The truth is, I didn’t ever take a shower or even get dressed yesterday. Or brush my flowing, greying locks. I meant to, but what for? The only clothing modification I made all day was to loosen the belt on my fuzzy bathrobe after I ate an entire Trader Joe’s pizza (I usually eat half) followed by a hearty helping of potato chips and some dark chocolate with almonds. I would have eaten brownies but I’d finished them earlier in the day.
After the tech support person “assisted” me yesterday, I realized he did something that corrupted all eight-hundred eighteen of my posts to date, so that apostrophes, quotation marks, em dashes and other punctuation and special marks (except commas) became strange symbols like ‘, making this entire blog difficult if not impossible to read. I am wild with frustration. It’s futile. I can’t update 21 years’ worth of writing. So any future readers will just have to figure out how to parse totally trashed posts that I can’t fix, like this one:
“Вредные примеÑи возможно ÑимволичеÑки поделить на некоторое количеÑтво групп: препÑÑ‚Ñтвующие обычной гидратации цемента;”
That had been one of my more clever and inspired pieces of writing, gone. I’m serious. I am quite dismayed right now about this effing blog and its caprices. The thing is, I expected it to last for the ages. That’s the whole point of my writing in it: to document things I would otherwise forget. Having the integrity of what I’ve carefully crafted go out the window because of a technical error is upsetting. Not sure what the point of this blogging exercise is any more. And now there are even more critical warnings in the administrative area of my blog, yet I have no idea what to do with them. This whole thing may melt down at any minute.
To crown my dissatisfaction with life at the moment, I drew and painted not one but two wire-haired dogs so badly I won’t even show then to you. One looks like something out of a Stephen King story, with luminous, psychotic eyes. The other looks like a ball of Brillo.
But today is a new day. Tra la la. The sun has returned after three days of grey and wet. I brushed my teeth and took a shower. Inspired by my friend Anna, I parted my damp hair in a new place, as she did. It’s rocking my world, since I’ve sported that same left part (dressed left, if you will) for probably thirty years.
Marianna G., the multitalented crafter, has made and mailed me my very own cloth mask. It’s a sign of the times that I am extremely excited to receive it, and I’m grateful to her for the time and materials it took her to make it. It should arrive in two days.
Guess I’ll leave you now to resume my Bugs 101 class on Coursera. In Week Two we’re exploring insect anatomy. The scientific terms confound me, and then they slip right out of my sievelike memory. Do you have any idea how many body parts arthropods have? Their mouth bits alone are made up of at least four separate regions, including maxilla and palps. And here are just some of the classifications of antennae.
Bye. I hope you’re staying healthy and somewhat sane.
I’ve been guilty of the stay-in-the nightgown, don’t curl the hair syndrome — and just today decided that this tendency should be corrected!
Let’ s see if I stick to it!
So sorry about your blog disaster. Bunner, plus!
I am glad you are keeping your strength up in these trying times (i.e. I wholly approve of your dietary choices).
Super-annoying about the bloggy mischief. I hope we’re able to get it remedied sometime soon. There may be a solution for all the corrupted posts, perhaps.
Your new part looks quite stylish indeed.
I like the flabellate antennae best. When I grow up, I want to BE an antenna.
nooo bloggy noooooo! I hope there are better solutions! I am now poking about coursea which is really cool – entomology is one of the classes I’m bummed I never got to take in college. Thank you for witnessing my proliferation of stretchy pants every single day. Perhaps I’ll try the parting thing to spice things up.