Stormy May Day Pondering Texas Goodbye

I had myself a dark Circle Trail walk this second day of May in Texas.

Tornadoes have been touching down around Wichita Falls the past couple days, but none too close to my location.

Late May Day afternoon a thunderstorm struck bolts at the same time the boom exploded, as in, directly overhead.

I don't like it all that much when that happens.

The decibel level is way too high.

And it sets off car alarms and dogs howling.

So far on this second day of May there have only been a few distant lightning flashes. I am ready for the return of blue sky.

Yesterday, as in May Day, the first day of May, something unexpected set off a revolution in thinking, with me realizing I have been Durango in Texas since 1999. Twenty years ago. That was when I got my durangotexas.com domain, using my Durango nickname which I acquired in the early 1990s, back when the Internet and email were starting to be a thing.

Durango became my nickname for multiple reasons, the root one of which I no longer remember. I know the Durango birth pre-dated using the Durango nickname to send out trip planning info for the Durango Wild West Houseboat Roadtrip, or whatever it was I titled this way back then. I remember my first email address was durango@wolfenet.net, or something like that. Or maybe it was mj2@sos.net.

"mj2" stood for Moose Jaw 2. I was the #2 Moose Jaw. Details are sketchy. Trying to remember way back in the previous century it gets hard to render details.

I remember my Durango nickname was solidly in place when Lulu & Durango in As the WWWeb Turns became Cool Site of the Day, back when that actually was a cool thing, which I think now, decades later, is long gone. Soon after the Lulu & Durango website became cool I had my own website for the first time. It was called Dialing Doctor Durango.

Dialing Doctor Durango was soon picked to be Funky Site of the Day. This was not nearly as cool as Cool Site of the Day. But, even so, being Funky Site of the Day generated emails from all over the world, including one from someone in Singapore, asking me for advice. All these years later I still communicate with my Singapore patient, as recently as this morning on Facebook.

When I got the durangotexas.com domain I did not realize there was a town in Texas called Durango.

I had been to the Durango in Colorado, after I had acquired the Durango nickname. I remember when I was in Durango I bought multiple wearable items with the Durango name on them. Now, all long gone. I think I gave my Durango baseball cap to Miss Puerto Rico, if I remember correctly.

After discovering there was a town in Texas named Durango, I found the town and made a webpage of what I found in Durango.
Anyway, back to that May Day revolution epiphany I had yesterday. Something happened that has me seriously thinking I am ready to get out of Texas.

Durango Arizona?

Durango Washington?

Durango California?

Durango Oregon? Returning to the state in which I was hatched.

Durango Mexico? Which I think is the location of the original Durango.

By the end of this month the decision will likely be made whether or not to say so long to Texas...

Lulu & Durango Back In As The WWWeb Turns???

You are looking at the entry page of the first website I was ever involved with. "As the WWWeb Turns..."

I thought it was "Lulu & Durango in As the WWWeb Turns" but I obviously am remembering wrong. I also didn't remember it saying "a soap opera@friendship.com."

But, this took place over 14 years ago, in 1995, so I guess it is understandable my memory is a bit tainted.

"As the WWWeb Turns..." was picked as a Cool Site of the Day. Back when being Cool Site of the Day was a really cool thing to be.

Lulu's husband at the time, let's call him Geff, well, unbeknownst to me, he took email exchanges between myself and Lulu and turned them into a website. He added a lot of links and photos, which he often gruesomely altered. Giving me an over-sized forehead, for instance.

I believe there were only 4 editions of As the WWWeb Turns. I spewed out a lot of email. Lulu had trouble keeping up. And Geff seemed to be lollygagging regarding updating this phenomenal website. At the time I did not realize Geff was making the webpages the old-fashioned way, via editing it all in HTML with no web editor. Geff is a really bright guy with an extremely good eye for detail, hence the ability to create a webpage by typing in HTML code.

One day I got a call telling me to come down to Gig Harbor, where Geff and Lulu lived at the time. I did as told. When Geff got home I was shown a graphic and some primitive HTML for a website Geff had made for me called "Dialing Doctor Durango." Basically Geff was wisely putting the website making ball in my court.

I knew there was no way my disorderly mind was going to master HTML. I quickly found a web editor called Hot Dog that made making a webpage somewhat easy. Within a month I'd uploaded Dialing Doctor Durango to a server in Seattle called Wolfenet.

