This year, I’ve begun to have a welcome yet unfamiliar feeling. It’s the feeling of doing what I want. It will take some getting used to it. In addition to gaining something from it – relief, satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment – I have also lost something. I’ve lost the entirely dreamlike status of my goals. When goals are dreamlike, it’s as if they exist in a warm womb. Now I’m much more conscious of all of the work that I need to do in the present, and I don’t dream about the future quite as much. In addition, of course, I’ve had to take the risk of finding out that what I accomplish will not live up to my own expectations and hopes. That’s what happens when you’re livin’ the dream.

There are times when I wonder if I want to do all the work I will need to do. There are times I wonder if I can. At such times, three thoughts help me immensely. The first thought is that I will be doing all the work incrementally. Little by little, it will accumulate. I used to put all this incremental effort into notes and sketches. Now I’ll be putting that same time and effort into incrementally adding to the content on dreamfishery.com. I have accumulated an enormous quanity of notes, graphics, sketches, etc. over the years. If I can generate all that stuff just by messing around in my spare time, I can flesh out the content on dreamfishery.com, over time.

The second thought that helps is that I remember all the times in the past when I was uncertain whether I would be able to solve a problem or figure out how to accomplish a challenge. Oddly, it seems to be true that it’s darkest just before the dawn. It’s been a fairly consistent experience over the years that immediately after my confidence has hit bottom, I’ve had a eureka moment. When I remember all these times, it helps me have faith in myself.

The third thought that helps me, when I wonder if I want to do all the work, is that I recall my original motivation. My original motivation consists of play and curiosity. To be like a kid playing pretend, that’s all that it takes. I have to remember not to try too hard. There is actually a Blink 182 song about a girl with green eyes and long blonde hair who tries too hard. “Some girls try too hard,” the lyric repeats over and over. Well, that’s me! I have green eyes and long blonde hair, and I try too hard. What my new kitten, Marten, has helped me realize is that I had been missing fun and play in my life, due to pushing myself hard all the time to work on my website in my spare time. Marten was a blessing, in spite of being a drain on my leisure time for a little while. His freshness of spirit has perked up the energetics in the household. Thankfully, most of the work on the website is done now, and I can concentrate on adding content to it. With content, the equation will include less work and more play.

With a website, the work is never done, of course. I just realized last night that the thickbox code I had implemented for the Myth of Merula image gallery does not work in Opera. I would expect it to gracefully degrade so that the larger image would open in a new window rather than in a thickbox. Not so. When a thumbnail is clicked in Opera, the whole browser window goes blank. In addition, I learned that a crawler has been overvisiting my site. Yesterday, my statistics showed 95 hits on Squirrel Tao. A closer look revealed that approximately 70% of these hits were from a crawler robot that simply showed up as “Crawler”. Not only that, but I learned that I was not able to link an image to an external site in MediaWiki. The link automatically pointed back to the image page in the wiki. There’s always something. There will always be more things to tweak and optimize. The time has come, however, to stop being obsessive-compulsive about all of these little things. Otherwise, I’ll have a well-oiled site with little content in it.

UPDATE 1/7/07: After upgrading from Opera 8.52  to Opera 9.10, the thickbox code in the Myth of Merula image gallery works just fine.