This afternoon I came across something on the Web, an ad, perhaps. Hell I can’t remember. What it was, in fact, was a gateway to my life on the internet.
Some years ago, maybe two or three, I can’t remember these things, I lost my password on my Yahoo Mail account. I spent about a week trying to coax the yahoos at Yahoo into returning me to my mail. It didn’t happen.
I eventually got onto Google Mail. I had Google everything else, so why not Google Mail? I had a learning curve, but a symbiosis developed between Google and I.
This afternoon, with the opportunity to revisit my Yahoo Mail account, I traveled ahead although I felt that if that chance failed, I wouldn’t sob too loudly, and probably not at all.
As it happened, Yahoo had my telephone number and it offered a code sent via text. Then, taa-daa! There was my Yahoo mail account some two or three years later. Daunting was the 9,999+ unread messages that await me. I know probably 95-plus percent of these messages are spam, or mail that is what I now consider as spam.
I did manage to access some files and found messages from as far back as 2001. Among the messages were some photos of mine of friends and those pictures I took. One of those photos is the new header media. This was one of two of the best pictures I took with a disposable camera back in 2003 or 2004. I didn’t even have a personal computer, well at least one with internet connectivity. Most of my internet usage back then was done at my job as a journalist in Central Texas.
After leaving that job for a short-lived freelancing-only career, I had a jerry-built desktop, constructed by one of my computer science friends. I don’t know how identifies himself professionally these days since he has been on what is seemingly an extended vacation since at least summer 2016. That is when Ross and I went on a week-long expedition of the southeastern U.S. During Hurricane Rita in 2005, I was freelancing for a large U.S. metro newspapers but didn’t have laptop. I needed a laptop. If you are going to work outside an office, you pretty much have to own a laptop. So I bought a rebuilt laptop in Dallas less than a week after Rita hit. Since that time I have had four, five, crap, I don’t know.
The picture that is my header now was taken on my way up to the summit of Enchanted Rock . As is suggested, Enchanted is a rock. It is a large dome of pink granite located near Fredericksburg, Texas, about 100 miles northwest of Austin. A Texas Monthly article about the rock said its incline is about 30 degrees. I was in much better shape when I walked, yes, walked up the rock, than I am now. I was somewhere around 47 or 48 back then. I walked a lot and did some hiking.
I have no idea how, or if, I will deal with the thousands of emails on my Yahoo account. I am glad to have recovered some of my early web days though.