Shameful, What I'm Doing

You can take the word shameful two ways, as in “I should be ashamed of myself,” but also as “I am shameful—full of shame—and I’m trying to make amends somehow.”

It’s not as if I haven’t meant to post blogs these past few years; I have, in fact, prepared all over the place for them. I’ve taken pictures and made videos. I’ve even written entire posts . . . then simply failed the last, critical step: the posting.

Blogger has gotten stupider to use in the last ten years. You have two ways of posting, as plain text, where you can edit codes yourself (“HTML view”), or in the semi-convenient “Compose view.” Neither has ever been completely convenient, but now the Compose view is bananas with the extraneous codes that it adds (after using it, peek at the HTML codes, and you can hardly find your actual text anymore!). Meanwhile, the HTML view no longer provides simple niceties like automatically transforming hard returns into paragraph breaks. Not that I can see, anyway.

So now that I’ve been coding it mostly myself, posting takes more time and it feels more like work. Fortunately, there are still buttons for uploading links, images, and videos, but anyway . . . This last step—putting the content online—has been irksome enough that I’ve gotten way behind in posting.

So, while I have some time without yardwork, and no big work crunches, by golly, I’m posting some older material. To mess up everyone, I’m posting them retroactively, dating them on the actual dates I composed them, and would have posted them, if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked by other things first. So they’re suddenly shuffled into my blog as if they’d always been there.

I can picture people checking my blog, rubbing their eyes, and going, Hey, where’d that post come from?? I didn’t see it before! Am I losing my mind?

If you want to find these new, but older posts, you’ll just have to scroll down and look for something you hadn’t seen yet. Hint: anything posted as 2018, 2019, and 2020 might be “new.” Another hint: these new/old posts may go back at least as far as August 2017, when we had the big eclipse!

So, I am ashamed of myself—so much so, that I won’t hesitate to alter history by making it look like I’d been posting all along. Maybe then, I won’t feel like such a slacker.