fall

It's "Back to School" time for sure. There are many indications of this, but, in my humble opinion, the most welcome of these is the change in the weather.

Heat and multiple sclerosis DO NOT MIX! When I'm hot, I'm a basket case. (No comments, please, about my normal condition.) As a matter of fact, it was being hot at the pool that initially dramatized my MS symptoms to the point that I could no longer ignore them.

To avoid heat induced illness, I keep my room here quite cool. It drives all the little skinny Ethiopian women caregivers crazy. I'm the one who has to live here, and they are just here for 15 minutes, so I don't worry about it... which is yet another reason why I'm so popular around here.

Finally, though, fall weather is moving in. It is to be only in the mid-40's and high 65 to 69 degrees tomorrow. (Does anyone know where the little degree symbol is on the iPad virtual keyboard?)

Another "Back to School" indicator is the fact that I began a new class today. It is offered by Arlington County Adult Education and is called "Design your Own Website". It teaches, not only how to make a site, but also how to publish it, as well as how to make it more visible to search engines.

It will be really fun and challenging to "re-create" a page like the one I used to run. This page was named "Write to Order". On it, I sold custom written nonsense verse or alternate song lyrics about anyone or anything. Customers told me the nature of the verse they wanted, and I e-mailed questions about the theme. People read or sang these verses at parties and tributes, or made the poems into greeting card. I used a service called "PayPal" to deal with all the money collection. PayPal, in my opinion, was well worth the small fee charged.

The problem is that the ISP went out of business, and the page just disappeared. Yes, I do have it on backup disks, but I can't figure out how to publish it again. I think I really just luck that I ever got it published in the first place. My ISP was named ABC, because that was the first one listed and I didn't know how to differentiate.

Anyway, I don't want to put the same page back up. I want something fresh.

I made a few sales with the old site, including about 50 songs/poems for birthday or retirement events. I even wrote a whole series of poems for a girl's Bat Mitzvah. I had a job then, though, and didn't have much time for advertising or promotion. Now I have tons of time, so maybe I can make a go of this.

I think the funniest thing I wrote was for a woman on her first anniversary. She wanted a song to sing to her husband at their first anniversary party that made fun of his three old girlfriends, and she told me a prominent flaw about each of them. I wrote the song to the tune of "The Aadams Family"' and it went something like, "They're creepy and they're kooky, They're ugly, dumb, and spooky, They're altogether ooky, The girls Fred used to date"