Families...Friendships

And a Happy Thanksgiving it was.

For the first time since Dad passed away, we celebrated Thanksgiving ALL together, at one table, the four sisters, their (available) husbands, my niece and nephew, and my mother. How much it warmed my heart to look around my dining table and see all those faces smiling, really enjoying each other. We so rarely do that anymore.

Friday, we made our annual foray to the "World's Largest Christmas Bazaar" at the Portland Expo Center. Saturday, the sun made an appearance, so my sister D and her husband, my niece, my hubs and I took a long walk down along the dike next to the Channel. We saw cranes, and cormorants, geese, hawks, and a "possible" eagle. Then we stopped at the little houseboat restaurant on the channel for a bite before heading back to the house; where the "left behind" contingent were about to revolt. They were swiftly appeased with a quick trip to Dollar Tree. Battle averted.

Which is not to say that the visit didn't go on for, oh, about twelve hours too long. By Sunday morning, the guests were fairly fleeing the confines. I told my sister, "Everybody's leaving...  I'm so conflicted. I don't know whether to be sad or have a party!" I did manage a quick, two-step happy dance as the little carpool rounded the corner at the end of our street.

Now, I'm on strike, for at least the next twelve hours. I'm playing with the 'puter, half-watching CSI reruns on Spike TV, munching on leftover pretzels, and downing mass quantities of water in an attempt to cleanse the sugar and alcohol out of my system so I can climb back on the diet wagon tomorrow.

I was just visiting some AOL journals (the few, the proud...) and I experienced an interesting phenomenon. SOME of the journals I visited were missing something. Something at the top of the page. Something involving little yellow moving trucks, cel phones, drugs, love match, AOL 9.0. Probably nothing more than yet another wrinkle in the technological fabric of America Online Reinvented. (The incarnation of AOL that worships at the altar of advertising revenue, rather than subscriber dues.) Hmmm... Ads sporadically disappearing. On a few journals. Sometimes. It bears watching, anyway.

And can I just add this thought?

I am here in AOL J-land, and I plan on staying for the foreseeable future. I've stated many times: I write because I can't not write. And I write here because there's no reason not to, though the streets of the community are mighty quiet these days. In the early days of J-land, we put our messages in bottles, floated them out into the ether, waited to see what would happen. And readers happened. And then friends. Then the purge of the unwanted ad banners happened, and Journal-land is back to feeling like those early days. But different...a little sadder. A little bit like we were expected to choose sides, and no matter what side we chose, we were going to alienate someone. I have tried to keep track of my friends who have streamed away from AOL. I added their new journals to my bloglines feeds.  I visit and comment, to let them know I want to keep the lines open. Unfortunately, many of my friends, for whatever reason, have not reciprocated. So I can't help but feel that I have committed some unpardonable faux pas by choosing not to leave AOL.

What I would like to ask everyone is this: Visit your friends, wherever they went. It is simple, and free, to set up a "Bloglines" account. I set up mine a long time ago, when the AOL alerts started getting so "iffy." You CAN follow those who are writing elsewhere now. And leave them a little note to let them know you've stopped by.

And, those of you who left AOL, please come back and see us. Perhaps you have come by, but have not commented. For awhile--until we can sort out these weird aftershocks that everyone is experiencing--why not leave a quick note? Just say, "Hi! I'm still reading!" It would mean a lot to us. The internet is a vast, free, sometimes lonely space. We don't have to let our "community" be defined by which blog site we subscribe to... Do we?