For those interested in such details, the content of latest updates, and/or improvements, will be noted on this page.  The most recent date will be noted first.

2 November 1999, 1:51am: to my eye, the homepage has been looking too "busy" lately with all its suns and trees. Each tree = 1017 bytes, and each sun = 777 bytes. These symbols take up extra space and also add to the time it takes for the page to load. I finally decided to change things. I've replaced all the trees with tiny, simple, round blue "jewels" -- each jewel = only 107 bytes v.s. 1017 bytes, so I save nearly 1000 bytes/jewel. I also replaced all the suns with Karkruff's more complex jewels -- each of his jewels = 403 bytes v.s. 777 bytes. It isn't just about bytes, of course - it's about the too "busy" look of all the trees & suns. The page now looks much simpler & more dignified. //////// I also rearranged categories in the European section, shifting Pre-Historic (was in W. Europe) and Old Europe (was in E. Europe) to the meta-category of Europe. ///////// I learned earlier tonight that my Teachers' Reference page has been deemed a "Cool Site" by the Open Directory Project (which services Netscape, Dogpile, & a number of other major search engines); seems odd to me that a reference page should be called "cool," but, although one of my eyebrows is raised, I'm also pleased. I'm sorry it took me so long to realize how influential such a Teachers' page could be.

1 November 1999, 12:48pm: I had intended to keep my Stonehenge, Avebury, etc links only on the W. European > Prehistoric page, but yesterday I came across a great little page from Martin Gray on the stones of Stenness (Scotland) that brought in the energy-fields, etc I'd already discussed under crop circles on my new Landscape page. Since crop circles DO lead naturally to stone circles (and v.s.), I added a section on stone circles with one of Ernie's images, plus Ernie's site, Martin Gray's, and that great Stone Pages site -- which, it turns out, changed its URL, eff. *today,* so I had to go to the Prehistoric page to change this as well; that meant deleting 2 unframed annotations for Stone Pages (since they no longer exist); along the way, I checked the rest of the links on that page and discovered to my horror that the French have now ruined their once-lovely page on Chauvet Cave. I e-mailed the webmaster but that was probably futile. Bah. What a shame. I hope the French don't hire that same webmaster to mess up the rest of their pages!! Anyway, what should have taken no more than 20 minutes took nearly 2 hours as I kept clicking & trying to find a way to locate what used to be on that Chauvet page. ///////// In Common Themes I've now added 2 more forthcoming categories: "Food: Sacrality & Lore" and "Music." /////// Yesterday: Andrys loves the new Landscape page and was delighted to find that I'd used her Peruvian photo (she'd forgotten that I'd already checked this out with her 6 wks ago) -- she sent me a revised one that eliminated the downsize-jaggies, so I switched them yesterday.

30 October 1999, 8:20pm: Finally! -- after about 6 weeks of off & on work, I uploaded the new Landscape: Sacrality & Lore page. When I finally found the gorgeous background of blues and greens a week or so ago, it really all started to come together at last -- odd how stalled I'd felt until then. I'm still not happy with the image of the cave, but it's the best I've found so far; when a better one comes along, I'll replace it. I love everything else about the page -- especially the section on mountains and springs -- and, of course, Andrys' great opening Peruvian photo. I also revised all the "Common Themes" links on this Landscape page, shifted them to the home page, integrated them with the earlier coding, and shifted a bunch of "News" to the archival page. //////// Still in the hopper: a new Common Themes page on weaving, cosmic webs, etc -- found some fantastic links for this and the background and images I have so far may make this one of the most beautiful yet; I can't finish it until the end of November however, as too much else to do; ditto on the Yule page. Once past these two (and normal routine upkeep), this old bear plans to hibernate til spring.

23 October 1999, 8:32pm: added 5 more links to the Teachers' Reference page (Getty Museum, AskEric, Treasure Island lesson plan, + Web Study & History/Soc.Sciences, both of which are mega-sites for lesson plans & links) + 2 more images (Tradestone's "Angel" and Hindu child reading Sanskrit).

22 October 1999, Friday, 4:10pm: I had 7 new links to add to the Teachers' Reference page (Teaching Tolerance, plagiarism.org, one on Harry Potter, Roger Ebert on Bklyn Museum art exhibit, & 3 on Frank Rogers' lit sites); that many new additions meant reorganizing the page into convenient subsections & shifting the art images around to fit. /////// On my Cross-Cultural, Multi-collections, etc page, revised link to Voice of Shuttle; ditto for ancient Greece page (but discovered to my dismay that his across-the-board update to "vos" didn't include the 2 crucial essays by PK on the myth after which his site is named!, so after changing them & uploading, testing them, discovering the snafu, trying to find the original links again, uploading again, I had to waste a precious hour -- I'm really irritated with him for being so unclear about his changes -- but it's still one of the best sites around).

19 October 1999, 12:30pm: on the Jungian, etc PGI page I added a link to a fine interview with Bob Romanyshyn; also a link to C.G. Jung Home page; deleted a broken link to David Sedgewick (sp?) at C. G. Jung site. ////// On the Teachers' Reference page, added notation about their search engine to the Donn's huge site; also switched "Banjo Lesson" painting (I want it for a future African Diaspora page) with Owens' "Children of Eden" (played w/background and rotated it 180-degrees). ///// 8:58pm: added 2 links (P. Rappoport on brides' hair and rusalkas + "How to Meet a Faerie"), and updated a changed URL for Niko's "Faerie Bibliography" on my Nature Spirits of the World page. I then double-listed Rappoport's entry on the Pan Slavic Beliefs & Traditions page. ////// 10:02pm: on the Teachers' Reference page, I cleaned up the Children of Eden image by smudging away the ring-debris; cropped Merryl Jaye's "In Daddy's Arms" image but kept original sizing (the -20% resizing left jaggy edges); & used Jaye's original size on "Chyna Rose" for the same reason.

18 October 1999, 4:38pm: The Creation page (see 10/15/99 entry) needed some attention again because the people behind the Heinemann link tell me they've merged with someone else and that page has now been removed. So I pulled the large entry from my site, tweeked a few other things, added Eskimo women from Sunbirds + Tim Ashkar's black Adam & Eve (a bit sentimental but I still like it), checked the site's size, and decided to shift the African creation myths from p. 2 to p .1 (only about 1/3rd of the people who go to p. 1 bother to click on p. 2, which is disappointing; I may eventually combine both of them into one). ///////// The Teachers' Reference page (see 10/15/99) is now officially online, since Victoria Barnes gave me permission last night to use her words about a critical thinking site. I also added a link to a site on children's books about Gypsies, Bulgaria, etc; one on teaching folklore to 7th & 8th graders; and several from Lin and Don Donns' huge site full of lesson plans, etc. After many hours this weekend, I finally found some fine art done by black artists of black children -- I added these images to the Russian lacquer paintings of children that I already had up (Tim Ashkar's Adam & Eve came from this search too). I'll eventually find children of other nationalities but simply don't have enough time right now --- it took about 6-8 hours just to track down and view the paintings of black children! (I have a huge amount of art in my files, gathered over the past two years, but they focus on myth, lore & history, not children.) ////////// On Starlore page, added an additional link for Wolfstar that includes his past issues; also re-instated his original link with Alicia H., since her astrological jewelry remains intriging & she's made interesting revisions to her site (using Ann-S-Thesia's work).

17 October 1999, 1:55am: just spent the last three hours on the new "Time" page, tweeking a few things, adding some bio data that Bill Hollon e-mailed me, also adding 2 more calendar links (Waverly Fitzgerald's and the "Alpine Shaman's"), plus a series of links related to The Millennium Watch Institute (whose messy home page looks really flaky -- considering the subject matter, I would have ignored it except for the fact that the collection is housed at Annenberg/University of Penn! -- that's impressive, but they really need a more tasteful design & some decent navigation). ////// 1:32pm: I've been surprised that my Samhain/Halloween page gets so little traffic; today, as an experiment, I listed it as a separate page with AltaVista, Netscape, & Dogpile -- all of whom send people to my other pages. Also, for fun, I added an animated gif of falling leaves to the very bottom of the Samhain page.

16 October 1999, 7:46pm: today's project was autumnal: I shifted 3 links from the Samhain page to the Autumn Equinox page (on cider, turkeys, & pumpkins) and added the Oct. calendar page from Waverly's site to these; then, over on linked the Samhain page, I added 3 new links -- WGBH on Ghosts, Waverly on Halloween, and about.com's page on Ghost Stories in ancient lit.

15 October 1999, 4:34pm, Friday: I'm delaying further work on the Landscape Lore page until I can clear up loose ends on many of my more recent pages. I spent today with the two Creation Myth pages: I wrote an "Author's Note"; I added bars & titles to subdivisions previously marked only by a change in art; I revised the URL and entry for that Navajo site I like so much (he's added great new photos of the 4 sacred mountains + wonderful data); I added some brief bio data on Walter Wright based on an e-mail he sent me 8/2/99; I shifted various things around & revised entries; I added 2 images (Judy Racz's "map" and Young Neptune) & 7 new links, each marked with today's date. On some pages, 7 new links would rate another tree on the home page, but on this page, they're just a blip on the screen! -- so no update to the home page.

////////11:13pm: stirred by a request from a Middle School teacher on Tuesday, I created a brief Reference page for Primary & Secondary Teachers. Also added more Firebird data to the Pan Slavic page since "firebird" keeps turning up as a search term on the search engine page.

11 October 1999, 1:23pm: RE: PanSlavic page -- Dr. Piotr Wiench, who gave me permission to use the Perun image from his site, also sent me a URL with a stunning ram-headed deity. He thinks it's Veles (Volos), who's usually called the god of cattle but other sources (including the link on my page to Roman Zaroff's long paper) say he's the god of domestic animals, especially since rams, ewes, and he-goats were among the animals sacrificed to him. Just added the image to the PanSlavic page.

10 October 1999, Sunday, 12:50pm: just uploaded the Pan Slavic Traditions & Beliefs page after intense work since the night of the 7th (in the midst of fighting off a cold). Found some great scholarly links, in addition to more general ones, which always delights me. The next few days will be occupied with teaching, etc but by the weekend I hope to have Landscape Lore ready to upload. Then my major "loose ends" will be taken care of, I can turn to a swarm of minor ones, and then take a long break to work on a script.

7 October 1999, 11:12am: I was up til 4am the night of October 5-6 finishing much of the new page on Time (calendars, clocks, attitudes, etc). It's a relatively small page, but I'm pleased w/it. I uploaded it yesterday around 1pm. /////// Today, I moved some "New" entries from the home page to the archival page + shifted data on my pages with music to the end of the page.

