Jump! We're off.

Oooh, this is nerve-wracking.......

I've just started a new blog on Wordpress, and this one will be mothballed, but remain loved (by me, anyway) just like an old teddy.

Slow Lane Life II is now in embryonic form - click HERE to leap into hyperspace and find yourself on an alien planet that hasn't been very well constructed. 

My new baby. Come and peer anxiously at it, and will it into being. 

Don't fuss too much about the weird layout or the bizarre colours, will you; you have no idea how much effort it took to get the thing up and running at all, let alone attending to the aesthetics. I shall continue to learn, tweak and tinker, and who knows, maybe even get those cats on it too.

Now I can go and have a little lie down.

Experimental

Thank you all for the supportive/informative/encouraging comments. So nice of you, and I'm truly grateful, but why aren't you sitting here at my desk with me, telling me to press this, scroll down to that, select this, click that, until I can smile smugly and be proud of understanding just how my mega-brained computer works? That's the element in all this lovely blog-fellowship that's missing - the Home Visits to the Inept and Confused......

Blogger persists in telling me I have reached my quota of uploaded photographs, even though I have deleted everything in Picasaweb that isn't in the blog itself (although I may have done some inadvertent deleting of blog pics, but daren't go looking). Making space hasn't helped - a bit like taking a heap of stuff out of that over-full drawer, it doesn't seem to have made any difference; the socks and scarves still bulge out at the edges.

True, the now-monthly fee (be warned, you annual payment people!) to increase my storage space by Google, which has integrated Blogger and Picasaweb for photo storage, isn't very costly, but the system itself is impenetrably complex, and my capacity to understand it is impenetrably limited. I know this is an impenetrable sentence, too.....

Anyhoo.... in the next few days, I will be spending some time in my secret underground laboratory, wearing a white coat, white wellies and thick goggles, experimenting like some demented fictional scientist, to create a new blog. A Wordpress blog. There will be naked flames, billowing vapours, green glowing lights in flasks and test tubes, maniacal laughter, thunder and lightning, and hopefully a new creation.

I've started already, actually. Massive delays occurred at first because I couldn't think of a blog title, a username, a design with a font I liked. (This early-days paralysis is one of the (many) reasons why I haven't written a bestselling novel - my inability to find names that don't sound implausible or downright ludicrous.) 

Early attempts produced monsters, to be quickly, ruthlessly, euthanised and forgotten. The mad scientist moves on, eyes glittering feverishly. Once I have an acceptable template, the advice from other Wordpressers may start to make sense. 

Almost as good as having you sitting beside me here, but not quite. I try not to sound blaming, you understand; I know some of you live a long way off and can't make the time and the fare to sit in damp windy Somerset in your dressing gown with a cup of tea to hand and a cat trying to walk over the keyboard, Home Visiting the Inept and Confused.

Neighbours are due to visit in half an hour; they don't even own a computer, so I shall take a break from the mad scientisting and eat mince pies with them. Now, if Bloggerasaoogle allowed, I could show you a picture of those very same home made mince pies.... sigh....

Brooding

I seem to have been struck dumb, blogwise.

My Picasa/Google/Blogger situation is such a mess, and while I know that many other people have had terrible problems with Picasa's multiple duplications of photos, sorting it out seems incredibly complicated. Advice is invariably so technical that I'm lost off before I get to paragraph 2 and feel defeated before I start.

Also, I can't find much to blog about, photos or no photos - does any one else feel like this? Is it the weather? The time of year? Or, as I suspect, the fact that my life is calm and happy, after those blogging years of turmoil and change, and provides little or no material to write/rage/angst about?

I'm toying with the idea of leaving Blogger entirely and starting a new blog, using Wordpress as encouraged by other bloggers who have done the same or have always used the latter only, but it seems like a mammoth change to make. Considerations include:

• Staying put, and paying the monthly fee to Google for more photo space.
• Migrating this blog onto Wordpress. There are dire warnings online about doing this.
• Starting from scratch with a new blog.
• Ditto the cats' blog. (Is this woman serious? I hear you ask)

Dither, dither. 

Tell me what you think.