On Beyond Letters

Christmas, 2015

Our family members are good at living their lives, but not at keeping in touch! Letters are few and far between. We are also spread across the continental US and in Yorkshire, England. In the past, we were also not apt to call each other just to shoot the breeze, as we didn’t want to pay for long distance phone calls.

During the first ten years of the 21^st century, the World Wide Web bloomed with many ways to communicate simply and economically. Because I lived with Don Starnes, who is particularly tech savvy, I was often on the “cutting edge” of these new ways of communicating. (We joked that Don himself was on the “bleeding edge,” suffering because he often tried to do things with computers that were theoretically possible, but not quite available.)

In 2001 I put up an MSN community for the Kronlokken family. It was intended to replace a newsletter I had been editing called The Intercoastal Hobbit. The children of my siblings were the first to sign up. I wondered why others didn’t, but my brother reminded me that I was surrounded by high-speed DSL lines. Others weren’t! It did limp along for a few years, however.

By November 2002, Don made a space on his website and wrote the HTML code for us to begin a weblog, or blog. We called it “Living in the Flatlands,” because we wanted to write about our daily lives and some of the ideas we had about them. I did most of the writing, though Don edited each essay, trying to make them more universal. It was an exercise in learning how to write for other people, though I loved the freedom of not caring who read it, or when. When Jesse, Don’s son, graduated from high school and our lives changed, I stopped writing for the blog and published the articles as a book, which you can see here.

My nephew Peter Taylor, who lived with us during the early 2000’s, wrote down his experiences in a weblog he called “The Random Englishman,” thus keeping his family and friends in England posted on his exploits.

Google came up with its Blogger software in about the middle of the decade, which gave anyone the space and ability to post a blog. It came in handy for all of us when my sister Ruth and her husband Don Evans rebuilt the family cabin in Minnesota. They used a Blogspot to keep us posted on what was going on. The original cabin was bulldozed in 2006 and a fine new log home was built in its stead. In my journal for June 27, 2007 I wrote, “The rafters are going up on the cabin at Kabekona today. Every day I look at the new photographs Ruth and Don put up. The progress is dramatic; they are ahead of schedule. ‘We just love to go over and smell the wood!’ Ruth says.”

In May of 2008 I “succumbed” to Facebook. It was the easiest way to communicate with a friend in Hong Kong. I loved it at first, as more and more of my family signed on. It was thrilling when new family photos showed up in living color. Facebook still retains some of its ability to disseminate family news, but you do have to plow through a lot more ads and re-posts than at first.

About the middle of the decade, I began to call my sister Solveig in England using Skype. We set up a schedule for speaking each week correlating our time zones. Solveig hasn’t been able to travel much, and it has helped immeasurably to keep in touch with that part of the family. We even read books to each other on Skype! I used Skype for other phone calls, of course, enjoying the ability to see into someone’s life with a camera.

Don and Jesse got their first iPhones about 2008. In the summers, I often drove Jesse from place to place, so I got a little Korean pre-paid phone on which I learned to text (taught by Jesse) and keep in touch. At least ten years later, I still have this little phone, which has faithfully worked ever since. It can’t connect to the web, but it also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg every month!

Other amazing uses of the web began in those years, including wikipedia.org and youtube.com. It is now hard to imagine the world without these knowledge-bases. By 2008, I had published two of my books with iUniverse, and was outlining the characters for the series of books I called So Are You to My Thoughts. This blog details the background and progress of this series, which, at this writing is within sight of completion. I have just finished a first draft of Chapter 10, with fifteen chapters to go.

I’m grateful for the advances in inexpensive personal communication over the web in recent years. I believe the Kronlokkens are in better touch with each other. And I am very happy to be able to use Createspace to publish my family saga. Don is still out there, ahead of the pack, helping me at every stage. It would be nice if I could help him. But, “I can’t be helped,” he tells me.