A few technical difficulties

My blogging has been delayed recently by some ridiculous unexplainable terrible annoying technical difficulties.

Most of my time for blogging comes during Jackson's naps. He's an excellent napper, and usually I can count on at least two hours, sometimes three hours, of a calm house in mid-afternoon. Inevitably, I use some of his nap time for chores, emails, or other stuff that needs to get done. But I'm lucky to have a fairly consistent time to try to blog.

Unless, of course, our internet service gets interrupted. We've had ups and downs with our service -- at least five technicians came to the house in the first handful of months we were here -- but the past few months I had been lulled into thinking perhaps our problems were solved. Not so much. In the last week, our internet connection has come and gone incessantly. I would write a couple of sentences, or try to read some background info, and then the connection would drop out. It becomes too maddening to attempt to write and then constantly interrupt or lose what I'm working on.

Over the the last couple of days the connection has been much better. So do some blogging, right?

And now iPhoto is ruining my sanity screwing with me.

Yesterday, I got a pop-up box saying an iPhoto file was "corrupted," and so it shut down. That was odd, since I wasn't using iPhoto at the time (though it was open in the background as I attempted, and failed, to blog). But I opened up iPhoto again, and thousands of pictures were gone. In fact, iPhoto asserted it didn't have a photo library at all.

Huh? What the ----? Nooooooooo!

Fortunately for me, we have all of our photos on memory cards. So this iPhoto snafu is more about inconvenience than devastating loss. Nevertheless, I had spent time arranging and preparing photos for future blog posts, and all that work is gone. I'm not much of a photo editor -- the vast majority of the photos on this blog are unedited -- but a few get cropped or straightened or made presentable in some fashion. Mostly I've lost some groupings and prep work for blog posts. Nothing vital, but it will slow me down.

Without slogging through all the details, I spent several hours with successive layers of advanced Apple technicians, and they ain't got no idea what happened. They were terrifically friendly and helpful and knowledgeable, but this particular snafu doesn't seem to have a fix. We can find all the photos on my computer, but the ordering and naming is a disaster of gobbledygook and gibberish. Despite all the time they spent trying to fix things, they mostly gave up. The plan now is to upload the photos from the memory cards -- presumably resulting in a comprehensible order -- and then delete the earlier photos.

Ah, well. First world problems, y'know?

With luck, I'll be back to posting again soon.

Why this picture? Well, it's the first photo in my current mess of an iPhoto library. (Why does the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow have a statue of fat Elvis? No idea.)