The great migration

It’s fall again and the natives are getting restless. At church people are exchanging contact info and talking about their snowbird plans for the Carolinas and Florida. Geese and ducks are beginning to flock up, and the herons are topping up their tanks for the long haul down to the southern estuaries of Cuba. I suspect that their balmy restorative Caribbean stay is where they get that relaxed gait and slow smooth takeoff.

I’m a different kind of bird, having spent every winter since 1957 in the North Country–more like the blue jay that sticks around to scold at your window all year long. So it is with some anxiety that I view a couple of migrations of a different kind.

This morning it was email. St. Lawrence moved everyone at the station to a new kind of email server and we went hours–hours I tell you–without email of any kind, watching with bated breath until all the info was brought back to life once again. All the laptops and smart phones belonging to staff migrated to the kitchen, where IT techs migrated over from the main campus to do the necessary voodoo that they do to keep us all connected.

And next up is ncpr.org, which will migrate to a new set of servers shortly. If this goes smoothly, you will never know it–same pages, same address, same stuff. As a mode of travel it’s like using the transporter on the Enterprise–everything gets disassembled and copied on one end, beamed to the other end, and reassembled. Once the new location gets checked out, the old is deleted. (Wouldn’t want two copies of Spock running around.) I wish all the migrants well and look ahead with some relief to when the North Country is left to the jays and other hard cases for another winter.