In "The Dredge" I said that I had originally referred to journal entries as "postcards," but stopped doing that fairly soon after I began, when I formally named the journal section of my site Alewife Bayou. The latter part of that isn't true. They kept being postcards, and in fact the files for the various entries in a given month are 'post1', 'post2', etc. Originally they were post1.htm, post2.htm ... because they were flat HTML files; I composed them by hand and posted them.

Over the years I experimented with various dynamic-content systems designed to make my life easier -- several I wrote myself, and of course the three or so years I flirted with MediaWiki. But eventually I realized that if you're not storing your entries as files which can be read and viewed in a web browser all by themselves, with no software needed, you're probably doing something that will bite you on the ass twenty years later.

Case in point: The first three or so months of Alewife Bayou, which I much later reformatted into whatever dynamic system I was using at the time. (I'd have redone all of Alewife Bayou, but I never went back and finished the project -- to my benefit now. See, laziness sometimes pays off!) Now those first three months are only available to me in templated fragment files which are annoying to reopen and re-read; the rest are still in HTML files which I can just open and read in a web browser.

But we won't get to any of the actual entries this time. This time I want to explain the name, and talk about the stamps.

Second logo, drawn by Cat Mills. The first logo for that area of the site was purely typographic because I can't draw and never could. It is now lost, possibly blessedly.

I've lost the piece that explained the title, which was called "What to call that little body of water." See, I came from Louisiana but have spent the latter half of my life in Greater Boston. It might be a brook, it might (especially in Virginia) be a run, it might be a creek, it could be any number of other things, but in South Louisiana, if it's smaller than a river and bigger than a stream, it's likely to be a bayou.

Alewife Brook is not far from my house ... it starts off a bit too small to be a bayou (barely a stream, really more like a drainage ditch) but about a half mile further on, it expands into something that legitimately could be called Alewife Bayou, if your sense of humor were peculiar like mine. (This doesn't last. A bit further and it joins the Mystic River, which is much less fun.)

An alewife, by the way, is not the spouse of a brewer or an archaic term for a female bartender, but a type of shad, which is in turn a species of herring. Alewives are supposed to be very tasty, if bony, eating. I would not try eating any alewives from Alewife Bayou though. There are storm drains which lead into it, and the Boston area has a long-standing problem that its sewage system and its storm-overflow system are connected, which means that when it rains a lot, you get sewage in the water.

ANYWAY ...

These were called "postcards," and every good postcard must have a stamp. I have some notes I made in late 2004 -- which was when I was trying to convert these entries into the dynamic format of the moment, see above -- to debaffle some of the references in them. In those notes, I wrote this about the stamps:

I lost touch with Dianne van Dulken ages ago, and I don't know why I saw fit to note there that she was an Aussie. I mean, that note wasn't for me, it was for potential readers; I already knew she was an Aussie. But I don't know why I considered it pertinent there, unless she objected to it being entirely images of United States stamps? (I don't remember what stamp images I used.)

I have also, sadly, lost touch with Katharine Mills, who drew such wonderful images that I used them again in a later incarnation of the journal because I liked them so much. I love the idea of a journal entry having a mood ring attached to it; you can look at the little face at the top of the entry and immediately know what you're getting into. And, also, I was just begining to solidify my online visual identity at the time -- what Col looked like -- and Cat nailed it.

(Compare these images to the big image of Trilby, my alter ego for fiction purposes, at the top of the top page of this domain. There's not all that much distance between these images of Columbine and my renders of Trilby, except Trilby's face is thinner.)

I won't be able to put these in later when I'm dredging through the actual posts, so I wanted to get them all here in one place so you could appreciate them now.

Cat, wherever you are, I just want you to know I still appreciate your fine and generous work, nearly thirty years later. I look at these little pictures and they make me smile.