trials and travails
So I've been having a bit of a difficult time over the past couple days. Obviously, the website has been having problems, and that's been a great trial to me; aside from how much I missed communicating with all of you via these pages (or, more commonly lately, watching Leah communicate) I also use squibix.net to record all sorts of things you don't care about: the weather, books I read, what's going on in the garden, and things like that. We had some really interesting weather the last few days, and I couldn't write it down... and now I don't remember it! Even worse, while things are now up and running again the site has apparently been reverted to how it looked on June 1 or 2, so all the updates we made since then have disappeared.
I was initially pretty sad to lose the blog posts, but then it occurred to me that they're all still there in RSS readers the world round—and, most pertinently, in the two RSS readers on my computer here. Even better, all your comments were also saved, though in that case I think only on my computer; I believe that I'm the only person anywhere in the world who subscribes to our comments feed. So even if the hosting company can't get their act together to repair the damage (I'm giving em another 24 hours or so), I'll be able to replace the missing posts and comments.
I was especially frustrated by the timing of the outage, because I've been putting my personal website on job applications, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that no one is reading those applications anyways (see the opening sentence of this post).
On top of all that, my bicycle was stolen from my workplace on Monday. I walked out at the end of the day and boy was I surprised to find it missing. Many people did many nice things to help console me in my loss—most usefully offering to lend me bicycles, more bicycles that I could ever hope to ride (and now I can say I've ridden a real single-speed; thanks Janice!). While not really holding out any hope that I'd ever see the poor machine, my prize possession, again, I went through the motions and filed a police report as well as making some very attractive posters designed to guilt the thief into giving the bike back to me, should he happen to return to the scene of the crime and see one of them.
Well, today the site works and I got the bicycle back. The thief rode it a couple miles and then dumped it in the woods, probably frustrated by the incredibly poor tuning on the derailleurs and the lack of adequate brake response. The police claim to have found it, but since I know for a fact that cops never go into the woods (proven at the afterparty following Leah's senior prom) it must have been someone else that stumbled upon it and reported it to them. Nevertheless, they were very kind and I was happy to get the call that I could come down and retrieve my wayward machine. Everyone asked me if it was damaged at all when I got it back, and I told them that it wasn't any more damaged that it had been while still in my possession.
So anyways, that's two things fixed at least in part (although I'm still looking into other hosting companies; not only did the recent difficulties not fill me with confidence in our current host, we're also continuing to have some problems with our email). They say things come in threes; maybe I'll finally get an interview somewhere next? Please?
comments
Welcome back. I check your RSS feed pretty religiously (though I randomly dragged it over to the blogs tagged "Personal Finance" by mistake, and decided not to move it back). I'm sorry about your bike and so happy to hear you got it back. Crazy times. Inspired by you and Luke, I've started to bike to work. Well, so far I've biked one day. But still.
If you need a new bike lock, let me know. We've got a few sitting around in my basement, I'm sure one of them must work.