. I am a compulsive saver -- I've continued to save for retirement even while working 20-hour weeks -- but budgeting is not really my thing. Until 2007, I used to keep a close eye on my spending. In 2007, I lost track (too much +terrible butterflies+) and then realized that keeping a close eye on my spending didn't change anything  I did, so I never got back to it. I wanted to get back to it now to make sure that my sense of "I have plenty enough in savings to comfortably continue in the present fashion" was accurate. It is. I have some concerns about weathering a long-term disabling illness that would increase both my annual medical costs and general expenses. But I should be fine even then. 

Boy, this entry has still been pretty thematic. }:( I gotta work harder at this "disorganized and incoherent" thing.

Oh, I wanted to talk about my annual goals. I completed all the various final parts of Alien Peacelords: The Coriolis Effect https://books2read.com/alienpeacelords and released it! So that's done. (I will do a separate post tomorrow about Shiny New Book because that deserves better than to be buried in a long ramble). My last incomplete item from the annual goal list is "write an outline for a new book." I've spent some time thinking about new stories and have made some notes on two different ones, but do not have enough to count as an outline yet. Outlines are not necessarily super-long or detailed, though, so it's not out of the question that I'll finish this.

Anyway, that's enough for an entry (because anything is enough for an entry, that's the point) and it's late, so I'll call it here.