Time once again for my traditional Year-End El Jay Wrap-Up, where I post the first couple and last couple of sentences from each of my entries during the year, for a snapshot of my year on El Jay (and, for the first time, with photos!)

Twenty-Eleven was a banner year. Even though less people than ever read my el jay, I may be posting more than ever before. 29 entries, for an astounding average of one entry every 13 days or so. Wow.


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A Merry Solstice Christmassy Photo Journal


Once again I was off to San Francisco for a repeat of San Francistmas, the getaway I’d love to take every year to get me in the Christmas Spirit.

But it didn’t really hit me the same way this time. Even with our spirited participation in San Francisco Santarchy that I’ve longed for since happening upon it two years ago with Isaac, and the thousands of Santas it spawned for a very fun day - it did not seem all that Christmassy to me (more like Veinticinco de Mayo - a yuletide holiday devoted to crazy binge drinking). And the usual suspects of Christmaslike bastions that endeared themselves to me last time seemed a little stale this time.

I’m wondering if everything must be new to me to be appreciated. I’d hate that. It’s an attitude I sensed in someone I met not long ago, and it was not pretty. But there’s no denying old stuff seemed old, even if it was good. Still ... there were a few nice touches, many of them duly Christmassy ... and certainly Santarchy was a bunch of trippy weird fun.









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My old and dear friend Jim Cochrane died ... oh wow, it’s been a month now ... and it’s a testament to how badly and widely he’s been missed that his friends are still on about it four weeks later. He was a young man ... well, since he was precisely 3 months older than me, I insist on it being termed Young ... but at 51, I think a general consensus is that’s too young to drop dead in 2012 America.





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So, recently, El Jay made a change that really bugged me. The pan-and-scan bar (for lack of knowing the proper term) located at the bottom of each page was suddenly gone. Ugh, I had just posted one of my typical, multi-part, photo-heavy el jay series - this one quite a departure from my norm - a 14-year-old story I'd written of a trek through Wyoming - only now able to be married with the photographs of that adventure since I've Quixotically embarked on the crazy task of scanning to digital all 30 years of my analog photographs.

But the removal of the pan-and-scan bar meant that people who don't have widescreen monitors (such as, ahem, my office) would not even be able to pan to see the remainder of the occasional ultra-wide photo. Worse yet, those ultra-wide photos were cropped, even on wider screens, apparently to fit within the borders of the page formatting I selected long ago for my el jay, and were suddenly confined to imaginary borders they easily exceeded before.

I was pretty annoyed.


So I was all set to jump ship, and have been researching alternate blogging sites. But even though barely anyone I know uses El Jay anymore, I hesitate to move to a blog site that is NOT a repository of friends' blogs - but rather every man for himself. My friends who still blog tend to do that on stand-alone blog sites, and "promote" each entry they make with a link on facebook and twitter. Personally, I'm not too keen on that sort of thing. I like the concept of el jay where anyone who wants to catch up on my blog can just come here when they feel like. Happy as I often am with my cool photo-journals, I don't often feel like ANNOUNCING them to everyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook. It seems a little too pretentious.

But I was prepared to do that.


Until, that is, I noticed that if I merely changed my el jay journal page style to one without a side bar, the photos display correctly. Whew.


Since I have no idea if any of the 3 or 4 people who still read my el jay view my stuff in their own el jay style or in mine - - I just want to say that if you are viewing it in your own style and the pictures seem oddly cropped at the right-hand side ... I recommend switching to a style without a sidebar. Easy enough.


(And if you're viewing my stuff in MY style, I'll try to get rid of that horrible pink color as soon as I can ... but right now I'm just glad to have found one that doesn't mess up my photographs.)


Just as I was about to dump El Jay last year because, well, it's been practically abandoned ... I've had an El Jay Renaissance of sorts in Twenty Eleven, and have posted TWENTY FOUR entries this calendar year so far. (An astounding average of twice monthly - WTF?)

So ... for now at least ... El Jay's been given a reprieve by me. Let's see what shakes up in Twenty Twelve.

As Isaac returns from his jaunt to South Dakota, the 14-year-old Yellowstone Expedition of 1997 finally concludes ...



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Last week I visited New York City for the first time in 22 years. Having grown up there, and immediately after high school having bid a none-too-fond farewell to its gritty, decrepit, aggressive, Dickensian culture and habitat (not to mention my parents), I haven’t really seen a need to return. In the mid-80’s, I took friends and lovers and kids visiting to the fabled city ... but since then, I haven’t missed it. That is - - until about a year ago.

For some reason, the strange culture and dirty yet exciting City started to appeal to my nostalgia - - and finally, at Beaumark’s welcome suggestion, the two of us flew to the Big Apple for a whirlwind tour of Broadway highlights and anything new to be found in New York.



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I think I'm gonna join the bandwagon and drop el jay. I don't see a point in posting here if no one's reading it, and it's no longer fun if zero of my friends ever post here (or so rarely or so few it's just plain silly).

Another reason is that my entries tend to be photo-heavy and I hate that el jay starts dropping the photos after a week or two even though the links are still valid. And bah, that cool program Keith turned me onto that makes a back-up of your el jay apparently does it live, since all the same photos keep getting deleted. What's the point of a back-up, then? Sheesh.

Anyway, bah, i kinda liked this. I've never kept any kind of journal before, and the only thing that encouraged me to in this instance was that there would be a mutual audience among friends. Oh well.

This won't likely be my final entry. But it's looking like that's coming up fast.