19 December 2025

Travel

For the first two weeks of December, you would have found me in California. I flew out on the 29th of November, and covered friends and family from Marin to Sacramento to San Diego to LA and back North again to SF before flying home last Saturday.

To be fair, it was mostly a condolence and commiseration tour, talking through the last year's tribulations leading up to Marcia's passing in October. Some folks needed convincing that Maine was really, really where I wanted to be. Others just needed reassurance that I was sad, and bereaved, but not despondent and depressed. Lots of hugs, some tears, some laughter and reminiscing.

I took some quilts that Marcia designed and made for folks who were in her plans that didn't happen, so I got to choose and take them something to remember Marcia by. This was a very good thing.  

The only downside was driving in California - some few of the drivers are definitely more deranged than I recall, and I did more than 1200 miles in the two weeks. Yowza!

Winter in the Wings

While I was traveling West, there was a 4-6" snowfall here in Hallowell that stuck around until ... today, when we went up into the mid 50's. That's in temperature AND in wind speeds, plus an inch of rain. A thoroughly unpleasant day.  At this point it looks like a white Christmas is unlikely, but not impossible.

Web Repairs

While I was traveling, I found myself wanting to show some stuff to the folks I was visiting ... at which point I learned that my Wordpress to Publii migration had not been as painless as I might have suspected. Alternatively, it's possible that a lot of the images I thought were active in the WP site were previously borked and I just had not looked in a good long while. 

I am going to slowly work my way through the site and read, and fix up / identify / replace missing images as I go. I've got things fixed back through to the beginning of 2019. Additionally, I'll try perhaps to figure out some sort of on-site Search functionality (really, no promises here), although to be fair, once the new version of the site is fully indexed in Google, it's not hard to search there, just preface the search string(s) with "site:orbdesigns.com" and you'll get some of the right stuff that way.

I did reach into the depths and fix up the Home Office Done post from back on July 19, 2013, since that has pictures of the office furnishings I built for myself. Those have all since made the trip north and remain in use today.

Big News Soon

Not letting the cat out of the bag early (why is the cat's starting point ALWAYS in a bag?), but some more personally significant news is expected 'round these parts very early in the new year, so stay tuned.