upgrading the haloscan account was a big step for me. for the past year and a half i've been blogging i have prided myself with the fact that blogging was entirely free. sure, it wasted a ton of time. but in my feverish brain i could convince myself that the wasted time actually a good economic decision. the time i spent on blogs and blogging, was time was not spending money doing something else. viewed that way, all the time spent on this site can be made into a rather large economic boon.
in any case, dumping money into this site i viewed as off-limits. being free distinguished blogging from all of my other half-assed hobbies. sure, blogging has caused me to dip into my wallet now and then. during election season there were pleas for donations to candidates or causes and sometimes i did donate. but i told myself that they were political donations, not money spent on blogging. now and then impoverished bloggers have told tales of unemployment and woe and rattled their tip jars in a way that i found hard to resist. sometimes i didn't, but that (i told myself) was helping out someone in need, not a blogging expense. when fellow liberal coalition member steve gillard was in the hospital last year, i sent him a book about central asia that i found on his amazon wish list, but that was a get-well gift for a sick person, not a blogging expense (it also was part of my ongoing campaign to get other people obsessed with uzbekistan, so it was a doubly good cause).
flickr probably came closest to the line before today. i originally joined to use it as a tool to post photos here. that is still one of the reasons i use it. but i've also tried to set up a travel photo archive there. over the past few months i've been slowly but surely uploading all my travel photos into several online albums. probably no one will ever look at them, but i want them there and, for whatever reason, i've gotten really into uploading, writing comments to, and organizing my photos.* it didn't take long before i needed the extra space that came with an upgrade to a pro account. i paid, but only after convincing myself that i was not paying for blogging per se. flickr may have started out as a blogging tool and, while it still is, i need the upgrade for an entirely different, unrelated to blogging, purpose. thus, the upgrade was not a blogging expense, but a flickr expense--an entirely different line item on the noz budget. Q.E.D.
i can't talk my way out of the haloscan upgrade, however. my haloscan account has no purpose other than this site. is this the exception that proves the rule or the crossing of a rubicon? if i'm broke a few months down the line we will know which one it turned out to be.
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* speaking of my travel photo archives, as of today i finished preparing the italy 2002 photo set, where it joins my uzbekistan 2003 and british columbia 2004 sets. because i'm working backwards, next up is my 2001 trip to mali, west africa. the problem is, this is the first set of photos from the pre-digital age. i just have photos and negatives for mali which means i need to get all 200 or so photos scanned. if i do it myself it will take hours. if i pay someone to do it, it will cost much more than i really should be paying for a photo archive that no one will look at.
