It’s fun to be retired. I find myself often as busy as ever, with multiple projects threading their way through the days. Some are just long deferred cleanup or efforts to organize our lives — I love to putter!

As some of you know, I think of my retirement as a third chapter of my life.  As the study of music defined the first 20 years, and information technology the second 40, I am now diving into my understanding and appreciation of art and collecting. It’s a very satisfactory world to explore, maybe because it’s far from technology.

I’ve spent time trying to see what I could make of this wordpress site beyond simple blogging. It has been a somewhat frustrating struggle to find adequate tools. Default editing capabilities are very limited, like you can’t even change font size (you choose a theme, you get what you get).  You have to upgrade all the way to their highest level of (for fee) services to open up a world of plugins, each with their own capabilities and shortcomings. I am bouncing between two editors to get the features I want, always concerned a change in one won’t undo something in the other. My admittedly limited exploration of other DIY hosted web sites seen to reveal they operate on similar lines, so for now I’m sticking with the current leader and continuing to gain skills. You may notice that I am now at lynnmcrae.com!

So, to get my feet wet, I have a short writeup of a recent diverting fact-finding mission that made me happy. You might like it if you are a metadata wonk like me. Check out Baumann “Builders” – A Year Too Soon if you are interested. If not, here’s a bonus picture of a nighttime visitor to make your visit here worthwhile: