Blog? I'd Rather Have Gum Surgery!!!!!

I've been blogging for awhile now. And one thing I can tell you - it isn't getting any easier.

I had visions, when I started out, of wafting about the house all day in my jammies, posting to my multiple blogs and smiling the whole time. Not crying tears of frustration while cursing my computer, my internet provider, Blogger and every tech "wizard" in the known universe.

My computer is, by computer standards, old and in need of replacement. In real years? That would make it three. My socks last longer!

Alan also has a computer. It's also old and past it. It has retained skills that mine has not and mine has retained skills that his has not. So most times, to post to one of my blogs, we sit down side by side, with both computers, trying to help each other out. This is not efficient, or (because of all the swearing and crying) romantic. It's just nuts.

One of the huge problems is that our security protocols keep updating. And every time they do, my range of possible activities narrows just a little more. There are some websites I can barely see anymore. There are some websites I can't even get into! Like the one I use for selling those nice books in my sidebar.

I'm a grown woman, dammit. Let me decide what I can and cannot see or do on the internet! I feel like my computer's being run by my Aunties.
Add this to the fact that (especially on rainy days) our server will suddenly drop the connection. It's nothing I've done, just... Ooopsy! And up comes the error message. Usually after I've just done something really complicated, the results of which are then lost forever.

And Blogger? Oh, don't get me started on Blogger!

Every time I sign into it these days, they've made some improvements. Which would be fine if they actually improved things. And sometimes, yes, an improvement is actually better. But usually it means I have to figure things out all over again, learning ever more HTML code. Because a little improvement over here means a total screw-up way over there. With no way out but to roll up your sleeves and fix it manually (anybody else having trouble with the centring function? If you centre your photo, it centres the text, too. And, while I'd like to believe that every word that spills from my keyboard is pure poetry, I know enough to know that setting it up like poetry will only annoy and alienate my readers. But if you don't centre the photo, the whole post just looks completely random.).

So here's my advice to the kind folks at Blogger. Quit updating! Quit making improvements! Just because you think, "Hey! It'd be neat to....." doesn't mean it would actually be neat to do it!

You've got middle-aged housewives using this software and we'd like to be able to put a day in our jammies to better use. Like TAKING A GIANT NAP!!!!!

It's called editing people! We bloggers have to learn to do it. You "Blogger tech support" types should too!

So. Because of all that I won't be posting today. But I did want to show you some pictures of the cool stuff Jim brought in recently.