Seppala Kennels 'SledDogBlog'

the forgotten Seppalas

Back in October I mentioned my old friend Ramón Rojas in Spain. After re-establishing contact with Ramón and acquiring a new Spanish-speaking friend of Seppalas in Arizona, I became fired with enthusiasm to strengthen the interest and bonds between the SSSD Project and Spanish-speaking mushers. The Project was born in Spain, actually. Isa Boucher and I spent three years with Dreama, Hurley, Kidron and Norde, our founder generation dogs this time around, on a lovely old farmstead called Masía Maurí in the Prepirineo region of Catalunya, in the northern part of Spain. The Catalan mushers were extremely friendly, cordial people. Isa and I still remember our sojourn there with longing. There exists no such esprit de corps and collegiality among Yukon dog drivers, unfortunately; our road has been a lonely one since returning to Canada.

Of course the Spanish are ignored by the US racing mob as being beneath their notice. The ISSSC has no interest in Ramón or his forgotten Seppalas; they probably would not even consider them Seppalas due to their Solovyev Russian bloodline content. Ramón's road has probably been as lonely as our own in recent years. So it's time to do something about these geographic solitudes.

An experimental new section of the SSSD Project website was just uploaded tonight, entitled "Séppala Hispánica" -- a website within a website, a place for Spanish aficionados of Seppalas to come for information. As yet it is mainly a kernel, a newly-sprouted seed; half of the pages are only place-holders with their content yet to be translated and formatted. With the help of my friend in Arizona, my rusty Spanish should be decently readable.

This development is also a forerunner of major improvements for the main SSSD website, though, because the new pages are styled and formatted with CSS -- look, ma! no tables! If there are no major glitches in these, then the other core pages of the website will soon be uploaded in CSS formatted versions, to be followed slowly by a gradual reformatting of every page in the entire site. It won't happen overnight, not with two hundred-odd pages to hand-code. That's right; I'm not doing this with anybody's web-design software. My old app doesn't support CSS and I can't afford Dreamweaver. Besides, this way I'm forced to learn to do it right.

One way or another, we are going to forge a worldwide Seppala network. The ISSSC have proved to any reasonable person's satisfaction that they care nothing for unity or inclusiveness. So, since we cannot do this thing with them, we shall do it without them, just as they would apparently have it. I'll take the society of polite people like Luis Till and Ramón Rojas any day, over that of the self-styled "movers and shakers" of ISSSC's omnipotent Board.

Posted by jjeffrey at November 10, 2003 09:09 PM