4 October 1999, Feast of Francis of Assisi, 4:43pm: when I began the new Nature Spirits of the World page on the 26th, I hoped to put it on-line for Michaelmas the 29th (angels like Michael being nature spirits, in my view). I only had 5 or 6 links at the time so this seemed reasonable. But those few links grew, so did the number of images, and I've been putting in many days of long hours on that site ever since! If I'd ever guessed that this would happen, I never would have started it -- I've really wanted to taper off my webbing! But once a page is started, momentum builds and it would take twice as long to go back through everything many months later; thus, I stayed with it -- some fine material emerged, as well as new insights, so I don't regret it, but it does really leave me way behind (and with a backlog of over 70 e-mails). I finally uploaded it about 30 minutes ago. ///////Earlier today I also updated the Star Lore page: I discovered that the original astrological jewelry site that featured Wolfstar's column had dropped it, which is a disappointment since they also used to keep his archives. I've been using the more reliable Halloran link on my home page for months, however, so I finally revised the entry on the Star Lore page to reflect this. I also added a new link to a paper on "Speculation on Archangels," a spillover from Nature Spirits, where I have it double-listed. ////// Still in the oven: the new Landscape Lore page -- it began to get more complex than I wanted back in late September so on 9/26 I switched to the Nature Spirits page, mistakenly thinking I could finish that one in a day or two and then return with a fresh eye to Landscape Lore. These pages were supposed to be a brief tying-up-of-loose-ends, NOT major productions. But that's how it goes. They're important and I love getting the data out there -- it's just that there's so much work to do on other projects! /////// 7:04pm: a few days ago while working on Nature Spirits, I discovered how to make a black-background gif turn into a transparent one. It's like magic and I used it for several images on that page (blue cutglass mermaid, dakini animation, Grimshaw Spirit of Night). In the back of my mind was the desire to try it on those red & white Baba Marta tassels on p. 2 of my Bulgarian page --- I'd tried really so hard to jury-rig transparency last spring, & I just kept failing. But with this new program, it only took seconds! I tweeked a few other minor things and just uploaded the page.

2 October 1999, 8:52pm: I planned to use Hasse B's Gnome/Deer painting in Nature Spirits but found I didn't need it -- so I shifted it to the Icelandic/Nordic/Teutonic page this morning, only to discover it was already there! I'd forgotten this! The new version is larger though (I was stingier with sizes last year), so replaced the old one with it; as long as I was there, also pruned links from the menu that have been shifted elsewhere over the past few months. I noticed there was still only one link, however, which bothered me -- I haven't done a "real" update on that page in ages. So this evening, I interrupted my work on Nature Spirits long enough to add 5 new links and one new image of the Wild Hunt.

30 September 1999, 3:13am: Some 5 hours ago I started work on the new Nature Spirits page, but got waylaid on the European Earth-based (Wicca) page instead. In moving a Fabrisia site from there to the new Nature Spirits page, I discovered that she'd restructured her site & really improved its navigation (unfortunately, however, all the space taken up by her new menu spoils the overall look); thus, I had to spend time revising my entries on it. I decided to check the rest of the links on my Wicca page and got a shock. About 1/3rd of the links had either moved entirely, changed internal URL's, gotten re-formatted, or were dead. It took 5 hours to sort through it all and update my page! The moves were good since they were away from odious pop-up menu pages; & internal changes were fine once I tracked them down. But re-formated sites (e.g., Raven's & the new Latvian one that's now in frames) meant blocks of material had been deleted -- often really good material that I'd mentioned in my annotations! So all that had to be tediously revised. Fortunately, not all my pages are as unstable as those Wicca links.

25 September, 1999, 2:46pm: added Jungian therapist John Granrose's great Archetype of the Magician paper to the Tricksters page + 2 exquisite images of jesters from Pavel's site that perfectly fit that page. ///////// 8:57pm: still clearing up important odds & ends -- added 4 new links to my Reference page (Library of Congress, Digital Librarian, Maps for Current Events, and the OED's Michael Q.'s home page) and re-organized the page into clearer-cut sections so that students can find things more easily (realized I needed to do this when Mark Kelly and I did the "big screen" demo for our first year grad students on the 14th). ///////// 9:54pm: added 2 links on Jung & Freud from U. of Dayton's "History of Psychology" to Pacifica Special Interest page; unfortunately, the site's trapped in frames and wouldn't let me in when I tried to peel back these links to reach their home page. (I HATE frames.)

24 September 1999, 12:25pm = Daytime now: Webcom's still going off & on but at least my stats show that more people are getting through now. I just added the Hunger Site banner near the bottom of my Home Page because that page really gets the highest number of daily hits. I also have another version of the banner on the Autumn Greetings page, where it's been since mid-August, but I'm surprised (& disappointed) by how few people go to that page (it's actually one of my favorites, but I suppose solstices attract more attention than equinoxes) -- so it'll get better exposure on the home page.

24 September 1999, wee hours = 2:02am: Webcom seems to be getting more stable but many of their clients are still in an uproar over the situation (which was very badly bungled from a customer relations POV). An hour ago I uploaded 3 links on Waverly Fitzgerald's "School of the Seasons" -- all for September -- to my Autumn Equinox page; also changed an image on the Australian Aboriginal page as I love that strange map & decided it has to be there (just e-mailed One World for permission to use it -- switched it with an image I'm already using on my Creation Myth page); also added Netstat to the Australian page. I still have a few more odds & ends I've been trying to get to for weeks -- hope to get those up in the next few days. Then I'm taking a long breather to work on the GreenWorld script.

23 September 1999, 3:19pm: (see below) I kept trying til 5:45am this morning and finally went to bed. At 1pm this afternoon, a window-of-opportunity opened between Webcom's crashes and I finally got the revised Home Page on-line, at last. I also added a handful of new links to my Search Engine and References pages --and those revisions also made it through safely. Now I'll see if this page shares in the luck. All this may be moot, of course, if more crashes keep denying access to visitors. Once I get this page up, no more webbing for a week or more -- I'm sick of the hassle. When/if Webcom gets their act together, I'll resume. . . .

23 September 1999, Thursday pre-dawn, 5:11am: Webcom has been down for days now -- since Sunday the 19th, I think, although it wasn't until Monday that the problems impacted me. I couldn't upload Old Europe until late Tuesday, the 21st, but then there was another crash (they call it a "period of high latency") and I never got the revised homepage on-line to announce the major update on Old Europe! I finished Australia around 4am this morning and was able to upload it safely, but, again, I can't get the home page up! Very frustrating! I have no idea if this page will slip through, but at least it's revised.

20 September 1999, 11:27pm: now ftp-ing won't work but my site can be accessed. I've finished Old Europe and have been trying for 2 hrs to upload it. [Later: I spoke too soon -- the site is also down -- none of Webcom's sites can be accessed!] //// Learned today, btw, that my site was the humanities "Translators' Site du Jour" today. My pleasure was mixed with chagrin since no one can get to my site to look at it!

19 September 1999, 3:14pm: added 3 new links (Rossi, Ulansey & Paula Vaughan) to the Jungian/Special Interest page and repositioned my 2 "Meta-category" sections on the home page. Webcom is down so no one can access my site for a few hours but at least ftp-ing works. [EC called & prefers the data remain offline -- c-9/3/99. So be it.]

18 September 1999, 9:15am: decided to add an image to the Pacifica/Jungian/Special Interests page; also tweeked some text & positionings. /// 12:32pm: in checking my stats for the home page today, I discovered a new Swedish search engine that had led someone (seeking "Eliade") to my site -- in clicking on the Swedish results page, I found a few great links to Eliade & R. Otto, also one for Jung. Added these 6 new ones to the Special Interests page; updated Home Page finally. Still in the oven: the Old Europe/Gimbutas page.

17 September 1999, 5:01pm: the Pacifica/Jungian-related page now has quite a few links -- all unannotated since they're generally so well known to the Pacifica Community at large. I've been wanting to update this page for ages, but today both Jonathan Young and Mystic Fire e-mailed me with praise for the site, and a suggestion that we link, so I decided just to go ahead & do it. The demise of Matthew Clapp's Jung Index is a great loss, by the way; I'd bookmarked quite a few of his special pages for this Pacifica page, and now they're gone. He put up a fading pic of Jung -- rather eerie. //// I changed the title of this updates page from "Updates Log" to "Diary of Updates," which more accurately reflects its scope.

10 September 1999: added "Aztec Flute" music to the Mexican Day of the Dead page, but it's an "au" file, not a midi (which is what all my other music files are) and it takes forever to load! Since I may remove it later, I'm not noting the music's existence on the home page.

6 September 1999, 1:14pm: more loose ends & changes: re-fonted the MythingLinks headers on the 4 "betweens" + Mexico's Day of Dead so that they're less intrusive & don't take up so much space; got rid of the orangey bkgd on Samhain before I turned in last night & went for "basic black"; changed link colors & bullets today and added 2 great roundels of Baba Yaga. I want that page to look handsome, not lame! Now, finally, I'm happy with it. ////11:29pm: Ric Williams found an odd spacing problem on my Bio page -- it may be due to the way different browsers display things, but I went in, took a look, dinked with it, & maybe solved it; made some minor updates on the page too. Ric also noted a minor fonting problem on the Autumn Greetings page -- I think it's now fixed.

6 September 1999, 1:42am: still at it -- forgot the usual MythingLinks headers on the 4 "between" pages plus the Wheel of the Year; corrected that -- tedious, since I can only do one upload at a time and then have to exit and return to Composer. Also had to correct various problems with spacing. Then, I realized that there was no way I could have a European-focused Day of the Dead and ignore the equally ancient tradition in Mexico. I did a search on Alta Vista for "Day of Dead"+Mexico -- and got close to 3 million results! Fortunately, there were some excellent ones near the beginning -- enough to create a good page and link it to Samhain with an explanatory note. (Despite the " "'s, I suspect the search engines used every darn mention in the world of "day," "dead" & "Mexico.") /////// Finally, I've never been happy with the Samhain background -- the colors never seemed right -- they felt too "busy" & lame. So I got rid of it and now have a plain orange-y bkgd. I think it's better. /////// Enough -- my vacation ends the 7th & I've done what I can over the past 2 months to expand my site. Now I'll probably have to put further updates on hiatus for awhile, except for a few minor additions.

