I’ve always been a dinosaur. I like being a dinosaur. It’s comfortable. It’s easy. It makes life much less complicated. I don’t have an iPhone, I don’t do text messages, and I don’t speak geek.

But lately I’ve noticed a certain amount of geekness slipping into my life. I blame a lot of it on Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour. She’s a carrier, sort of the Typhoid Mary of Geekdom.

It’s an insidious thing, this geekness. You start out just dipping a toe into the waters of technology to see what it feels like, and the next thing you know, you’re in over your head.

I was perfectly happy running my little travel rag, and then someone convinced me that I needed a website to help promote the Gypsy Journal. That took a while to get a handle on, but it worked out okay and over time our website has become very popular. But just like rabbits, one website begets two, and two begets three, and before I knew it, I had four websites.

When the blogging thing came along, I thought it was nonsense. Who in the world would waste their time reading something like that? Well, you know what happened there. I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now.

Enter Chris Guld, who hounded me into converting my blog to the WordPress format by giving me a hundred reasons why it would be easier to produce and format, would reach a higher readership, and allow the readers to post responses, creating a dialogue.

The next thing I knew, Chris was telling me that a lot of our readers would like an online edition of the Gypsy Journal. We’ll never stop publishing a printed version, but I finally caved in and uploaded an electronic edition of the current issue to a company who handles digital publications. It looks pretty good, and yesterday I sent out a link to it to several of our readers to get their feedback. I’d like to let you all take a look, but since this is just a test run, the company hosting it will only allow a limited number of views.

Here’s where I am with this so far: The cost is extremely expensive, and we’d need at least 500 subscribers to the electronic edition to make it financially viable. The feedback I have received so far is mixed. Some people liked it, some said they would not be bothered, and some said they would read it, but it would take some getting used to.

Do we have 500 readers out there who want to spend $20 a year for an electronic edition of the Gypsy Journal? A lot of you keep asking for it, even demanding. I guess it’s time to put up or shut up. If you’d step up to the plate and subscribe, send me an e-mail at editor@gypsyjournal.net and let me know, and we’ll see what the response is.

As for you readers who don’t want to give up your printed paper, no worries. If we do go with an electronic edition, it will only be an alternative way to subscribe, and the printed version will still remain just as it is.

Okay, you’d think that now that Chris has me blogging and looking at online publishing, she’d be happy. Guess again! At the Affinity rally in Albuquerque last week, she told me that if I didn’t Twitter, I was one step above Cro-Magnon man. I’d heard of Twitter, and like blogging, I wasn’t impressed at first (or second) glance. Twitter is a bunch of geeks sending each other short messages telling each other what they are doing now. Huh? Who cares if I’m going into McDonald’s for lunch? And it’s nobody’s business if I have a magazine in hand and am headed for the bathroom. Who cares?

Apparently, a lot of people do! Some people have thousands of followers on Twitter. Chris and her hubby Jim explained to me that while, yes, there is a lot of nonsense on Twitter, it can also be a good marketing tool and a way to stay in touch with our friends and readers, and to update them on what we’re up to. If I post a new blog, or start a new project, or whatever, I can post with a “Tweet” on Twitter and get immediate responses. So now you can follow us on Twitter under the user name GypsyJournal (no spaces). But don’t expect me to tell you where I’m having lunch (unless you’re buying, of course). And when I head back to the library, just leave me alone, okay? That’s my time!

So there it is. I went to bed a dinosaur one night, and woke up the next day and had websites, blogs, an iPod, a GPS that talks to me, a Kindle e-book reader, and now I’m Tweeting on Twitter.

But if I were honest, I’d admit that it’s really not Chris Guld’s fault. I have nobody to blame but myself, when it comes right down to it. I’ve seen all of those Just Say No commercials, and I knew better. But those darned geeks have such neat toys! Who can resist? I need to find a meeting where I can stand up and get it off my chest.

“Hello, my name is Nick, and I’m a geek.”

Thought For The Day – Some folks wear their halos much too tight.

