Thank you for your reply and to Bob Arning for his words: "It may not
be much consolation, but explorers rarely have the benefit of paved
roads."

> One of the basic ideas behind OOP in general and Smalltalk/Self in
> particular is (IMHO) that there is great power in "mirroring the real
> world" when designing software. In short - the less we need to transform
> our model (which typically is out there in the real world) when we try
> to build software for it, the better.

-- I might be getting philosophical here:-- 
        I doubt that the world is made out of tangible things
        ("Gegenstände" in German). At least not the interesting parts
        of it. If you look at the postings here (interesting part of
        the world) you'll see that we talk about things like
        "explorers", "roads" (both ment figuratively), "ideas", "OOP",
        "power","mirroring", "software" and other abstract things,
        none of which have an obvious visual translation. We can only
        do this because we use *language* and not a point-and-click
        paradigm. This is why I am not too excieted about "visual
        programming".

        This does not mean I don't like OOP. OOP applies well to
        "explorers" and "roads". But the drawOn: method and the Viewer
        will be somewhat tricky.
-- philosophical part ends here --

But back to the original question:

I thought it might be a good idea to keep a journal of what I did. I
tried two things:

(1) keep the journal in emacs. Problem: cannot cut&paste from
    PluggableLists (from the Browsers)

(2) Keep the journal within squeak. Tried the book morph and a
    TextMoph in there. Could write text and paste
    PluggableLists. However could not resize the book just fullscrean
    off/on. 

Any suggestions ?

Learnig OO

I don't think that OO as such is the problem when entering the squeak
world. There is an initial hickup but *that* road is well paved. I got
the blue book and it answers most syntcatical questions. The problem
is the big big squeak system.