5 September 1999, 4:43pm: Samhain links are finished (unless I come across more later that I can't resist); the Autumn Greetings page is safely linked to Samhain; and the home page now has an official announcement about the Wheel of the Year page. ////// By the way, I figured out last night what I do want as "music" for Lammas (birdsongs, crickets, etc) and for Samhain (the sounds of rushing winds). I did a websearch for appropriate midis but no luck so far. One site has ".ram" versions, but I had a hard enough time figuring out to embed ".mid" versions & I have no intention of tackling something even worse! So, there the matter rests for now.

4 September 1999, 1:54pm: I added text to Lammas last night (it was the only one without this) & revised it a bit more today. I've also been trying to find music for the page -- but everything I try feels wrong -- either too bland, too busy, too non-Celtic (e.g., Fernando Sor's lovely studies), or too Celtic, etc. So I'll let it go for now. Ditto for Imbolc & Samhain. But late last night I did come across a haunting bagpipe lullaby that feels right for Beltane, so I added that today. On Autumn Equinox page, I added the "Weather Doctor's" great quotes for autumn; also a link to Mary Kelly's Hungarian "Black Harvest Goddess." I still have to finish Samhain's links (the rest is all done) before I'll announce the new Wheel of the Year page.

3 September 1999, 8:25pm: I put Imbolc online yesterday, but kept it unlisted, as I initially planned to link it to the 1999 winter solstice page and not list either of them until late October-early November. Then today I realized that I needed a meta-page where all 8 sabbats could be listed, otherwise I'll drive people nuts by making them shuttle backwards and forwards through all the solstices & equinoxes! This new page, the "Wheel of the Year," is itself linked back to the earth-based/wicca page (although I don't have a reciprocal link there yet), and it includes live links to everything else. So, via this page, Imbolc is now online, along with yesterday's Beltane and today's Lammas (I shifted annotated links on Lammas from the Summer page, so it was a fairly easy transition). The 4 Greetings pages are on it as well. Samhain is also linked, but it goes nowhere as I still have more work to do on it. Hopefully, it'll go online this weekend.

/////// EC phoned at 9:53 am today while I was in the midst of creating the new Wheel of the Year page to ask that I delete a myth from a page until he could check to be sure to be sure it was safe to include it; I was distressed lest I have caused him harm (also sad because I feel very close to that particular myth), but of course I did as he asked & removed the myth as well as any references to it on that page as well as on the Home Page. ///// While I was on the Home Page, I also added the new Wheel of the Year page under the Earth-Based section, but only people with sharp eyes will ever notice it there. It is there, with all but one of its links live, but I still plan to wait a week or so before announcing its existence under "New."

/////// It's amazing how many hours & details have gone into this simple project -- new links, images, bullets, color alterations, shifting data from earlier sites, adding careful navigation, looking for music, etc, etc. Every time I change one thing, everything else shifts and needs to be updated. I feel like a juggler with 2 dozen balls in the air. Netscape Composer doesn't help either since every time I upload a page, I have to exit and then re-enter or the next upload won't "take." But if I do this too soon, Earthlink will disconnect me after 15 minutes -- and making new revisions often takes longer than that. It's easy to forget whether my upload "coin" is still good or not!

////////P.S. There is one further reason why I'm working so far ahead and creating this Wheel of the Year -- with so much weirdness on the web about the millennium, Endtime, etc, this is my small "mythic" way of creating an archetypal bridge, safe, secure, beautiful, & potent, anchored in today and yet spanning the "thin places" into a year hence. These are strange times with much potential for trouble -- but also for good. The good seeds deserve to be nurtured.

1 September 1999, 3:32pm: I have to ask myself why, on the first day of September, would I have spent the last five hours working on a MayDay (Beltane) page for next spring?! Well, it's because ever since a few weeks ago when I found a great Green Man (unidentified on one of Taliszas' hard-to-find pages of "free," anonymous graphics), I've been itching to use him somewhere. Last night, when I decided I needed 4 new pages of links to the "between" earth-based celebrations (Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas), I realized I could keep that same Green Man for each of them, altering the color balances (in him as well as in the same background), so that he changes as the Wheel of the Year turns. I was up til 3am playing with all four pages -- and really love them, but found the cool heather and lavender tones of Beltane the most intoxicating of all!

So I had to work on it & spent much of today writing my opening text, fine-tuning, gathering links, annotating, etc, etc. It's now on-line & linked to the Spring Equinox page, which, believe it or not, a few people still visit even though spring's long gone. Eventually, all 4 pages will be up, each linked to its appropriate "larger" celebration (i.e., solstices & equinoxes), but also linked to my "European Earth-Based Ways (wicca)" page. Only then will I mention their existence on the Home page. For now, they're between me and the handful of people who might still check this Updates page (::chuckle::). I also started the Imbolc (February 1-2) page, since that one needs to be linked to the upcoming Winter Solstice page; and Samhain is waiting in the wings, with many great links to annotate.

It's Samhain, actually, that started this whole thing -- I just didn't want to add Halloween links to the autumn Samovila painting and music: it would alter the mood too much. In considering options, I decided to create an entirely new Halloween page and just update its link to the changing equinox page each year (i.e., the "between" pages will stay essentially the same; the other 4 pages will change their images, greetings, and times annually). That meant I'd also have to do it for the other 3, and from there, it was a simple step for me to figure out how I could use the Green Man image for all four.

31 August 1999, 8:10pm: read Jim Maertens' great essay on Krishna's Flute today when I was sorting thru links and realized it doesn't belong under "India," as I'd assumed. Pan, the Pied Piper, etc are also in it and it's really about tricksters. Since I had one other trickster link I've been wanting to put up, I added them both to the page & renamed the page: "Tricksters, Clowns, Jesters & Fools." This expands the scope so I can include more -- e.g., a mummers site I saw, but can't remember where, though I imagine I can find it again. Since the site is still so brief, it's perfect for music. Added "Riu riu," & love it there. Enuf. Exhausted. Up til 4am working on millennial solstice page to get a head start.

30 August 1999, 11:51pm: Webcom's been down all day so I couldn't FTP changes until now. Many of our sites, starting with Andrys' early in the morning, and then lots of others, including mine, have also been out of commission off & on. No explanation, of course. Even Webcom's homepage was completely unavailable this evening until around 11:30pm. Anyway, I just uploaded the changes I made hours ago to the Ancient Greece page: changed the Pegasus gif to the more complexly animated one; added blue flanking dragons to the Search Engine link near the top of the page; & added 2 new images -- the Andromeda & Cassiopeia constellations, and the Perseus constellation -- both by La Hire (1705) from the MKC exhibit site.

29 August 1999, 12:16pm: I created a page with Sandra's large version of Medusa and linked it to the smaller, resized version on my Ancient Greece page. I added her text on the artifacts' identity, etc, which she did for AmberLotus. This way, people can see the full effect of this painting's power. /////// I also added a link on the Ancient Greece page to my Star Lore page where there are several fine images of Andromeda as a constellation from J. Bayer et al.

25 August 1999, 6:47pm: I've been working at my usual insane pace since late 8/21-22 to add more links and images to the Ancient Greece page. Up until now, the page only had 1 link (Perseus Project) & 1 image (the B&W Gorgon/Grail head), yet next to the Egyptian and Creation Mythology pages, it's usually my most popular page. With a new school year beginning, the numbers will pick up and I'd feel badly not to have more there. Inspired by Sandra's 1982 Icarus painting and her brand new Medusa/Apple Tree painting, I started serious work on the page. I now have about 3 dozen new links, some great images, & I changed the background from forest to sea (I actually preferred a darker, more stormy looking sea, but it was too hard to read the text against it). ///// 9pm-ish: Dina gave me her permission several days ago to go public with a webpage I'd created for her private e-mail on the LA daycare shootings; I wanted to link it to Sacred Dance. I was too immersed in the Greek page to upload it at the time, but just did it. Her insights really touched a nerve in me & I hope they will in others too.

16 August 1999, 1pm-ish: whenever I looked at the Autumn page, I wondered what was wrong with my eyes because I could barely see the faces in the trees. I remembered that when I first saw that image, I could see them clearly, but no longer. Were my eyes finally rebelling after too many long nights on the web?! Today the reason dawned on me -- I thought that was the only "jpg" I had of that image but I'd forgotten that I'd resized it to 50% of the original for another project! Duh. So I now have the full sized version on the site -- what a difference!! I also added a small "Banner" for the Hunger Site plus a link to "about.com," where there's a report on the man who started the whole thing.

15 August 1999: have been looking at Okana's Web, since she hopes I'll add it to my Polish and/or Earth-Based Ways pages (I will) and last night found a great Polish proverb there about the value of donating a single thread -- one thread may not seem like much, but if everyone does it, the naked will have a shirt. It fits the Hunger Site's theme so well that I added it to my Autumn Greetings page.

14 August 1999, 12:06pm: it's been cold & grey here, school's already started in many places, stores are full of school supplies, & it feels like autumn. I actually started the Autumn Greetings page weeks ago but had no idea what music to use. I found the perfect one a few nights ago -- for me, at least, the blend is perfect! I also decided I absolutely had to add the Hunger Site data on this page -- this IS the season of harvest, after all! -- & I hated to hold it up for another month before going online. Then, when I learned last night that fall had already begun 2 August in the Ukraine (and presumably other northern lands mark autumn around the same time), I decided to put the page online today. I gathered up links from both bookmark files last night, did a search for a few more, & annotated the ones I want for this first wave; next month I'll do a second wave w/Halloween, etc. Finished up this morning & just uploaded the page.

7 August 1999, 5:53am: after 3 hours of sleep, I woke around 4am with images of the rainbow goddess, Natseelit, in my mind. She wouldn't let go of me so I got up, heated some goat's milk to make me sleepy, & started searching for exactly the right image to scan. Found it -- & added it to the Floods page (with the background's ocean between her head and feet, which would never be done in any sandpainting but which felt exactly right when I saw the effect). Also updated the "Weather Doctor's" site since he added a no-frames version yesterday after my complaints! Poor man! But my weary eyes do truly loathe frames and many other people share the feeling............Now to heat up more goat's milk and try to sleep.

