true to type

I’ve just this minute logged in, clicked ‘Add New’, typed in the post’s title and scheduled it to go live next Monday. In the right-hand column of my web page there’s the standard heading ‘Publish’ typed in black and, now that I’ve scheduled the post blue type alongside states:

December 12, 2022, 9.00 pm AEDT.

Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) applies to Australia and Antarctica, not New Zealand; the time zone programmers for my website must consider our country to be merely the bit in between.

My aim is to get a post out there by midday Monday New Zealand time, but I like to give myself some wriggle room by initially setting the deadline for much later in the day. Without a deadline procrastination wins hands down through the days, weeks, months, years of my life -yep, it’s that bad.

And another thing, I don’t know how I would have got along if I’d had to write everything in longhand first or type it into Microsoft Word or another word processing app before transferring it to my web page. I touch type with ten fingers from the word go directly onto my web page, and the other tools I need as I prepare my post for publishing are either on the page or in the side columns.

When I write longhand, the chopping and changing makes for a laboriously slow and increasingly difficult to decipher scrawl:

Five sides of A4 looked like that when I made a start on my Maruia post: Maruia Hot Springs and The Little Guy. A low battery had triggered a laptop shutdown. (Not long after the Maruia trip we bought ourselves a small portable battery unit to run LED lights and charge our devices when we’re camping.)

I could have walked up to the resort and started typing while the laptop was charging, but I don’t like writing when there are people milling around. So, I sat in the Little Guy instead (that’s the name of our teardrop camper) and used a black BIC biro to write longhand in an A4 lined notebook.

I decided, during my first year in the classroom, that, as a teacher, the ability to type would be a useful supplementary skill. I no longer have the instruction manual I used but its one step at a time approach and repetitive practical exercises obviously worked for me – even after decades of seldom typing anything. The skill securely stored in my procedural memory bank:

One thing we know for sure, however, is simple sequences of movements we internalize, even far in the past, are typically preserved for a lifetime. Or as the saying goes, it’s “just like riding a bike”. (See Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike? – Scientific American.)

I started my personal journal about modern-day homesteading at Little Owl Gully almost three years ago and in no time at all I was touch typing with ten fingers at a modest speed and with a high degree of accuracy. What’s more, I found I liked the feel of my fingers touching and skimming over the keys. Positive feedback further enhanced every time I viewed the post in progress the way it would look to the reader: all I needed to do was click on ‘Schedule’ and then ‘View Post’.

It’s such a boon for those of us who are not computer geeks that the word processor functions available on a personal website these days boast so many user-friendly attributes. I like to think that most of the time it frees me up to express myself in a way that’s true to type!

That’s all on modern-day homesteading at Little Owl Gully till next Monday. Thanks for your company. Bye for now.