Launching Penny Letters

You know you’ve had a taxing weekend when you unwind by watching a documentary on the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I was really going to launch my blog this weekend. But then the social obligations started piling up. The eight-hour prayer seminar at church. A friend inviting me to try out her new hot tub. Another friend inviting me to church, with a speaker who told a heartbreaking story of losing his entire family in a flash flood. This was followed by a Sunday lunch invite that took up most of the afternoon. Then I had a small group meeting Sunday evening.

Don’t get me wrong, they were all great events. But they gobbled up the whole weekend and made me tired. And so that’s why I came home (after carefully calculating how quickly I could depart from small group without being rude) I watched the BBC documentary on the Congo instead of launching the blog.

I had good intentions of launching the blog even earlier, back in June, before I went to Alaska. But then I ran into all kinds of technical difficulties, as opposed to social difficulties.

My little homemade cartoon tells the short version:

If you don’t get the joke, be grateful.

If you do get the joke, in my defense, it’s a little exaggerated— I was planning to use WordPress from the very start, and I don’t completely stick to the WYSIWYG. I have a self-hosted website, built with the Genesis framework, and a customized Genesis sample theme.

When I tried installing my own theme, it worked okay until it would lock me out of my own website, which is very unpleasant because it’s like trying to fix a car without being able to look under the hood. The nice support staff at the hosting company kept telling me it was my custom theme. I finally surrendered to the wisdom of the Genesis documentation, which recommends beginners customize the Sample Theme instead of creating their own. Maybe someday.

Meanwhile, I highly recommend this documentary about the Congo. One of my favorite parts is the smiling woman, widowed with five children, traveling to a new home, with well-worn Bible at her side.

Suddenly, my problems are small.