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Every time I take a step forward with the new blog/website, I get a little excited — and then something happens to forestall the excitement. It’s kind of like when we were sitting in Stanstead airport waiting to catch our plane to Greece (to Greece!) and even though we hadn’t slept for more than an hour out of the past 48, I was still sitting on the edge of my seat, jiggling my leg up and down with anticipation: watching the plane come in, unload, get cleaned, meals loaded…and then the intercom notified us that the Athens airport was overcrowded and we’d have to wait 30, no, 45, no 50 minutes to load.
POR QUE?! [insert hand-wringing here]
That’s what moving to the new blog is like, albeit less expensive and I don’t have to sit for hours in a cramped cattle compartment that hurtles through space at hundreds of miles an hour with children kicking the seat behind me.
Erm. Anyway.
I’ve encountered the following bugs, many of which are still unfixed:
- No bulleted or numbered lists of any kind. For example, this list should be bulleted, but it’s not. (The Husband says this is fixable. However, he has also taken to texting me from his iPhone WHILE SITTING NEXT TO ME, so things are a little tense right now.)
- No quick-edit tag at the bottom of each post. (The Husband says this is fixable, but when I texted him back and asked how, he replied *yawn* BRB, pushed my feet off his lap and went to bed.)
- Uploading photos has yet to be successful, partially because of size and partially because now there’s an extra step: no more uploading straight from the folder, they have to be in a separate folder (I think on the server?) before I can upload them. (Or maybe that has something to do with thumbnails? I don’t know because The Husband doesn’t write in complete iPhone-texted sentences.)
- Importing the posts directly from Blogger to my own server-hosted blog wreaked havoc, with all the less-than/greater-than brackets getting stripped (these: <>), which meant no formatting, no links, no pictures, no videos, nothin’. The fix for this was to import from Blogger to a WordPress.com-hosted blog, and then export the WP.com blog to my hard drive and import it to my server…but the server apparently has a maximum upload capability that needs to be upped before that happens.
So that’s where things are. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled life when I’ve properly bribed our server admin.
I imported all my old posts from my Blogger blog…only to have all of them come in without the carrot brackets (these: < >). Thus, all the html tags don’t work, nor does the list formatting, nothing. The Husband thinks this is a bug and that I should delete and re-import them, but my go-go-energy-gadget command is also failing. In a word, blech.
Aiiieee, jet lag!
More to come.
Liquids in a plastic bag. *sigh*
Passport and Ambien. These are the only things really necessary.
Int’l Drivers Permit
Learning how to order Greek salad. Only there it’s just salad (
salata).
Oof. Heavy. Can we go now?
For graduation, there was cake. That was the bribe to attract family to help build The Fence.
First we dug post holes.
Then we cemented them in place. Those suckers ain’t ever moving.
Framing.
Affixing via screws.
Gate.
Front fence; gate yet to come.
More fence.
We’re not done — still have a couple gates and a whole side of the house to go (property line issue), but we got a lot done and I much prefer the newer, privater back yard.
On a different note, we have leftover cake, key lime pie, and cookies. Anyone up for dessert some evening this week? Y’know, before we leave for Greece. FOR GREECE, I SAY.
There’s this fencing company in a town about an hour south of here that I found advertising on Craigslist. I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to do that, but hey, I need fencing supplies and they claimed to have good prices. They had an online “request information form,” which I filled out. I asked the price of pickets, galvanized steel posts, and a double drive-through gate.
Here’s the reply I got from an e-mail account with the name Diane attached to it:
d/drive 10′ opening $182.85. post are 8′ and a structural .116 wall at $12.95 each are 2anbtr 1x6x6′ d/e real cedar this is old growth cedar doing a 3 rail ( includes fence boards post, 2×4′s, hangers,& screws) estimate at $8.20 per foot for more info call toll free 1-866-xxx-xxxx.
Whoa. Paragraphs are your friend, Diane, and I recommend some punctuation, too, while you’re at it.
Anyway, so I puzzled over the reply for a long time. I figured out that the double drive-through gate was $182. Got it. The posts are 8 ft (which I already knew — that’s standard); d/e means dog-eared, which I don’t want; but after that, WTF? “2anbtr”?
I could have called at this point, but the reply was so ambiguous that I thought I’d better see if they even had the type of products I wanted. Simple question. So I e-mailed back and said,
Diane, thank you for your reply. However, I’m having trouble understanding the information you sent.
I need about 150 ft. of fence, which I believe is about 300 pickets. I do not want dog-eared pickets, and I do not want to buy pre-made fencing. Is it possible to buy 300 non-dog-eared cedar 6′ pickets through your company?
Is it possible to get a double-drive gate with square-topped pickets instead of dog-eared?
Thank you.
The reply I got said,
FOR MORE INFO CALL TOLL FREE 1-866-xxx-xxxx mike
*sigh* Dude. First of all, I don’t know why “mike” is answering “Diane’s” e-mail, but WTH, I don’t really care. Second, don’t yell at me. Third, on your website, you have an e-mail form for questions. Clearly you have an e-mail account for receiving and responding to said questions, so you should be able to handle e-mail queries. I prefer to e-mail than call, partly because I have a mild phone phobia and mostly because it’s just faster, and ESPECIALLY WHEN I’M ASKING FUCKING YES AND NO QUESTIONS. I don’t think my expectations are out of line: is it that hard to say “yes,” “no,” or “we might be able to work something out, but please call us to do that”? Can you really afford to give bad customer service in this economy?
At any rate, we got a $50 off Home Depot coupon in the mail yesterday, so I’ll save myself the trouble of calling for more information.
Washing your hands after spending all day with them in the dirt really shows you how well you normally wash. Two minutes with soap and scrubbing, and this stuff isn’t coming out from under my nails. Huh.
In related news, am now the proud owner of about ten two-foot-deep holes on my property (all of which were dug by The Husband and a friend; I weeded, shoveled, hauled rocks, and generally did other dirt-related things as we only had two post-hole diggers). Am also unsure of where the east property line is, so will have to call the city to figure that out. It has come to this, however: either the guy who put in our sprinkler system put it in on neighbor’s land, or else the driveway is not quite perpendicular to the road. Either way, the discrepancy of about eighteen inches is, to say the least, sizable.
Fewer than twenty-four hours until the end of graduate school…
There are a lot of things I’d like to believe in but don’t, thanks to evidence or the lack thereof; the infallibility of the Bible being up there on the list, as well as the existence of angels and people who don’t fuck up the earth and kind, loving girls’ deans. However, today, I’m going to believe that dolphins saved a ship from pirates. Because I can. And because the NYT says so.
In other “because I can” news, we leave for Greece in one month! from today! Such an event almost calls for multiple punctuation marks….
Have discovered my journals from my high school and early college years. Life should have a giant rewind/undo button.
For the next couple days, I will only answer to “Magister” or “Your Magistery.”
Thank you to everyone who read, encouraged, and helped me finish this crazy degree. You’re the best.
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