5 August 1999, 3:32am: soooo, I spent the evening adding the treasures to the Flood page of which I spoke a few hours ago in the 8/4 entry. I expanded the site's scope to include "Other Weather Wonders" in addition to "Floods, Storms & Rainbows." Added 13 new links on St. Elmo's Fire (from Weather Doctor site), Green Flashes, & Aurora Borealis, etc. Also 2 new images -- a great aurora borealis + Sandra's haunting "Rainbow," painted in 1984, with strange apocalyptic resonances mingled with hope. Now I think this "monk" can follow the Beatles and "Let It Be." ////// O - also revised the home page's "New Archives" page earlier tonight - changing colors of background and fonts as it was too hard to read on that bright blue. /////2:17pm: a few loose ends remained when I got up today: added Weather Doctor's homepage to Floods as his overall site is just too great to ignore (it's framed so I tucked in some unframmed links too); added another of his pages on summer quotes to my Summer's Greeting page. Decided to add a caption to Pegasus on my home page because someone e-mailed me and referred to him as a unicorn! Horrors!

4 August 1999, 6:08pm: after finishing the Floods page on Monday, I looked at the rest of my Common Themes pages to see if there were others with nothing on them. Sacred Theatre/Dance at least had an image, but that was all, which surprised me. (A new Pacifica student, who's a dancer, had mentioned to me in a recent e-mail that she loves the site but wishes I had more on dance -- I realized how tactful she was being when I discovered this!) Since I've collected quite a few good links over the past year, and since that category is so close to my heart anyway, I've worked like a madwoman the past 48 hours to discard some & more fully grok others. Just went online with a total of 29 links + 10 illustrations (including one of Carla which perfectly fits the Ecstatic Dance section -- I'd meant to use a graphic from the Taliszanna [sp?] site but her page was down -- and will be for a few days -- and then memory of the picture of Carla leaped into my mind, which is far better for my page anyway). When I don't know the material, it takes much longer because I have to dig more deeply into each site to get a "feel" for it; fortunately, with this dance material, I already had a head start in knowing much of its background or it would have taken at least a week. Now, the deities willing, I want to pull back for a few weeks and, except for adding a few more treasures to the Flood page, I want to switch roles from being a monk illuminating "manuscripts" (i.e., the web) to being a normal human who might even take time to start dancing again herself. Andrys Basten sent me this "gal.gif" yesterday -- where my website's concerned, I'm making it my hallmark for the rest of August!

3 August 1999, 4:44pm: added a Babylonian Creation myth link to the bottom of p.2 of my "Creation Myths" section along with Sandra's Ishtar painting; added another of Sandra's paintings to the "India & S. Asia" page (which until now has been just a "shell" with headers & footers only); also a link to stunning art at Black Peacock site.

2 August 1999, 4:41pm: The Floods, Storms, & Rainbows page (it used to be just "Floods") has had nothing on it since I put the site online 11/13/98 -- just a watery background and header & footer material. Yet people kept clicking on it! So today I added Mark Isaak's great flood data and added two rainbow pages that are interesting but undocumented. Two of Judy Racz's paintings look perfect here. ////Also moved more "New" additions from the home page to the "New" Archives.

1 August 1999, 3:13pm: The Crones & Sages page, which used to have just one image and no links, now has 4 new images & 5 links. As noted below (7/31/99), it's now found under Common Themes. ///// Made a few minor changes to the 2 new Creation pages.

31 July 1999, c.4:30pm: after days (and too many nights) of work, Creation Myths is finally updated -- I changed the background to pure black -- it's the womb out of which creation emerges. Added 17 new links, new art, a second linked page to handle spillover from the first, and I even retold the Huichol Blue Deer story for this page. Made a new page so that Paula Geise's data on contemporary Mayan weaving could be preserved....and gave it a link on this Creation Myth page. //// Along the way, found a few New World links for Crones & Sages, which used to be under W. Europe, so now I've moved it to Common Themes, which is where I should have put it in the first place.

29 July 1999: streamlined the design of my little search engine page, gave it 2 flanking dragonsm, & changed some text colors.

28 July 1999, 10:17pm: When I discovered to my delight the other day that Christopher Siren had put my site in the #2 slot of his "General" category, I realized I'd forgotten to link his site when I put up Voice of the Shuttle (see 7/3/99 entry). I decided it was high time to create a new linked page for a handful of these huge multi-regional sites. But to do that, I also needed to get the Pacifica/Jungian category on its own page lest it be orphaned at the bottom of my homepage. I also had some great reference links I've been wanting to put up for months. So I spent much of yesterday and today creating 3 new pages, a reference page (that includes the copyright and online citation links that used to be on the home page); a Pacifica/Jungian related page (that also used to be part of the Home page & still needs much fuller development); and a cross-cultural page for Voice of Shuttle, Chris Siren, and several new links. /// (Also in the oven: more new links for the Creation Myths page.)

27 July 1999, 11:59am: in late January to early February, I added NedStat Basic/Referstat as an experiment to 3 pages: home page, ancient Egypt/Sahara page, and ancient Greece. NedStat's counting program only worked for the first day and stayed stuck there, making it look as if only one person had ever visited the site; yet if I scrolled down to the bottom of the page, the Referstat program DID work, showing where the last 25 visitors to the site had come from. I e-mailed the Dutch firm that sponsors this free service, but they never got back. Since very few visitors would ever know to click on the tiny blue icon at the very bottom of these pages, I left it alone. I did, however, scroll down & check the refer-stats myself every day or so because I found it useful to know where people were coming to the page from. I also found some very nice sites this way that had linked to mine. Yesterday, after all these months, I was finally annoyed enough by the on-going situation to go back to NedStat's homepage. I discovered that they now include the Referstat html code as an optional to the Basic code, which means it doesn't have to be installed separately. The coding itself is also different. So I reapplied, changing names, etc, for those 3 pages plus 2 new ones that I wish to track more closely: the wicca and creation myth pages. There were some bumps I had to work through yesterday & today, but it now looks as if it all works. These things aren't totally accurate, of course -- if a visitor finds what s/he needs w/o letting a page fully load, they might not be counted; a number of other flukes will also cause a faulty count. But it's still muuuuuch better than the nonsense WebCom gives us every morning where it's impossible to tell humans from all the robots & spiders! /// Along the way, I also did some minor updates to 3 of the 5 pages involved: changed Mining Co. data on Wicca page; removed 2 old links from Greek page; tweeked the home page here & there plus added notice to Jung Index about its upcoming demise this fall (Matthew Clapp e-mailed those on his list about this earlier this week).

24 July 1999, 9:32pm: earlier today, I changed text colors on the Maize page since Andrys, whose "eye" I trust, found the other version lovely but hard on the eyes. I may be playing with changes for the next few days & won't bother to note these in my updates. /// Added an e-mail link to the Pachamama banner on the Andean page plus an additional link to a site displaying all 7 of the artist's Pachamamas (see 7/17 entry).

20 July 1999, 1:16am: Although it was only a month ago, Summer Solstice seems like an eon ago. Yet it's still summer, and Lammas, or Lugh's feast, still lies ahead on August 1st. So I added 4 new links to my Summer Greeting page: 2 on solstice, 2 on Lammas, all 4 are excellent. I also added some of the wonderful lyrics to the music on this page -- words I've sung for years now whenever I celebrate rituals for summer solstice.

19 July 1999, 3:37pm: when I created a separate archival page for recent "New" entries (see 7/12/99), I inadvertantly moved Wolfstar's column as well. I just returned it to "Links of ongoing relevance" on the home page so that it's easier to find. ///// 11:08pm: I added 2 about.com search engine sites with tips, facts & stats, etc to my new little search engine page; also included my boilerplate response to non-Pacifica sudents with my own brief data on search engines.

17 July 1999, 1:09pm: I added 3 more of Sandra's paintings to my site -- Isis = Egyptian Beliefs, Sekmet = Mythology, & Nut = Women in Ancient Egypt. Her work adds such a beautiful & powerful presence. /// 2:57pm: realized in looking up something on Sandra's website that her Diana/Artemis & Black Madonna would be perfect on my wicca page, so just put them there. Corrected pronouns on my Andean Peoples page (apologies, A! <blushing>); added artist's name on the Pachamama wall-hanging, since Kristina suddenly remembered it when she saw my page. Still awaiting word from the artist about whether she wants me to provide an e-mail link back to her.

16 July 1999, 4:12pm: some months ago a visitor to my Burning Times page recommended a site by Jenny Gibbons. I visited it and was really impressed. I've meant to add it many times since then, but too many other claims were being made on my time & I kept putting it off. Then a few days ago Joe Bethancourt e-mailed me with a new URL for his site. I also found a site by Joan Pontius today that's another fine addition to the page. So I updated Joe's and added the two new sites.

12 July 1999, 4:55pm: I started a Latin America maize page late Saturday night, worked on it all day yesterday and part of today. I just put it online: The Lore & History of Maize. It's a companion piece to the Latin American cacao/chocolate page. Menu listings are also updated in all the usual listings. ///// Also did some small revisions to the Amazonian Peoples page (deleted a few comments about Marco Bleeker's site when he pointed out that my technical problems w/his slide show could be from my browser -- true enuf!, especially lately!). ///// Made some additions to my little "Search Engine" page. ///// Made a new "Archival Page" for recent "NEW" announcements because that section on my home page was getting too long, due to all my activity lately. ///// Changed some text-colors on the home page as I was tired of the deep-rose color in the "NEW" section. I'm probably going to get rid of the rose & mauve colors in the Table of Contents area too -- I think I'd prefer grass-green. That way the whole color-scheme is in greens, blues & beiges. It'll be more restful to look at. (Or maybe my eyes are just getting very tired from all this computer work! Now I'm going to back off for awhile!) ///// Same day, 5:30pm: well, when my brain decides she doesn't like something, she worries at it like a dog with a bone. So although it was tedious to change all those tiny rosy-mauve dates, I just spent 30 minutes doing it. Now they're grass-green -- & I do like the look much better. Three blends of color are enough: greens, blues, beiges. To add a 4th color makes the page look too "busy." OK, now for a few weeks' rest!!!!

11 July 1999, 4:15pm: I awoke many hours ago with the sudden awareness that I had to re-name & re-organize my South American pages by the 3 major regions or else I'd be locked into working country-by-country and the whole thing would become impossibly top-heavy! So I split the Amazon material from the S. America page and gave it a page of its own: Amazonian Peoples -- data and images remain the exactly the same -- I just did a copy/paste to a new page & framed it with the usual top and bottom. The new South America page retains my original opening essay, which is followed by the new Table of Contents, and then the 3 general links that were on the old page -- I also added a new image of a Columbian golden snake and jaguar that I love. I then re-named yesterday's "Peru & Her Andean Neighbors" to Andean Peoples (I kept the original "peru" URL so it doesn't ruin bookmarks and search engine listings). I made small revisions all over the Andean page -- corrected the spelling of Andrys last name; deleted link to NOVA transcript because they keep shifting their URL's around; tinted Barakat's lovely Moche toad a very pale green as the original white was too stark; added a few lines to some annotations, deleted a few from others. I also listed two new South American pages (continuing the symmetry): "Patagonian Peoples" and "Peoples from Other South American Regions" -- these are still forthcoming. The hard part was updating all the Menus & Table of Contents w/o losing my way!
Then I did something to the Home page that I've been wanting to do for several weeks anyway. I shifted the coding-key for the tree & sun symbols to a little page of its own. It took up too much space and I want to get visitors to the Table of Contents section sooner. Those who are puzzled by the symbols can check on their own.

