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Mrs. du Toit Weblog

Mrs. du Toit Weblog:

One of the things I used to love about the blogosphere was the… well… the blogosphere (even before Daily Pundit coined the term). I loved blogs. I thoroughly enjoyed the debates you’d find all over the ‘net. It was invigorating and satisfying, like finding a fresh-water spring after a long journey across the desert. You could jump in to any discussion, in the way one might leap backwards into an open jump rump. (And yes, there was a time when I loved to jump rope and I could make the dangerous backwards leap into one.) There was no such thing as comment registration, because there were so few trolls and spammers, there was no need to worry about them.

The debates were fabulous. At Rachel’s site you could find any number of meaty discussions, often on guns or the war in Iraq. Michele not Malkin (you remember Michele Catalano, right?) would have slumber-party open threads on a Friday night, while working herself to the bone doing good deeds and organizing money-raising campaigns for the troops. Misha’s was great for a mud fight. Francis and Mark would hammer out posts week after week. Dean Esmay would have a battle that would extend beyond Dean’s World

Internet FriendshipsJuly 31

It’s often difficult to write about this sort of topic and limit the scope appropriately. It’s like writing about people who are rude online: The rude folks don’t care and the polite folks get nervous that you’re talking about them. You’ve missed the mark completely when that happens.

With that caveat, let me begin.

Kim and I have developed friendships with folks we’ve met online. All of our Brit friends we’ve met through online channels. The real friendship didn’t begin, however, until we met face-to-face. There’s always a bit of a reservation about that, as you do have to keep your guard up when first meeting folks from the Intarweb, but once you’ve confirmed that the couple you’ve been talking to really is a couple (and not two 13 year old boys or grifters) it is as if you met through non-web channels.

Keeping in contact with people all over the place has been the real benefit (from a personal life perspective) of the Intarweb. My sister and I exchange emails all the time. When we do see each other (generally no more than once a year) there isn’t that feeling of “a lot to catch up on” or being out of touch. You are in touch, on a daily basis, or could be if we sent an email. Emails are miraculous in that way.

The addition of Blackberry-style phones (web-capable) has just enhanced that capability and feeling of closeness.

I’ve been using the Intarweb for a long time. Before

Mary, Mary Quite ContraryJuly 31

I thought I’d post a garden/house update since I haven’t mentioned it in a while…

For those of you who were following what we were planning (and our progress) excuse me for a moment while I give a quick update:

We had two trees in our front yard that provide(d) a lot of shade. Between the falling leaves, shade, and sap, our grass wouldn’t grow, so we took it all out, with the goal of replacing it with paths, and things like creepers and thyme (things that like shade).

We had typical suburban bushes in the front of our house… the hideous boxy things people trim into rectangles… I hate bushes (or anything in the nursery category of “shrubs"), so we had always planned to take them out. Those were replaced with climbing roses.

We had the grass removed and brought in shale (both as a soil conditioner for the awful clay soil of N. Texas and to make paths). We put black cloth down, before the shale, to control weeds where we intended to have paths.

I had carefully set aside the budget to do all of the above. It was about three years of planning and budgeting to do it in the most economical way possible.

The first wrinkle was when I hit the main line for the sprinklers when I was hammering in a spike for one of the borders. We tried our best to fix it, but it is was at the worst possible place--the intersection of all the sprinkler lines. We didn’t have the money to hire anyone to fix it, nor did we

Writing it DownJuly 29

Last night I wrote a great essay in my head. Knowing that I was likely to forget it, I made myself remember a word as the key to the brain storage vault. It was a good word, one that would allow me to locate all the various strands of thought. It wouldn’t be a matter of writing. I would, in a Bill Whittle whirlwind fashion, just have to type it, having thought it all through.

Forgot the damn word.

Frizzle? Feckless? Fragile?

Oh, poop.

Retiring TooJuly 29

As Kim announced today, we will be retiring from blogging. I’ve taken several hiatuses from blogging, and have never posted as faithfully as he has (and I have minuscule traffic in comparison to his), but I, too, will be retiring from blogging (last day on November 30, 2008). I will be retiring from the blogosphere completely, at least for a long time. I may, at some future (unknown date) pop my head into the comments of other blogs, but after the retirement date, I don’t suspect I’ll be doing that for a long time either.

Even when I took breaks from my blog, I continued to be the official webmaster for all our various sites, and participated on Kim’s sites. This will be different because I’m going to stop doing that, too: “Tech Support” is also retiring. Our personal blog sites will remain (kimdutoit.com, theothersideofkim.com, and this site, mrsdutoit.com), but no new content will be added (ever again). That is a promise. As Kim detailed, other than our three personal sites, all our other websites will be taken off the Internet by December 1, 2008.

Kim mentions in his post that this will allow him to return to his first love, which is novel writing. I am going to return to my first love, which is caring for my family, and tinkering around the house.

I named this blog “Personal Effects” because I wanted to leave my thoughts behind for m