Last week I found out my website, the one I refer you to every week in my byline, has not been working since September. I apologize because I had no idea. I ended my blog in January 2018, and haven’t added columns to it for a couple years.
It took me so long to figure it out because I don’t log onto my site as a reader. I’ve only checked it through the web hosting company and honestly I haven’t even done much of that. I had noticed last couple months there were no statistics available for the last year, which irritated me, because I knew at the beginning of last year, my site garnered as much action as it ever had. I thought the problem was because the hosting company made recent upgrades, but I didn’t have time to address the issue, not even considering it wasn’t working at all.
I was looking for a recipe and the only way I can do a content search is to log in like everyone else. When the error came up, I frantically tried every which way to get into the site. I almost burst into tears. I just wanted to make dinner because I hadn’t had a productive day and was already frustrated. I found a random recipe on Google just to accomplish something. After dinner I was trying to figure out what was wrong with my site. As I was looking through my old emails to see if I’d gotten some notification of the demise of my site, horrible things started happening to my laptop. I panicked and mashed buttons trying to make the crashing stop. It wasn’t pretty and I’m not proud of the things I said.
The next day I took my laptop to my computer people in Maple Valley, P.C.E. Computing, because why should I understand anything when I have them? I did learn the virus cleaner I was using wasn’t working because it was a bug, not a virus. Huh? I went home and worked out the issues with my website, which is a longer, more convoluted story than this one. The Friday after I got it fixed there were immediate visits on the site. So I also need to thank you for hanging in there and continuously checking back.
The website snafu was a mini version of unexpectedly moving to a new house, where I’ve been so wrapped up in the problems of the moment, I forget routine aspects of life, like paying attention to my website. We kept trying to think how to organize everything similarly to the old house. But we’ve learned that though we have the same stuff, we can’t use it in the same way.
In my old house I had a shelf high above the sink where I hung cup hooks for six beloved cups I bought from Costco years ago. However, over the sink in the new house is the window frame. The window frame is rather wide, but I can’t reach it well, and I didn’t want the cups crashing into the window with a stretch to grab them. I thought about hanging them to the side of the window where I could reach them better, until I realized a flimsy cup hook isn’t really made to hang sideways.
Once I comprehended it wasn’t feasible to hang those cups in any way similar to how I did it in my old house I broke down and ordered a cup tree. It’s a metal, freestanding rack that holds cups. I have a lot more counter space than I used to anyway.
Maybe I should stop trying to hang my website sideways and write something different this year.
Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom living nearby in a neighborhood near you. You can read more of her writing on her website livingwithgleigh.com, or follow her on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh by Gretchen Leigh.” Her column is available every week at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Life section.