10 July 1999, 6:16pm: after 2 weeks of insane hours of work (annotating, finding images, getting permissions, etc, etc), the Peru & Her Andean Neighbors page is finally online. Updated the home page, Latin & South America pages, and the Indigenous Peoples meta-page to reflect this change. There's still much more to add to this page, but this is all I can do for now.

9 July 1999, 1:02am: I updated the Mansoor sites on my Egyptian Amarna page after viewing the family's extraordinary collection the afternoon of 7 July 1999.
///// Made some minor additions to the "Voice of the Shuttle" link near the bottom on my home page. ///// Later, same day: found an e-mail from the place that sells lovely Russian cards illustrated with lacquer boxes -- they have a new URL; I updated my Russian folklore page.

7 July 1999, 10:53am: yesterday I found some marvelous Meso-American "chocolate pots" on The Barakat Gallery's site. Fayez Barakat (whom I met in person in early 1994 to discuss a possible video project) graciously gave me permission to use any of his art as long as I give the appropriate credit to his gallery. I'm delighted! There's a wealth of choices there for pre-Columbian, Near Eastern and Chinese art especially (some already on his site, others I'll scan from earlier catalogues)! So far, I uploaded just one Costa Rican chocolate pot (c.500-800AD) for the History/Lore of Chocolate page.
///// Today, after Ed H. called my attention to it, I corrected an error in my annotation of his essay on women & religion on the Earth-based (Wicca) page; also added a link to another essay of his.

4 July 1999, 12:26pm: I added two new links (Smithsonian and Jungian) to the South America Page; one additional LANIC link (on anthro/archaeology) to the Latin America page; and one additional image -- a terrific Mayan cylinder vessel that actually once held their cocoa -- to the History & Lore of Chocolate page.

3 July 1999, 2:11pm: The Eliade link on my homepage has been "dead" since February and no one seems to have found out why or if the site is going to re-appear elsewhere. I decided it was time to delete it and replace it with Alan Liu's incredible "Voice of the Shuttle" site.

2 July 1999, 7:43pm: Sandra Stanton has given me permission to use whatever I wish of her amazing work. So I replaced her single "Tower Moon" on my Indigenous Peoples page with seven smaller goddesses of indigenous peoples. The effect is wonderful. /// 11:50pm: added 6 more brief links to the chocolate page (see below).

1 July 1999, 3:50pm: in the wee hours of June 24-25 I started working on a few Peru links, inspired by a number of communications from Andrys Bastien, whose photos of Peru are a joy. But since I didn't yet have a South American page, I started working on that too, thinking I'd keep Peru on the same page with it. By the time I finished grokking all the Amazon links, however, the page was too long to keep Peru with it, so I split them today. Peru still needs a few more days of work, but the South America page is now up, which meant I also had to create a Latin America page (since S. America is a subcategory), & revise the listings on the Home page and Indigenous Peoples page (added one of Sandra's paintings to it too). I also created a page on the Lore & History of Chocolate, since it embraces both South and Meso America (otherwise I would have kept it only on S. America).

27 June 1999, 11:56pm: Wolfstar's syndicated column on the "Wandering Star" jewelry site hasn't been posted since 6/7/99; seems they're re-evaluating whether they wish to carry this excellent column. So I added an alternate backup, Halloran's site, to the home page.

22 June 1999, 10:49am: I took two opposite-facing B&W dragon dingbats, tinted them pale green, and now have them flanking the search engine notice on the home page -- they're more eye-catching than the two starmaidens. My usual Imager program never came up properly after the computer crash, so I had to tint the dragons in an Adobe program, which won't let me line them up side-by-side; thus the green tint isn't quite the same in each one but it's the best I could do. I also added a "note" on the actual Search Engine Page alerting non-cyber-savvy visitors that the ominous Netscape-looking "warning" they might see on whatUseek's search-page is just an ad. Also mentioned a few things on search terms.

20 June 1999, 5:09pm: I framed the new search engine with two "starmaidens" to make it more visible (especially to frequent visitors who might otherwise scroll past it). Made minor formatting revisions to the home page; did minor pruning in the tree/sun coding section.

19 June 1999, 9:52pm: AT LAST!! -- a proper search engine!!! Among the backlog I've been wading through after the computer crash was info on a search-engine called whatUseek. The price is right: free -- but I haven't had much luck with free search engines. Months ago I experimented with Webcom's (my site's host), but couldn't figure out how to get it to work. I also tried Thunderstone, but they only indexed 15 of my pages (I probably have over 100 by now) and when I did a search for Bulgaria & Amarna, I was given silly links to Updates and not to the actual sites. So I let Thunderstone expire without ever letting it go public. A few months back I also tried several others -- but nothing ever worked. WhatUseek does!! It seems to be amazingly thorough. I checked Bulgaria & Amarna and got appropriate responses -- some redundancies, but that's ok. Then I tried Valley of the Roses and Mike Harding -- both quite obscure (I only mention Mike once!) -- and it came through with flying colors! I'm really delighted as this will make the website much more useful (and less frustrating!) for people who visit it looking for something specific.

18 June 1999, 1:30am: a crucial part of my computer crashed around 8am on 9 June after I'd spent an all-nighter creating my new Summer Solstice greeting; I couldn't get the music to work, and in the middle of that mess, Netscape crashed, which means I could no longer get into my e-mail nor could I access any of my websites! Scarey! My computer wizard-friend, Bill Weeks, came over for four hours on Sunday 6/13, but to no avail. The entire system wound up crashing (gee, thanks, Bill Gates, for creating such a buggy Windows 95!), not just Netscape, so Bill had to take my hard-drive to his own apartment. Fortunately, I'd saved my crucial programs on my new zip drive so it wasn't as devastating as it could have been, but it was still disconcerting. Finally, by 10pm on June 17th everything got re-installed, thanks to Bill. Unfortunately, I had 151 e-mail messages. I pulled out the urgent ones and finally had a chance to upload the summer solstice greeting. I updated the home page (altering the Bulgarian link so that it can now only be accessed by going to the Balkan page); I also shifted the spring equinox greeting to the European Earth-based Ways page. I don't anticipate further updates to my website until I can get caught up on all that e-mail backlog.

9 June 1999, 1:23am: corrected the music source on my Home Page. I'd thought the only midis I'd filed were from the Renaissance Internet Band, but it turns out "Greensleeves" came from another site. Also did a few minor revisions to my Bulgaria section under "New" and to the Balkans under the main menu.

2 June 1999, 2:47am: the other project (see below) had to be postponed a little longer due to a backlog of 60+ e-mails plus a faculty meeting. To "relax," I decided to return to Bulgaria just after midnight. My third Baba Marta link (Emil's) was never really annotated when I uploaded my second page yesterday (5/31) because his server was down; tonight it was up, so I did the annotation and included a marvelous passage from his work. I also happened across a nice little photo (beautifully lit too) of Bulgarian dancers, which I added to my second page. And, as long as I was working on the pages, I added another four links, 2/page (these are Prof. John Bell's sites: two are good cultural bibliographies and my pages had need of that "bookish" dimension). Now I'm content and can move on. The remaining handful of Bulgarian links can safely wait. //// 3:46am: Well, except for one more -- an easy one on dance-specifics + a warning that a non-dance related newsgroup link on that page might crash a computer, as it did mine, twice! ///// 6:30am: another all-nighter -- that's the problem with running a website: it's the "Red Shoes" syndrome -- once you start dancing, you can't stop. I went surfing and found 2 more links that had to be added right away -- one on p. 1 about a group of forced conversions to Islam in the Rhodope Mountains; one on p. 2 about pre-Christian echoes in Bulgarian Christian carols.

31 May 1999, 11:37pm: It's Memorial Day -- and I've spent about 15 straight hours today annotating 27 links and adding new images to the Bulgaria site. I also split the site into 2 pages, since it was getting way too long. I still have more sites left to annotate for this page, but I'm afraid they'll have to wait. Starting tomorrow, I've cleared the decks enough during this past week of intensity so that I can channel my energies into another long-awaited & very dear project <smile>. ///// P.S. also made some minor changes to the Home Page and to the Spring Equinox Greeting page (added a Verdant Goddess image) over the past 24 hours.

30 May 1999, 3pm: my "New" section on the homepage was getting much too long so I consolidated the data on Judith's Kosovo/Serb "Peace Invocation" under the new Balkan page's info and deleted all the rest. ///// Still uploading sample, unlisted pages so that Curtis Clark, who has very kindly offered to help me, can see why I can't do a title change and get more of his wonderful Renaissance Band music on my site! I'm eager to add his soothing "Greensleeves" to my homepage, but right now it just isn't happening. /////// 6pm-ish: Curtis pointed me in the right direction and now I have different medieval music on a total of 4 pages: the Home page, Tree & Plant Lore, Green Men, and my Spring Equinox greeting. I added a little section right after the Home page's "New" section to announce this new change. At the bottom of each page is a "control box" that'll allow people to turn off the music, if they prefer. I have no current plans to add more music, although I may do it from time to time as the mood strikes <smile>. In general, I want embedded music to come as a pleasant surprise on the few pages where I have it; if I put it on too many, it loses its impact.

30 May 1999, 4:32am: A friend e-mailed me for data on the connection between serpents and healing. In checking my bookmarks, I decided it was time to add more of them to my Dragons & Serpents page (it's only had one link so far, but now it has closer to a dozen). Of course, I didn't plan to stay up most of the night doing this. I always forget how long these things take! But that page attracts a lot of traffic so it's worth it.

29 May 1999, 12:08pm: I spent hours surfing the web last night and found at least 20 new Bulgarian websites, mostly on wonderful folklore aspects -- so, far from being "complete" (see yesterday's comment!), the page is only half done. En route, I located two photos of the Valley of the Roses (I seem to be obsessed with that place -- it's why I felt so driven to start the Bulgaria page in the first place). I just uploaded them.