Dialing Doctor Durango started off with me answering faked questions. Then it got picked as Funky Site of the Day. Not quite a Cool Site of the Day level of coolness, but it caused me a lot of incoming email questions.

After about a year I'd grown tired of Doctor Durango due to way too many people asking way too many serious questions because they thought I was a real doctor.

I changed the website to "The Durango Files" and made Dialing Doctor Durango a part of the new website and made it obvious I was not a real doctor.

The Durango Files survived the first year, or so, of Texas and then I let it go, got a new domain, durangotexas.com and soon forgot about my doctor years.

Til today when I got an email from Lulu. My one longtime reader may remember the trauma I went through in August of 2008, up in Tacoma, when Lulu turned on me, for no reason apparent to me. It took me months to get over it. Eventually I did and the incident faded in to memory. Today's email from Lulu directed me to her blog. I'd not read Lulu's blog for awhile. I did not get what I was supposed to see, at first. I read down through a long questionaire thing, in which one of the questions had Lulu saying she missed someone. Was this what I was supposed to see, I wondered?

And then I saw the next post. It was all about As the WWWeb Turns. Lulu suggested that since we no longer speak, maybe we could do email and revive the long dead online soap opera. Now, to discerning eyes, if one were to have been reading both our blogs over the past year or so, there has been somewhat of a revival of an online soap opera, though far more complex and convoluted than As the WWWeb Turns ever was.

I've no idea what Lulu has in mind. I rarely do.

Stayed tuned, I've no idea where this show is going....

Dialing Doctor Durango and the Parker County Peach Festival

Every year around this time of the year, for the past 7 years, I start getting emails like this one from Leroy...

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I understand that you have some gospel singing at the festival and would like the opportunity to be considered for a spot to sing. I have a group called Established and you can see us and listen to our sound clips at establishedtrio.com. Thank you for any consideration,

Leroy Lewis,the old gospel singer

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They go to my Eyes on Texas webpage about the Parker County Peach Festival and somehow think I run the thing. To help alleviate this confusion I put a link to the actual place where they can get the information they are seeking, but that doesn't help, they still email me.

I don't know how anyone could mistake one of my webpages for any sort of official website representing an event, but every year I get questions about the Fort Worth Main Street Arts Festival, Fort Worth Stock Show Parade, the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Festival and General Granbury's Birthday. And others I'm not remembering right now.

One of the reasons people get confused, maybe, is my webpages on these subjects show up at or near the top of searches, often above the official website. They should all hire me to make websites for them and solve this problem.

This sort of confusion, where people somehow miss the drift, dates back to way back when I made my first website, Dialing Doctor Durango, way back in 1995. Dialing Doctor Durango was supposed to be this tongue in cheek thing where I acted as if I was an authority on everything. I made up a lot of fake questions and answers.

Then Dialing Doctor Durango got picked for one of those site of the day things. I think it was Funky Site of the Day. After that happened I started getting questions of all sorts from people who did not get that I was not actually a doctor. Just a quack pretending to be one.

One of the questions came from Wee Cheng in Singapore. It was a lovelorn question about her ex-boyfriend who was returning from London, wanting to rekindle their relationship. I advised Wee to give Teck Seng another chance. Soon Wee became Wee Cheng Seng. Wee credited me with pointing her in the right direction to getting married. Wee and I communicated for years, including several phone calls. Wee shipped me several gifts. Wee got mad at all Americans after George W. invaded Iraq. I've not heard from Wee since.

Soon after I first heard from Wee I found out that a medical university in Munich had listed Dialing Doctor Durango as one of the Top 25 medical advice websites on the Internet! I was appalled.

Soon after that I got a very serious gynocological question regarding a UK lady's uterus. I thought, I've got to put a stop to this. I explained to the UK lady that I was not a doctor and that she should consult a real doctor about her uterus problem.

I then killed Dialing Doctor Durango and turned it into the Durango Files. Dialing Doctor Durango had become so huge it was easy to lose the doctor part and still have a website. The Durango Files lasted til I moved to Texas. Some time in 1999 I got the durangotexas.com domain. Some time after that I started Eyes on Texas. I don't have the Dialing Doctor Durango or Durango Files files anymore. They died long ago on a long ago dead computer. Sad.