Experimental Post (an Oldie)

I’m expecting that the Press This feature–by which I provided old posts, from the Archives,  for new readers, will never be restored. So this is my first effort to provide the same service without Press This.

From the Archives: Potbelly Hill (2013)

An Archeological Enigma: Potbelly Hill

This won’t work either if most of my Archives remain in the limbo of “File Loading.”

Oh, and regular readers, you’re gonna love this:

The engineer quizzing me about my WordPress woes wanted to know… if I’d added any code! Like, if somebody put a gun to my head and said, “Awright, load some code, or I’ll blow out your brains,” that would be the end for me. Adios, muchachos.

Problem Solved, Maybe

Now it looks like, after extensive work with the engineer, my text it readable again like a normal text, black letters on white background. Please let me know if this is what you see!

It looks to me like all your comments came out properly. I don’t know if Press Thgis is going to work now, but first things first.

Thank you all so very much for staying with me as I wrestled with this monster.

Mayday, Mayday–Help!!!!!

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Well, thanks to WordPress “helping” me, now I can’t read my own blog. Now it’s light blue letters on a grey background, practically invisible, certainly unreadable. For all I know, none of you out there can read it, either, and I am writing into a void–at best, performing a soliloquy before an empty house. I wonder if Richard Burton ever had to do that.

Following the instructions of the “Happiness Engineer”–heh-heh!–I pressed a “Re-install Press This” button and the whole thing turned into a pile of dead fish. I have no idea what to do now.

All I’ve got left is prayer, so that’s what I’ll be doing for a while.

If any of you can read this, please let me know.

Aaaah, Computers!

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For the benefit of new readers, each day I like to re-post a “best of” item from a few years ago.

But I wasn’t allowed to do that today. Maybe I can’t do it anymore.

Why? Because, says WordPress, “Your bookmarklet has been deprecated.”

What??? What in thunderation is that supposed to mean? Does any normal person know what that means? Trying to find out from WordPress would take hours, and I don’t have the time. I hate losing this feature of my blog.

Grrrrrrrrrr!

My Chapters Are Done!

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I worked my brains out today, doing over those chapters that the blasted computer devoured yesterday, and they’re all done, emailed to my editor, and printed out on paper, too. Calloo, callay.

Not that The Temptation is finished. There are still more chapters to go, and the Lord has not yet shown me how the story ends.

Meanwhile, some animal called a “shabarak” has entered the story and I don’t yet know what kind of beast it is. I’m leaning toward a Macrauchenia (pictured above). I’ve always been partial to it. It used to live in South America.

Mr. Blog is awful slow today. I hope a cat video later on can pep it up.

Crikey, am I tired!

My Chapters Are Blowin’ in the Wind

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Well, our IT guy has come and gone, he wrestled with the problem and couldn’t find the cause, much less the solution, and the upshot of it is that the first four chapters in the set are still here, but the last two–the longest ones, of course–are gone. I will have to do them all over again from scratch.

Because of the way I work, those chapters cannot be exactly duplicated. I was only just saying the other day that some of the material in those chapters was as good as anything I’ve ever done. For those who wonder about it, we do have backup, etc., but somehow this stuff never got backed up. The chapters as written are lost somewhere in the bowels of the computer. And Excalibur lies at the bottom of a lake or pond somewhere in England. Good luck trying to find it.

So I’ll write them all over again and ask the Lord to help me make them better than they were.

Computer Disaster! S.O.S! Help!

So I’m typing my current chapter set, and I’m almost done, 27 pages, over 11,000 words–and suddenly the whole blamed thing disappears! Back to “Page 1 of 1, 0 words.”

Where is my work????? How can I get it back? I was just typing away and there it went, gone, vanished, off to see the fairies. When I search for the document, all I get is this blank page.

Anybody out there who can help? Like, before my head explodes! Help!!!!

Why My Book’s Not Finished, or, Aunt Joan’s Banking Hell

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Patty called me in from working on my book because she was trying to do Aunt Joan’s banking online and it wasn’t working. Twice she called the bank, and twice she got cut off. I’m power of attorney, so before we get cut off, I have to go through all this re-bop about authorizing my wife to speak to a representative. Then we get cut off and have to start over.

Third time: okay, we don’t get cut off, but for some unknown reason the user name and password don’t work anymore and have to be replaced. By way of our speaker phone, says the banker. We don’t have a speaker phone. Well, your cell phone, then. We don’t have a cell phone. And the rules say she can’t talk to my wife about this, it has to be me, and I don’t know nothin’. So Pat goes across the room to the computer while I sit here and talk on the phone, back and forth. They have to converse through me. And my allergies are dancing the lambada with my respiratory system.

Every time we have to do this, both parties want to talk at once and I can’t make out what either of them is saying. And so it goes back and forth, back and forth, for the better part of an hour.

At least it finally has a happy ending: problem solved. I can go back to trying to breathe.

Really, I do understand the need for security in these matters. We don’t want some schlemiel in Pakistan dipping into our bank accounts. But meanwhile I’ve totally forgotten what I was about to write. *Sigh*

Loading the Computer

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We have Adam the tech guy here today to load all of the recovered data from our busted hard drive into our new hard drive. Gee, you’d almost think I knew what I was talking about. But I don’t.

Anyway, he says it’s going well, he’s restoring Patty’s assorted games that she bought, and if he’s done soon enough, I can go for a bike ride. And we will be altogether back in business, computer-wise.

Hell Ride II

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The good news is that the experts have recovered almost all our data and we are back in one piece. The bad news is that we got lost again coming home and just about a whole day is up the spout.

The route to this data recovery place is quite complex, and it’s really easy to miss a turn or two when you’re in unfamiliar surroundings in heavy traffic, much of which consists of aspiring kamikaze pilots.

The process of putting the data back into our computer, as the data recovery man explained it, is a project that, for sheer ornery complication, is somewhere on the order of taking a census of all the ant-hills in our neighborhood. A minute or two into his explanation, my brain was feverishly seeking a way out of my cranium. Patty says she understood it.

We did manage to avoid those tricky mountain roads today, but for all our efforts to follow the directions to a T, we still wound up with an extra ten miles’ wandering through parts unknown. Patty says it wasn’t quite as bad as the first time, but you could’ve fooled me.

One cherished cigar later, and I’m looking forward to my supper, a nap, and enough rest to start writing coherently again. I’ll have a lot of work to make up tomorrow, including, somehow, a Newswithviews column. All I really want to do is get back to writing up the new set of chapters of my book.

As hell rides go, this one wasn’t much, compared to some of the examples cited in your comments: see Phoebe’s and Linda’s, earlier today. But it was certainly enough for me.