28 May 1999, 6pm: I posted a brand new Bulgaria page around 1:30am this morning after working on it for much of yesterday. It only had 7 links and I didn't bother to note its existence either on my Home Page or on this Update page. I've now added another 14 links, for a total of 21, and I think the page is complete -- unless something special comes up (which it will -- it always does!). It's now noted on the Home Page & here. I'm pleased with it -- it looks like a beautiful country [I'm still trying to get a photo of the Valley of Roses -- e-mailed 3 possible sources].

27 May 1999, 4:46pm: Many changes, large & small: there is now a Balkan page online with a map, my usual opening mini-essay & several overall links to the region (pages for individual Balkan countries aren't online yet although I've already started working on Bulgaria [since the Balkans are named for her major mountain range] and I hope to upload that page w/at least a few links in the next day or so). The addition of the Balkan page meant the opening Eastern Europe page needed to be revised. Besides adding the Balkan page, I also added a Pan-Slavic Beliefs & Traditions page (not online yet though -- all that exists is its title). In addition, I deleted the "Eurasia: General" category since those few links more correctly belong on the opening Eastern Europe page w/o a separate link to some place else. I also shifted "Old Europe" from Western to Eastern Europe (revising its internal menu en route), where it really should have been from the start! This change, of course, meant revising the opening Western Europe page. And all these changes needed to be moved to the website's Home Page, which is now done. Finally, I darkened the "blue hands" on the Kosovo/Serb Invocation page so that they show up better; I also made a minor font change for the word, "addendum," near the bottom of the page. /////// 7:56pm: wasn't happy w/the Eurasia change so now added a new Eastern European category: Eurasia: The Caucasus & Beyond. This meant shifting the two new annotated links I'd just added to the opening Eastern Europe page, and correcting places where I'd already noted that I'd removed the Eurasia page. Reminds me of Oscar Wilde who spent the entire morning taking out a semi-colon -- and the entire afternoon putting it back in. Sigh. [Also bold-faced this entire page since I was finding it hard to read!]

26 May 1999, 3:09pm: I did some routine "housecleaning" in the "NEW" section on the home page; I also changed a few categories here & there (e.g., added "The Balkans" as a separate category under Eastern Europe --I had originally planned to include this region under "Other Slavic Lands," but this no longer seems appropriate -- there's no actual page for it yet -- just a title on the home page; the Kosovo/Serb page is now listed under The Balkans). Other changes: I finally got the embedded music on the Green Man page to work after spending many frustrating hours both last night and today trying to embed either a spritely hymn to "Great God Pan" or else Matthew White's early 17th century "Hark! how the woods do ring." For unknown reasons, I couldn't get either selection to work, nor would a mini-console come up. So finally I copied and pasted the commands from the Spring Equinox page (I got its music to work last night when I found the correct coding-insert in Earthlink's bi-monthly magazine -- and at least a dozen times carefully duplicated every step for Green Man, but it still wouldn't work!). Now it works. It refuses to accept a name change for the music, however, so both pages now have the same music, a "nota" from medieval times that I've loved since the 70's when it was my "signature piece" for my answering machine's message.

25 May 1999, 4:40pm: between a necessary week in Mexico, a very bad cold/fever which left me with temporarily blurry vision, and then piles of papers to grade, I've had little time for my website during the past month. But in my stack of unanswered e-mails, I found a revised URL for Tony Hagger of Web Sauce/Artistic Pixels. Without Tony, I never would have found the woodsey green background for most of my pages -- so I felt it was important to correct the "dead" URL near the bottom of my home page. I also inserted a Kosovo/Serbian Peace Invocation link under Eastern Europe >> Other Slavic Lands in my main menu.

23 April 1999, 11:56pm: Sandra Stanton sent me two very significant links on Kosovo/Serbia -- one from a woman in Belgrade, another from a woman in London; both are peace activists. I added these links to the "New" section on the Home page as well as to the first Kosovo/Serb page. These voices are so important! I hope many people visit the links -- and read the words.

21 April 1999, just before midnight: annotated 3 Latvian links on 3/27/99 for the Baltic States site but never posted them because the webmaster of a fine new site (on Ancient Latvian Religion) was going to make some changes based on my comments in a private e-mail; but it's been several weeks now without word, so I decided to go ahead and post these links; I can revise later, if need be. I also double-listed this new Latvian site on the European Earth-Based Ways page (and added a link at the top of that page to the "Peace Invocation" -- see below).

18 April 1999, 12:25am: finally put the new "blue hands" on the opening Kosovo/Serbia page. ///// 2:53am: added a concluding e-mail from Judith, and a final comment from me, to the second Kosovo/Serbia page.

17 April 1999, 3:53pm: over the past few days I've made minor changes to both Kosovo/Serbian pages -- e.g., correcting a few typos, changing the fonting, etc. I also changed the wording on the award posted on my home page. All these changes were too minor to warrant individual updates. ///// Today, on the Grail page, I added an alternate URL to the Wagnerian site at the request of its webmaster, but I haven't changed anything about the URL already there; I also updated the link-credit on Robert Lenz's "Grail Maiden" image since he now has his own webpage (where, unfortunately, I haven't been able to find this particular image because the categories are too fuzzy -- it could be in any of them, or none of them).

14 April 1999, 9:51pm: the second Kosovo/Serbian page now has further e-mail correspondence, this time between a good friend (going by the name of "Anon.") and me over her reactions to my responses to Judith. Added two small new images to the page as well: Russian lacquer box images of squirrels, one of which I own (the second one), the other is from Sunbirds in San Diego. (You'll have to visit my page to learn the relevance of a squirrel.) ///// Yesterday, Tuesday, 4/13, when I got home from Pacifica and checked my e-mails, I found one from late 4/12 announcing that my site has been given an excellence award from a small, but lovely, folklore site I never even heard of. I was very touched -- I also love the timing: the site went online 11/13/98, and exactly 5 months later, 4/13/99, I learn that it's won this folklore award.

12 April 1999, 11:25pm: I pulled an all-nighter between late Saturday and Sunday morn, 4/10-11, to work on the first Kosovo/Serbian page, and then to add a second with the behind-the-scenes e-mails between Judith and me (and including two paintings by Sandra instead of only one).  Didn't get to bed til 8am Sunday the 11th, and was up again by 1pm.  I've been so haunted by the situation in Yugoslavia that I couldn't have slept anyway if I hadn't first finished the two pages.  Today I deleted my "blue hand" image from the first of the pages -- there are strange forces afoot and my intuition told me I didn't want my own hand-print out there in cyberspace -- if there were genuine relevance in having it there, I wouldn't waver, but it felt extraneous; also deleted my references to it on the second linked page, since these no longer make sense w/o the actual image.  Made a few other minor changes to both pages.  ///  Deleted the music data from the Spring Equinox greeting -- I can't get it to work and the automatic "pop up" warning is too intrusive.

11 April 1999, 1am-ish, Orthodox Easter: I've just created a brand new page, born of two women's concerns over the situation in Kosovo and Serbia.  As I wrote on my home page about 30 minutes ago:  "...haunted by what's happening in Eastern Europe, I've been collecting links on the toxic "myth" of the 600 year old Serbian defeat on the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo.  When a recent visitor to my site, Judith Brownlee, asked for information on the pagan deities of that area, I sent her what I had (none of it has been posted to my site yet).  Merging my data with her own deeply sensitive and psychic insights, Judith created a wonderfully moving Peace Invocation.  I designed a website, a "sacred space," for it.  Please click HERE to see it."  I hope to add a second linked page to this one which will include our e-mails as well as a painting by Sandra Stanton.

"3 April 1999" [but being added 4/11/99]: uploaded 2 new links to the Green Men page (Margaret Rainbow & Ancient Circles).  I also thought I'd safely embedded a medieval music-link to this site -- a wonderful piece called "Now thanked be the great god Pan." It worked on my "Preview" page but refused to upload properly to my "live" site!  No idea why!  I did everything correctly in embedding the code, etc., so am really baffled.  E-mailed the music expert but no word.  I also tried to add a splendid "Nota" piece (my long-time "theme" song since the '70's in NYC) to my Spring Equinox page, but it too refused to accept the music.  I'm leaving the music-data on each site and hoping I can solve the mystery soon.  Since I've been hoping to correct the problem, I've held off on uploading this update for a week.  However, it's now 4/11/99, 1:50am, and still no solution to the music problem, so I'm finally adding this update.

18 March 1999, 9:30pm: uploaded a Spring Equinox greeting, which includes three links to relevant sites (there are many more out there, but I didn't have time to explore them all, and I liked these three for various reasons). It's been 3 long weeks since I've updated this site -- too long! -- yet so much has been happening, including endless e-mails, & there's been no time for more. /// I also added a notice on the homepage so that people trapped in frames can at least know my address, and cut & paste it on their own. Recently, I was shocked to find my site trapped in frames and reduced to a 1" x 4" slice!! The effect was totally ruined. I tried to find a "click-on" way to offer visitors a way to escape the darn frames, but none of them worked. So, providing my URL is a decent compromise.

26 February 1999, 12:35pm: under "New" on the Homepage, I added a promo for Wolfstar's column for the week of 2/22 on "The Goddess Rising," which looks in fascinating detail at Hillary Clinton's chart, as well as related issues. Seeing mythology through the lens of astrology is always of interest, especially from the POV of depth psychology & Jung.

24 February 1999, 5pm-ish: the Hunterian Museum's link on Egypt's "Religious Beliefs" page turns out to be fine so I removed the "warning"; one more link on that page and another on the Amarna page remain possible troublespots.   A brand new site on the Spanish Grail -- this time in English -- was sent to me yesterday.  It looks great, so although the Grail page is "officially" complete, I added it; I also added a nice little Peter Corless page since I was working on the page anyway.

22 February 1999, 2pm-ish: discovered the greened serpent image on my wicca page (Earth-Based Ways) wasn't loading because I'd forgotten to remove the spaces in its file name;  fixed it.

