Ok, I know that a) no one reads this and b) I’m not supposed to write anything like “sorry it’s been so long since I wrote something” posts, but here goes one. Obviously, this site was originally set up to show people back home what I was doing. With timezones and whatnot, it was much harder to keep in touch with people in the US. At this point, I’m smack in the middle of this country, I have a phone with which to call people for cheep(sic) and it’s much easier to keep in touch, even with those people who aren’t smart enough to live in Chicago. Also, life doesn’t seem quite as unique when you can’t say you took a train to Paris or whatever obnoxious posts we would put up showing our fabulous life. Life is still fabulous, it’s just in a different way.

I’ve had a website of sorts in various formats since 1995. Mercifully, most of them have disappeared down the memory hole of the interweb unless you search the internet archive carefully. I keep all data I can, so it’s around, you just can’t find it in the public. Before I moved to the UK, it was almost an evolution of my teaching myself about computers. At first it was “what’s this html thing”. Then it turned into “what’s this perl thing”. The content has never been that important, although it was more so when I was a college student ranting on his web space provided by the school. Later it was about building my own server and writing some crappy code. Since I moved abroad, the computers have been packed up and have become obsolete and need to be retired. Instead, I have a hosting company to host it and the content is served by wordpress instead of my own homebuilt system from the days before there was a word for CMS or blog.

Point is, the blog needs to have some new purposes and I like having a web presence, regardless if anyone reads it. So, since travel and a life abroad is not where I’m at now, let’s take some of the side things I’ve been playing with and put them up here. For starters, I’ve been playing history sleuth. My first focus was our home. I’m still compiling things, but I have found a few interesting things about what is just another building that came into being as Roger’s Park was starting to boom and before it went to shit and then had what I like to see as a bit of a revival nowadays. I’d like to document that and I’ll put it here. I’ll lay it out from the beginning, some of the basic history behind it’s origins and see if I can’t flesh out some of the stories of the people who lived here. Let’s see how that goes.