One Month from Tomorrow we fly to Rome! - - - This can't be possible! It feels like we were just there. The weeks and months just fly by. I must get in gear and start doing some reading and research for Rome and Naples.
Colleen and Shannon are in Santa Fe this weekend visiting their friend Nancy and Shannon's mother (and us). Colleen is going to come to Rome with us! The apartment we are housesitting is large, with plenty of room for Colleen and for us.
We got our first winter snow a couple of days ago and it mostly melted today. But I noticed it clouding over again this afternoon, so maybe we are getting more. It is really cold and kind of cold in the house too. The second bedroom that we use as our shared office (we work sitting about three feet from each other - hard to believe that this works - we both have a good ability to concentrate) is the coldest room in our house. Someday we must look at insulting under the floor of this room.
I still have not even looked at my trip photos. I want to go through them and make some photo essays for the web site. Our big work crunch ended last week with the business trip to Florida, so once I get a couple of other things done, I should have time to get to the photos.
Things I am Reading
Rebecca posted a new essay and it is great (as all of them are):
Oh, What I Would Give to be a Canadian
I just started reading "Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris" by Sarah Turnbull. Someone on the message board did not like this book, and I have just started it and quite like it so far. It is about an Australian woman who falls in love with a French man and moves to Paris. She loves Paris, but living there is not always easy for her.
Colleen gave me a present of a bunch of books from Amazon and Stephanie sent me a great book translated from Italian (it is three books published in one volume) - so I have a large pile of books to read.
SlowTrav Projects
The new Trip Reports Manager is doing very well. Kim is back from Italy, so has taken over managing it. We had a flurry of new trip reports in the last month and still have not copied all the old ones from the message board. We should get that done soon. This really is a great resource as well as being entertaining. Reading trip reports is good for trip planning or armchair traveling.
Trip Reports Manager
I am still working on our soon to be release paid classified ads system. Steve did a project in August to find the best software available, but when I started customizing it, I was not convinced that I liked it. So I spent a few days (okay, wasted a few days) doing the research all over again, only to come to the same conclusion as Steve. We are going with E-Classifieds. It runs in Perl with its own database. The main problem is that the pages are not indexed by Google - and for the life of me I cannot figure out why not - but I think our approach will be that the ads are for the Slow Travelers community - not for bumping up your Google ranking by being linked to by SlowTrav (we have a good Google rank).
I need to get this classifieds system launched ASAP. Right now we are getting an error message every time an email is sent and you can't upload photos. I have to convince Steve to spend some time figuring this out for me. I think this will be a great way of listing vacation rentals and other tourist businesses. The businesses will input their own ad and photos. I check them out before they get posted.
I am working on my redesign of the web site. I have big plans!! It is just that they are hard to implement on a site this large.
SlowTalk Things
The message board seems to slow down frequently. Infopop, who hosts the message board and provides the software, is putting out a huge new release next month and is upgrading the servers - so eventually this will be solved. They are releasing a new photo album feature that goes with the message board and if it is a good design, we will close down SlowTrips and move all the photos to the message board.
The upside is one less website to maintain. The downside is that bandwidth is expensive at Infopop and looking at photos eats up bandwidth. But Infopop has promised better hosting plans - so maybe that won't be an issue. Anyway, our AutoEurope and Venere clickthrus are up this year, so they will cover the additional costs.
Ending
I will end by describing our morning walk today.
It snowed a few inches the night before last and yesterday was overcast and cold. But this morning it warmed up and the snow started to melt. We live right in town (30 minutes walk to the plaza) but we are on a dirt road. Many roads in this old neighborhood are dirt. It is not so much dirt today as mud. Yesterday we did a long drive down to the airport and back to get Colleen and Shannon, so we really needed a walk today after all that sitting. We left the house just before 9. The road was muddy and as we walked mud splashed up the back of our jeans. (I just realized that I am still wearing those muddy jeans.)
The sky was overcast but the clouds were high up and were a beautiful steel grey. The bright blue sky was starting to break through, but the clouds hovered over the mountains. We live right at the edge of the Sangre de Cristos (part of the Rocky Mountains). The look of the sky with the patches of blue and the clouds hanging like a thick mist on the mountains was stunning.
We have a two mile route that goes around our neighborhood and ends at Downtown Subscription, our local coffee shop. We walk through lovely neighborhoods of old houses and down narrow lanes until we come to a public footpath that leads from one lane to another. Yes, a public footpath here in the US!! This footpath always reminds me of when I was a child and we lived in the countryside outside of Toronto (now it is all suburb, but then it was beautiful countryside with huge open fields and tree filled ravines). We walk on this path with fences and big trees on each side. The leaves are all yellow and gold now and about half of them have fallen off, so we are walking on a golden carpet of leaves, mixed with the melting snow and the mud. Unbelievably beautiful.
We end up at the coffee shop and today we sat inside for the first time in many months. Only the smokers were sitting outside. After coffee and a bagel (and a discussion of the work we have to do today), we do a quick one mile walk home on the direct route.
A wonderful way to start the day. In the good weather we do this walk 6 days out of 7. In the cold months, we sometimes forget to do it - but we shouldn't. Sometimes when we are tired of living in Santa Fe, we say our walk is like walking around the prison yard. But during the 90% of the time that I love it here, our walk is glorious!
My problem is that I just cannot commit geographically. I like too many places and one lifetime is too short to try living in all of them.