21 February 1999, 1pm-ish: I added another of Linda's links to Arthurian Themes (see below) when I realized that the Arthurian link from yesterday was specifically for reference materials and that there was a more inclusive link for medieval texts, modern fiction, etc, etc. /// 1-4pm-ish:  ever since I notified many of the Egyptology sites (see 1/24/99 entry), info on revisions, redesigns, etc has been coming in. Oddly enough, except for Greg Reeder's change (for the "Men in Ancient Egypt" page) and Tim Heid's site, which is on hiatus (my "Hieroglyphs" page), all the others were for Amarna.  Finally, today, I decided I needed to make these changes.  Most important was a notice about Mark Johnson's death (that's why I've waited so long to make these changes -- I felt too much emotion to do this at first).  In addition, Kate Stange moved, revised, greatly expanded her art and general links, etc.  So I changed her URL, wrote a new annotation, and shifted her to the opening slot since I think her site is now a good introduction to Amarna.  The Mansoor site has also been freshly redesigned with a whole series of terrific photos of a pink limestone Nefertiti head, so I added a postcript (in a different color) to my annotation.  Iain Hawkins has moved his site for the third time in less than a year!! -- seems it's become extremely popular.  Thus, I had to change his 4 URL's on the Amarna page, which led to changing 2 more on my "Religious Beliefs & Practices" page.  Mark Rigby's site also needed an update with new info.  I tweeked some text here and there on both the Amarna & Beliefs pages, also played with italics and minor font-changes under images, etc.  Then I checked all links to be sure they're still current....3 might have servers-down, or else be "dead."  I'll keep checking. /// Late evening: discovered my homepage link to Eliade is dead!  Checked w/2 other academic webmasters & no one knows what happened to it (one guy even did an exhaustive search and came up with zilch).  Whoever finds it first will notify the others.  I added an update to the homepage in purple text to alert visitors.  Weird how a major site like that can simply vanish into thin air in cyber space.

20 February 1999, 1:37pm:  I added two new links from Linda Malcor's Dragonlords' Bookstore to Arthurian Themes.  One is specifically on Arthurian resources in print; the other is to her own publications, including her From Scythia to Camelot book co-authored w/Littleton.  Since a number of students in the "E" group expressed interest in this work 2/15, and I assume the "G" group will do the same, I wanted to be sure I had a link for them, especially since Linda tells me there are very few books left and plans for another reprint don't look good.

8 February 1999, 11:24pm: Added a new link ("The Daily Grail") to the Egypt/Sahara homepage; this new site gave a rave review on 1/23/99 to my own website,which sent visitors to my site, as recorded by Referstat.  I followed the links backwards to "Daily Grail" -- a real "find" in its own right.  I also made a minor title addition to the page & added Nedstat and Referstat.  So far, on my Homepage and Greek page, only Referstat is working.  I'll see what happens w/this one.  I contacted NedStat for help on the other two but the complicated reply was in Dutch.  O well....

5 February 1999, 8:45pm: added Shelly Wu's new page on what to expect in the coming year of the cat/rabbit to StarLore.  I hope she's right.

4 February 1999, 2:35pm:  The "European Earth-Based Ways (Wicca)" page is now complete, unless something turns up later; I also added a Norwegian link to the connecting Burning Times page (see recent entries for URLs). Note: I keep checking the NedStat pages (see 1/31/99) -- the Home page numbers seem stuck, they haven't changed in days although the referral section keeps on increasing at the bottom of the page.  On the Greek page, numbers are also stuck and the referral section has stopped working. The gizmo's numbers bear no relationship to the large numbers Webcom keeps reporting.  I may disconnect it.

3 February 1999, 1:36pm: I spent hours last night adding new links and art to the Baltic and Wicca pages (I especially wanted to get the Lithuanian changes on-line to mark the anniversary of Gimbutas' death 2/2/94 -- I made it with a few hours to spare).  Along the line, however, I realized that I could no longer keep Wicca as a sub-category under Western Europe because too many of the links involved Baltic, Slavic, etc areas.  So I've now made Eastern & Western European Earth-Based Ways (Wicca) a major category under EUROPE.

Between last night and for about 4 hours today, I started re-titling & re-doing the navigation using new URLs (with ~west deleted) for the Wicca & Burning Times pages.  It turned into a major nightmare  -- to have continued with URL changes would have meant going through dozens of links by hand.  Also, the old URL's are in bookmarks and search engines around the world by now so I can't just pull the pages!  After changing the 2 wicca pages, Baltic page, Home Page, Europe, and Western Europe pages, I gave up on using the new URLs.  I've now gone back through, keeping all the title and organizational changes but reverting to the original URLs.  What a mess.  /// 2:54pm: in revising the Western Europe homepage this morning, I discovered I'd never deleted the tree/sun coding before going on-line last 11/13/98; lest I have slipped up elsewhere too, I went through all the section homepages & found the same error in Eastern Europe, Indigenous, Asia, and maybe a couple of others.  Fixed all of them.

[2 February 1999:  see entries for 2/3/99.]

1 February 1999, 12:57pm: I discovered yesterday that Tim Heid's papyrus page for Brown U. is temporarily unavailable.  I e-mailed the webmaster for details and, with her permission, posted an update to my Egyptian Hieroglyphs page (FYI: for updates on link problems, I'm not going to bother making my page-link "hot" on this Updates page).

31 January 1999, 9:38am: last night I finally figured out how to add an html code for NedStat -- then I added its "counter" to the bottom of the Home Page. This morning I added ReferStat to it; also deleted (under "New") the Medieval, Starlore, Solstice greeting, and GreenMan data, since that's been up for about a month now and people have either already visited those sites or else will find their way there from the main menu. /// 9:33 pm:  there's been a great deal of traffic to the Ancient Greece page, despite the fact that all I've had there is one image with commentary.  Tonight I added the essential Perseus Project + a Nedstat gizmo.

29 January 1999, 12:30pm: clarified and expanded data on "Back" buttons, "Reading Done," and "Server Down/or no DNS" on my page for the Cyber Challenged.  (Louise in the bookstore told me yesterday how much she enjoyed that page because I wrote it in "woman," not in "man" -- i.e., it's a very low-tech explanation unlike the kind her husband gives her!  I promptly came home and re-read it -- and saw some places that could be even clearer.)

26 January 1999, 4:42pm: my Burning Times' text color started to look too muddy & dark to me.  It bothered me enough that I mixed a custom color (255red/134green/134blue), which still gives the effect I want but is easier on the eyes.

24 January 1999, 6:42pm:  several days ago I finally announced the on-line existence of my site to the 15 people who had given me their generous permissions to use art, etc on my Egyptian and Saharan pages.  Warm responses are now slowly coming back to me.  A number have made changes to their sites since I first annotated them late last spring, so I'll be checking them out over the next week and revising my comments, where appropriate. Today I heard from Greg Reeder, who mentioned that he has a fresh .jpg of the image I use on my Men in Ancient Egypt page. I took a look -- the difference is enormous.  So I've now replaced the old, dark, "ragged" version with a larger, lighter, much clearer version.  I also deleted the two turquoise faience title-bars near the top of the page, as I felt they detracted from the intense cobalt blue background of the new image.  Since this particular page gets quite a lot of traffic, I'm especially pleased with this improvement.

23 January 1999, 10:04 pm:  I've been working on the Wicca section for 2 intense days (worked til 5am this morning!) and just uploaded the Wicca, or Earth-Based Ways page.  I've reorganized it, putting the Yule, etc portion at the end, and added a few new links and new graphics.  The biggest change, however, is that I created a link to a new page on the "Burning Times." That page I uploaded a few hours ago, but no one would be able to find it without the page I just uploaded. /// In awhile, I'll make the necessary changes to the home page's "New" section.  [Note: I'm not listing the Burning Times page under the usual Western Europe menu -- it's a "hidden" page -- only those who go to the first wicca page will find a link to it.  I'll mention it in the "New" section, but I'll only keep that announcement up for 4-6 weeks.]

20 January 1999, 12:54pm: since on 1/11 I started teaching "European Sacred Traditions," with its strong emphasis on the Grail, I decided it was time to complete the Grail Lore page (which until now has had 2 illustrations but no links whatsoever).  On Monday 1/18, I worked on it straight through for 15 hours, grokking and annotating sites from my Bookmarks; also added two gorgeous paintings by a Lithuanian artist.  Since there were still a few more sites to check, plus I needed to proofread everything, I didn't upload anything.  Tuesday & today I checked more sites, proofed everything for the 4th or 5th time, and uploaded it.  /// Made relevant changes to the Home Page to announce this newly completed site.  Next on my list, time permitting, are the Baltic & Wicca pages....  ///7:44pm: added a 12th link to the Grail page, this one [on Wolfram's Parzival] is still under construction at King's College London but I want it on my page for when it's done.  Since it's only been 7 hours since the earlier upload, and few if any, are likely to have looked at this page yet, I'm not going to bother altering the homepage with a "+ 1/20/99."

4 January 1999, 9:25pm: my first changes of the New Year were to the Green Man page, which is certainly appropriate, since this entire website began with this same Green Man page! I made minor changes in the text and spacing; "green-ed" the Hawthorn Man image from Jinny's postcard; added a great new image from Mike Harding's site -- a green man with a sunwheel around his neck; and, above all, I added the ecological page from Jay Williams' Green Man Graphics site; I also added an "author's note" concerning where Robin Hood will be found (under Western Europe > Folklore). /// Also made relevant changes to home page.

12/21/98, 4pm-ish: I uploaded at least a dozen or more revisions to the homepage today. I made some minor changes in the text (adding "mythological and sacred traditions" in two places for the sake of "keywords"; also moved the links under "Important Notes" [near the top of the page] to their foregoing texts instead of setting them off -- this looks cleaner to me now). But 95% of the revisions were to meta tags, which no one but search-engine spiders will ever see! I've discovered it's not enough to create a website and send the URL to Alta Vista, Lycos, Galaxy, etc. I assumed humans reviewed new sites. They don't. There are too many tens of millions out there. Spiders & robots make the decisions about where a site is listed. If a site is #9,734 out of a listing of over a million listed under "Mythology," it'll never get seen. So using freeware called Meta Medic (which tells you when you're in the ballpark but not how to get there, unless you buy their whole program, which I probably wouldn't know how to activate anyway), I spent the day testing various meta tags. Their critique of my first try was "very poor," then I got "poor," many more tries brought me to "good," and finally I received a "very good." Now I'll resubmit the URL & see what happens. The spiders will no longer find "Mything Links" out there -- they'll find "Mythology: Mything Links." Mything Links, alone, worked against me because spiders don't grok puns! "Mythology" is the important word, and then a ton of keywords related to the actual page's content.

12/17/98, 11:46am: with all the depressing turmoil between Iraq and impeachment, I find myself thinking often about what I read a few days ago -- that this is the year of the earth-tiger for the first time in 60 years.  It's on a page from Shelly Wu's Chinese astrology site, so I decided it should go on my Star Lore page now instead of waiting for a few weeks.  I've also been haunted by the exquisite image of Orion as a Japanese Drum of Winter.  The actual graphic is brown on black and I wasn't sure how well it could be altered.  I experimented with various settings over a period of several hours -- and suddenly had something I love.  So it's on the page now too.

