About "KayPoe's" Place - and - What's going on now?

The birth - "KayPoe's" Place was born in July, 1997, as a single web page that I didn't even want to make.  After months of urging by a friend who insisted I had to "just try making one page.  Maybe you'll like it," I finally gave in, but very reluctantly.  (Guess what? I liked it!)   "KayPoe's" Photo Album has been the title of that page from day one, but it was altered slightly during the great web page update of 1999.  I'm keeping that first page "as is" now, as a museum piece on this site.  :o)

What's with the name, the butterfly and the daisies? - The reason I write my name here as "KayPoe" (no space, and in quotation marks) is that neither of those is actually part of my real name. It is the way my online friends told me they "pronounced" the odd combination of letters that was my screen name back in 1997, when they saw it on chat screens or on emails from me.  It seemed like a good name to use when I made my first web page.  The name has stuck with me, and with my web site, ever since.  So has the butterfly stuck around.  He's been here from the very beginning, and I consider him to be the official mascot of "KayPoe's" Place now.  The daisies have been part of the package almost from the beginning, too.

The growing up years of this place - For two years, "KayPoe's" Place was a private little spot on the web where I put photos and other things I wanted to share with my own friends and family.  It was totally unknown outside that little circle of folks I knew, and that's just the way I liked it.  I will never know who was responsible for "letting the cat out of the bag", so to speak, but in 1999 "strangers" started showing up here in droves!  All of a sudden I was getting hundreds of emails every day from people I didn't know, telling me they'd enjoyed their visit to "KayPoe's" Place!  That surprised me and (at first) it didn't please me.  I felt like the victim of a home invasion or something!  I decided to remove all my pages from the web then and make "KayPoe's" Place disappear forever. *poof!*  A friend convinced me to wait a week or two, and I'm so glad he did!  Now I think it's really neat that people I don't even know come here to visit and have a look around.  Whether I know you or don't know you, I think of all visitors to my home here as friends now, and I'm really glad you've stopped by.  (Thank you for coming, and you're welcome to return any time!)  :o)  In the years since 1999, I've heard from people on little islands I'd never even heard of before, and from people on every continent except Antarctica (are you listening, people in Antarctica?  Palmer Station?  McMurdo Station?  Helloooo?  I know you have computers there.)  :o)   I've become good friends with some of the folks I first "met" when they typed a message in my guest book or sent me an email from here, and I have even met a few of them in person.  By the way, the page that was such a big hit in 1999 is one of the "old wiggly pages" that you'll read about if you check out the "Special Pages" index here.  :o)

The "theme" - For a long time, I didn't consider having a theme for this site, probably because for a long time I didn't think of it as a real web site.  It was simply a convenient way for me to share things I liked with people I knew.  By the time "theme" entered my mind, I already had accumulated quite a conglomeration of unrelated things here, and it seemed that the time for devising a theme had long since passed.   Some time after that, though, I realized that all those seemingly unrelated things had really created their own theme. in spite of my lack of planning..... actually two sort of intertwining themes.

One part of the theme is "happy".  "KayPoe's" Place is a happy place.  I know from the mail I get that this is a place where people come to relax and look at pictures and recall pleasant memories and sing and smile and escape for a while from busy-ness and sadness and stress and worry and all manner of serious stuff.  This isn't the place to be if you want to brood or feel blue, and you won't find anything here that will tax your brain or bring you down.  I didn't try to make it be that kind of place.  That just happened.   I can't imagine that "KayPoe's" Place will ever NOT be the kind of place it is now.

The other part of the theme is that as this place has evolved, it has become more and more really MY very personal place on the web.  In choosing the things I wanted to share here, I've managed to surround myself with things that I like and that have some special significance to me, just as I do in my off-the-web home.  The main title of my first (and I thought last!) web page, "KayPoe's" Photo Album, could serve as a title for a great many of the pages on this site now.  All the photos of things I've seen and places I've been really are like a big photo album.  And the sub-title of that very first web page -- "a few of my favorite things" -- turned out to be even more prophetic and fitting of this site, in fact.  It's just that "a few" are now "many".

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Here are a couple more old pages that have links only on this "About" page.

This was one of my backyard gardens when I lived in Ohio:
"KayPoe's" Mountain

This next page hasn't been updated for many years.  I used to use it for testing things:
"Just Stuff"