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Regular blog readers may remember a post I wrote on February 27 titled Just Shut Up, in which I said that sometimes silence is, indeed, golden. A Gypsy Journal reader at the Affinity rally said he learned that while in Albuquerque.

He said that when he arrived at the rally grounds it was late in the day, and someone on the parking crew informed him that one of his headlights was burned out.

The next evening he and his wife went to a local restaurant for dinner with some friends, and he had forgotten about the headlight until they were leaving the restaurant and one of their dinner companions spotted it and told him. On the way back to the fairgrounds, he stopped at an auto parts store and bought a replacement headlight.

He said it was dark by then and he was a block from the fairgrounds when a police officer going the opposite direction made a U-turn and pulled him over to tell him his headlight was out. He said he told the officer that he knew it, and in fact had just bought a replacement bulb not 5 minutes earlier.

He told me that the officer then said, “So you are admitting to me that you know you are driving an unsafe vehicle, which is a misdemeanor?”

He again told the officer that he had just bought a replacement headlight, and the officer again said “So you are admitting that you knew the headlight was out, and you are driving the vehicle?”

My friend said “Yeah, if you put it that way, I guess so.”

Then the cop issued him a ticket for violation of Section 66-3-801 of the state motor vehicle code. Once he had signed the ticket, the officer told him “If you had told me you were not aware of the burned out headlight, all you would have gotten was a warning ticket with no fine.”

I’m not sure I would have believed him if he hadn’t shown me the ticket, and his wife confirmed his story.

Now folks, I’m usually a big supporter of law enforcement. Our policemen and women do a job I’d never want to have to do. But this sucks. I know my way around Albuquerque a little bit, and on the area of Central Avenue around the fairgrounds, you can buy a hooker, any kind of drugs you want, or anything else that comes to mind. And yet this officer had time to hassle an old guy and his wife in an out of state pickup, because he told the truth. That just isn’t right.

Thought For The Day – There can be no failure for a man who has not lost his courage.

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Okay, what’s with all of this winter weather? We had a dusting of snow on Wednesday night, and I did some sniveling in spite of my best intentions to take it like a man.

But yesterday morning we woke up to about three inches of heavy, wet snow covering the campground here at Show Low Lake! It snowed hard off and on all day long.

I think the weather gods are testing me, and I’ll tell you right now, I’m going to fail. I’m about to throw a screaming, foot stomping tantrum, and it’s not going to be a pretty thing to see!

I have wheels under my house so I don’t have to see that nasty, cold stuff. And as much as I love my daughter Tiffany and my two granddaughters, warm weather better get here soon, or those wheels are going to start rolling, and they’ll be waving bye bye to me.

Actually, we have plans to leave Show Low Wednesday and go to Albuquerque to attend The Rally, Affinity’s big annual event. Then we plan to return here for a couple more weeks before we start toward Sedalia, Missouri for the Escapees Club Escapade rally.

Though we have some concerns about getting out of the campground. The roads are all dirt with gravel over them, and it has not been a problem so far. But right now the ground is so wet that when we drove over to Tiffany’s house yesterday afternoon, our Ford van wanted to sink in, and I could feel the rear tires starting to spin. Our bus weighs a lot more than the van, and the forecast is for more precipitation in the form of rain and snow showers between now and Wednesday. If we don’t get a break in the weather so it can dry up, we may be stuck for the duration.

Between now and Wednesday, I’ll be busy getting the new issue of the Gypsy Journal ready to send to the printer. This is our 10 Year Anniversary Issue, and I’m including some articles about our early days and how this dog and pony show of ours came to be.

Looking back, it amazes me that we have been fulltime RVers for an entire decade. It feels like we have just begun, and there is so much yet that we want to see and do. We cannot ever picture hanging up the keys as long as we can still climb behind the steering wheel and see to aim this old bus down the highway. It’s been a wonderful journey, and we’re just getting started!

Thought For The Day – Happiness is good health and a bad memory.

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