12/15/98, 12:38pm: inspired by Jim Matterer's holiday card on his medieval foods page, over the past few days I've been creating a "Solstice Card" for my own site.  I think all the words are finally right, so I uploaded it.  Maybe no one will ever see it, but I like having it there.

12/15/98, 1:14am:  I spoke too soon -- I had a nagging sense that I'd forgotten something important for Star Lore so I double-checked my off-stage URLs and found what I wanted -- a weekly "Newscope" by WolfStar.  I've only read 2 weeks worth but it's fascinating (and can be depressing), especially with all the sanctimonious myopia going on in Washington.  I've now uploaded it (also changed the link-colors on this page as the kelly-green (activating) and cream (visited) colors didn't work for me here).  Now maybe I can get some rest.

12/14/98, 2:19pm: uploaded two new links (archetypal astrology and a Japanese folktale) to the Star Lore site.  Combined with last night's annotations and images, I figure this is enough to warrant a tree, not just a "+," on the homepage, so I added it.  Another homepage change is that I decided to give a pale lavender color to all the small-fonted dates indicating changes -- they'll be easier for people to spot now.   /// 11:42pm: uploaded a third new major link to the Star Lore site -- it's on Greek and Roman lore from Phanes Press and includes gorgeous data on Delphinus, exactly the kind of lore I had hoped to find for this page; I also negativized and colorized Bayer's Aquarius, fell in love with the image, and made it the opening one on the page; the former one (Auriga and the little She-Goat) is now at the end.  A fourth possible link I meant to add today on Jung and astrology turned out to be just a collection of not very exciting Jungian quotes, so I'm skipping it.  Thus, for now, this page -- and I -- must rest. Many student papers to grade, books to read, sleep to find, 7 weeks' old cough/flu to heal.  Enuf.

12/13-14/98, 2:09am: worked all evening and finally uploaded the results to the Star Lore site. When I check my daily status activity reports, I notice quite a few visitors to my Creation and Star Lore pages.  I don't have much at either page, yet there's obviously interest in them.  So tonight I decided to work on Star Lore. I didn't even have an image there (and only one Tour Egypt "survey" link)!  Now I have 4 new links and three images (all "blue-d" to "162" on the funky program I use, and I negativized both Andromedas -- love the look! -- very hypnotic).  On some pages, this work would warrant an additional tree-marker on the homepage but I have such a huge number of URLs for this site that I can only give it a date/+.  Tomorrow, time permitting, I hope to add another 3 or 4 links.  Then I'll let that page rest for awhile (and me too).

12/13/98, 2:57pm: uploaded changes (see below) to Medieval Life & Times.  Then uploaded the revised homepage with changes noted below.  /// 9:16am: uploaded 2 more seasonal Moon Calendar links for the last two weeks in November 1998 to the Wicca page (e-mailed the site's owner, Christian Brunner, to see if he's doing a 1999 update as I'd like to keep it on my page).  Homepage: revised the tree/sun/date+ codes so that I can signal visitors when I add a few new URLs &/or images to a page (which wouldn't warrant adding a new tree-marker); added Jung Index URL (yesterday they cross-linked my site to theirs & I've been meaning to do the same to theirs for ages); added under "New" that there's now Yule feast data on Medieval Life & Times page (and used the new date/+ code for that homepage listing).  Then I spent the rest of the day revising my opening comments for that medieval page (they seemed too gloomy, so I softened my focus somewhat and opened out the context to include delight); finding and re-sizing two new cheerful illustrations (also enlarged the opening image so the details are easier to see); and annotating the link to Jim Matterer's "Master Huen's Boke of Gode Cookery."

12/12/98, 12:18pm: uploaded several good pagan sites on the Yule season (with links to Chanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa as well) to the W. European Wicca page.  Put a "new!" icon on the homepage to announce this, although I'll remove it the first of the year; also added another tree-marker to the listing on the homepage.

12/5/98, 7:31pm: Linda DeLaine just let me know that she's created a new webpage for her beautiful "Trilogy" and other art.  I removed the previous link and substituted the new one (which includes a nice link to my own site in return) on the Grail page.

12/2/98, 12:25pm: even though I have had neither an opening image nor any URL on my Creation Myths page (and thus no tree-marker for it on the home page), my status reports show that people are clicking on this page nevertheless.  So today I grokked one of my many URLs so that they will at least have a starting point, and I also scanned & resized a great image.  I uploaded both to the page & added a tree-marker to the home page; added Jos. Campbell Foundation URL to home page.  I also clarified on the home-page's bottom that its "latest update" applies only to it, and not to the site as a whole (many of my updates don't effect the home page & will only be noted in this log).

11/29/98, 12:33am: on Maori page's opening Hei Tiki photo, changed link from "eNZed," which no longer has the art section in which I found this lovely image (and which, in any case never asked permission to use it from the Otago Museum), to an e-mail link to Moira White, the Curator of Humanities at the Otago Museum.  I'm still hoping she'll write a page on the sacred art of the tiki.  If she does, I'll add that link later. /// Approx. 1:15am: resized and added color photo of New Zealand fjord landscape, source unknown, to the "General" section on this same Maori page. ///10:41am: added copyright holder and link back to origin-point for St. Paul/Aquarius illustration on the Western Europe opening page.

11/28/98, 9:44pm: on Near East page, added Time/Life and Bible Review links to their respective home pages.  In all the rush, I'd forgotten to do this earlier -- suddenly remembered while watching Deep Space Nine!  ///  Have been checking AltaVista for 2 days and my site now appears with them, as of today. ///  Heard some very negative, disturbing things through the Webcom grapevine yesterday about Lycos (their spiders over-exploit sites with good images & they refuse to stop), so last night I sent them a "dramatic" plea asking them to please cancel my listing before it even gets started; since it turns out that they have a rotten reputation for ignoring more "rational" requests, I've nothing to lose by adding some drama.  I hope it works.  I don't want their reckless robots to impair my ability to use images [FYI: as of 12/2/98 they haven't even had the courtesy to respond; I may be stuck with them; FYI: they replied 12/4/98 with a webpage telling users how to manipulate the robot.txt page to exclude robots from images, etc.  Unfortunately, it's beyond my skills.  So be it].

11/26/98, Thanksgiving night, 7pm:  so far, response to this site from students and colleagues has been wonderful.  Now it's time to see if the work will be useful for others as well.  Late last night into the wee hours, and for a few hours this afternoon, I revised the Meta tags for the eleven main "index" pages, uploading them as I went.  Some "took," others didn't, so I had to keep trying, clearing the cache, checking to be sure the changes went through, etc., etc.  Finally, just before 3pm, all of it worked and I officially went "public" by listing the site's URL with six search engines: Alta Vista, Lycos, Northern Light, Omphalos, Galaxy, and IPL (Internet Public Library).  Next week I'll probably list with 4 or 5 more.  Actually, it doesn't happen instantaneously.  Alta Vista is the fastest -- 24-48 hours.  Some of the others will take 2 weeks or longer.  One of them, Lycos, I think, responded with a message that my site had been successfully "spidered," which cracked me up.  Webs and spiders have been given entirely new meanings these days.

11/25/98, 8:17pm:  heard this morning from LA Jung people with data on the ouroboros -- it's public domain, as far as they know -- they only modified it slightly; so I revised the "ID" source and added an annotated "Here Be Dragons" link to this Dragons & Serpents page; also added its first tree-marker on Home Page.

11/24/98, approx. 7:55pm: scanned, negativized, and then uploaded a wonderful ouroboros image for the Dragons & Serpents page. E-mailed C.G. Jung Institute in LA for permission to use it, since I took it from one of their brochures. I won't change the Home Page until I have their permission. Since the page currently has no "marker-tree," it's unlikely anyone will go there except the Jung people. I just want them to see how handsome it looks!

11/23/98, 7:52pm: uploaded 4 new links to COMMON THEMES: "Trees & Plant Lore" after spending about 8 hours exploring and annotating them, plus gathering a few new ones for later use; added a third tree to the homepage and reduced date-fonting.  Decided to add live links to this Updates Log so that those interested in an expanded page can go there directly instead of waiting for the home page to reload.

11/22/98, 4:22pm: uploaded a single link to the COMMON THEMES: "Shamanism" page so that at least there's something there; put a tree next to this category on the Home Page. /// 4:47pm: uploaded a number of links on entheogens to the COMMON THEMES: "Trees & Plant Lore" page; enlarged the opening image by 3 clicks, which I like much better; added a second tree for this category on the Home Page. /// 5:30pm-ish: uploaded new info on Home Page about dating new additions next to their "tree" and using a "+" sign instead of the "Updated" icon next to a "sun."

11/21/98, 12:25am: on Western Europe's "Prehistoric" page, I added Ernie Black's Standing Stone Photo Gallery & switched its position with his already listed collection of links; made minor text changes to his links collection. /// 12:50am: on Eastern Europe's Russian Fairytales page, I deleted several lines from the Dreamworks annotation because they're no longer relevant. /// 1:26am: on Home Page, added a link to Tony's "Artistic Pixels," since his "WebSauce" is now defunct; added a second tree for W. Europe's "Prehistoric" page; minor text change to Worldwide section; added launch date at bottom.

11/19/98, 11:17am: after 3 frustrating days of trying (Webcom was having FTP problems again), I was finally able to upload a revised Russian Fairytales & Folklore page.  Andrew had sent me a better version of Tradestone's full 12 Months illustration so I switched it with the original version; I also added a CU of the 12 Months child near the fire.  I switched Sunbird's full Sadko & Sea-King to a CU of the Sea-King dancing in his underwater kingdom (the detail makes a better impression); I also added a CU of Sunbird's Humpbacked Pony.  Made several updates in text for entries at both Tradestone & Sunbirds.

11/15/98, 5:25pm: Added a second Cinderella image to Western Europe's Folklore & Fairytales page; this is a detail from a Russian lacquer box fromTradestone. Since Prokofiev's music for Cinderella has given us so many exquisite ballet versions of the fairytale, it seems especially appropriate to have a Russian image on the website.  ///  6:20pm: corrected Arthurian Themes page -- I inadvertently had "freedom of the thighs" instead of "friendship of the thighs" in my brief commentary below the picture of Arthur's farewell to his wife.

11/14/98, 6:42pm: Added Brad Burkhart's e-mail link to his stunning"Birth Worship" clay relief on the "Earth Goddesses & Gods" page, under COMMON THEMES.  He's thinking of creating a website for his sculptures -- I hope he does & will add that link when it's available.