My blog gets the chop

Logging rather than blogging: a healthier alternative?

Well, it's been fun finding out about Budleigh Salterton, Brewster and lots of other things but I've decided that I spend too much time on the computer. In these harsh economic times where time is a precious as money it seems that cuts are the way forward.

Two things happened recently to help me decide.

First, logs have taken over from blogs in recent days. With the approach of autumn it's time to sniff the air and guess what kind of winter we're going to have. I did read a year or so ago that early berries on the holly are a sign that Nature is providing extra food for the birds when the temperature will be dropping more than usual. And this autumn, I'm afraid to say, the holly seems to have even more berries than this time last year.

So extra logs are needed. And stacking a load of logs, I found, is a creative task which I realised was appealing to many more of my senses than my computer screen could ever do. The smell of the different woods, the feel of how seasoned a particular log is and which stack it should be added to... I recommend making a logstore as useful physical exercise with all that bending and stretching, and a way of keeping close to Nature.

It seems a shame that it'll end up as ash. But the ash makes good compost.

Meanwhile, back on the computer, FileMaker - which I'd always trusted as one of my best friends - seems to have let me down.

FileMaker, for those who don't know about such things, is a kind of gigantic address book on which my failing brain relies for vital information such as where on my computer I store a particular photo. And lots of other things.

Like a supernatural portent telling me how fragile our technological world really is, a message from cyberspace now tells me every time I try to use FileMaker that "An unsupported operation was attempted."

I have to confess I feel a bit lost without it. And that can't be right.

Some gremlin is at work and no doubt I'll be told that FileMaker - which I'd always trusted as one of my best friends - can be reinstalled and has simply had something like a dose of flu.

But I'm now feeling that I can rely on my logstore in a way that I could never could on computers. So blogging is going to be replaced by logging for the time being.

I'm not giving up on Budleigh Salterton news but my efforts in that area will be restricted to the Fairlynch Museum website at http://www.devonmuseums.net/fairlynch Do check it out from time to time.