Slowly, agonizingly hesitantly, I attempted to enter the vast playground of Facebook. A friend who knows everything offered to come over and set it up for me. We decided that I should have two accounts–one for people interested in my writing and music and broad spectrum conversation, and one for grandma brag pictures and videos of tiny tots eating their noodles and other such activities one finds fascinating if one has carried the mother of said tot in her arms thirty years ago. That seemed a reasonable idea, but that is the only remotely “reasonable” thing you’re going to read about in this posting. So, the two accounts that were never to meet were established and immediately became indistinguishable. Within a day or two, I had fifty people on one page and hundreds more on another, and while it was fun to hear from long-lost friends, I was confused about which page was which and who was looking at what. I solved the problem by doing the only logical thing: creating another page– an “author page” which would allow me to have discussions about ideas and art and be able to open the page up to whoever wanted to join in…no limit to amount of friends on that page. Immediately, a problem arose. I couldn’t administer the page I had created! I moaned about it to the right people and soon enough a friend who is a Facebook expert came over to help me–just to shut me up, no doubt. We got to the bottom of the problem and we (he) decided the thing to do was to copy all the author page stuff onto a new author page, then close the old one down. We spent six hours in a creative flurry, only to find out we couldn’t close down the old one without erasing everything. And that, dear friends, is why I have FOUR Facebook pages!!##  Things are getting better all the time (to borrow a Beatles’ lyric)…my daughter, Natalie, has apparently managed to remove one page. We’re in the process of trying to consolidate the other two main pages.

Yesterday, our old friends, artists Andreas & Tess Nottebohm, dropped by to borrow a coffee urn, and stayed for a cup of tea in the parlor. It was like a throw-back to my imagined holidays of old…relaxing with friends instead of frenzied pepper spraying to get the right gift at the right price. I was telling them of my Facebook misadventures, and they said, “You must write it.”  It was no doubt funnier with my hands flailing about and my voice ricocheting up and down the scale, but I hope my ineptness has made you feel like a genius in comparison, and that you’re all enjoying the simple joys of the season.