On Monday, the weather prognosticators got it wrong once again, but this time in a good way: the 15 percent chance of rain they offered as their tiny token of hope became 100 percent afternoon rain showers.
Our mail carrier here at Riverwalk told Lynn it rained so hard while she was here that she had to shelter in the mail house. I didn’t really find evidence of that in the buckets I’ve set out to collect rain washing off the roof and threatening Lynn’s flower garden, but yesterday on our early sojourn Bear and I discovered the soil was still quite damp.
Without my watering obligations, and since it was Primary Day in Colorado yesterday, I set out to combine two blog posts, one I never started and another I hadn’t finished. I started at 8 and finished — in between cat medicating and cat, dog and people feedings — shortly before 10, complete with photojournalistic excellence and a video from Youtube.
But the “publish” button wouldn’t work, and in attempting to get the page to reset (without taking screen shots — I know, I know. I know!) my brilliant work of two hours vanished. Without a trace.
I chatted with WordPress, robot or person I know not. WordPress blamed Firefox: “It appears your browser broke.” I don’t know how browsers “break,” but in rapid research around the internet later yesterday, this appears to be a common default for WordPress: Oh, hey, not us. Must be that lame browser you’re using.
Apparently mine is out of date, although I believed it updated itself all by itself. And the WordPress per/bot tried: it did find what I had already found: the piece I’d started a few days back, plus some small fraction of my words of wisdom from yesterday. I did wonder, later, if I could find it in my cache, since everyone kept recommending to clean that, but files were filling the cache faster than I could scroll past them.
There’s an adage, now ancient with the near-demise of actual print, that today’s news is tomorrow’s fishwrap, a humbling reminder to all us scribes that our brilliance is generally momentarily fleeting. And although I was trying to post mine for election day here in Colorado, to remind you to vote while you still can (although election deniers did not fare so well here in the Centennial State), I can probably still revive it, provided I have the fortitude to not get discouraged as I try to recall just how spectacularly I structured my sentences in the Before Time. Before the browser broke.
With no rain yesterday and today’s at a general “fat chance” 30 percent, I am back at a modified and mild version of my watering chores —
[I would like you all to know that all four of our attempts to plant grass seed have been with drought-tolerant strains interspersed with lots of wildflowers, but they have to be established to actually grow. I am well aware that “water doesn’t grow on trees,” as our water conservancy district is announcing on posters around town, even though water goes up in trees and I think with a little more thought a better slogan could have been achieved.]
— under the perhaps-not-supervision-but-certainly-moral-support of Marrakesh and Bear. In one of our forays out this morning Bear encountered his first-to-me deer, a young doe who initially thought she’d be fine if she stood her ground before deciding discretion is the better part of valor and ran. Bear, kind of to my surprise, ran after her, although he was back in short order. More quarter horse than thoroughbred, I guess, at least at his advanced age.
While not manna from heaven, Lynn and I are making money from our laundry room. I found $50 badly wrapped with a rubber band and a paper bearing a cryptic date under my socks where I put all the stuff that was in the pockets of my winter coat, which I just last weekend decided was safe to go without. (Although now it’s available for use and even clean, so I probably could have done that months ago.)
I don’t believe the money came from my pockets and Lynn assures me it isn’t hers, which leaves either the visiting woodpecker who was trapped right above this spot for a couple days or Santa, although one presumes he might have come down the gas fireplace vent and left gifts under the Norfolk pine. In December.
So while I had a discouraging word, perhaps two, yesterday, for the vagaries of the internet, Colorado proved to be not as crazy as it could have, politically (although the model of decorum, Don Coram, lost — not by as much as others challenging incumbents, but still a lot — to constitutional scholar Lauren Boebert, whose newest mission is to rid our country of that “separation of church and state junk.”
And I found money, even if it was mine to begin with and I just can’t remember it, and Lynn may have a new helper in her quest to keep the deer out of her plants. I guess yesterday could have been worse.
Garbanzo Beans for Breakfast 