Beta Schmeta

I am not happy. I am really not happy. I think I'm mad, actually. A mixture of anger and grief, to be precise.

I had written my little heart out about the experience of actually being in the air, gotten my photos onto the computer (thanks to hubby's help), and have tried for the past week to get the photos onto the blog, and they just wouldn't appear. The little boxes said exactly what they always did, and said my photos were there. But they weren't.

And all week I was being asked by the computer, did I want to switch to Beta Blogger? I never responded, because I liked my blog fine the way it was, and I didn't want to change anything.

Then today I thought I'd try again, and.....I really can't remember what happened next. It has been so stressful.

Either I learned that they were going to switch me, anyway, no choice about it. Or i decided to switch because the pressure was so continual, and I thought maybe something about not switching was causing my photos not to post. Maybe the new system would do what it was supposed to do.

So I created a password and switched. To the new, improved Beta Blogger. A merger between Blogger and Google. I was optimistic. I was brave. They said it wouldn't be all that different, just better. I figured I could learn to "drive" the new machine.

And now the photos will post, but I can't move them. So I spent all this time deleting them and then putting them up in reverse order, so that I could then cut and paste the text around the photos.

Finally, I was going to get this wonderful essay on here . . . share the actual experience of hang gliding with my loyal readers . . . and then, what do you think? Somehow two thirds of my writing was just gone. Cut off not in mid-sentence, but in mid-word. A violent crime.

And I have no energy left for re-writing it all tonight. As if I could possibly remember what I wrote, the way I wrote it, anyway. And I'll be out of town next weekend. And then it's Thanksgiving.

I don't know when I'll get to it.

It's a bad night for this blogger, and right now I'm not at all pleased with this "beta blogger." Not at all. It's bringing out the Luddite in me. As my dad always said, the fancier something is, the more things there are that can go wrong.

I'm going to go sit and write with a pen on paper and lick and stick envelopes for a while. I wish I had some lick and stick stamps, too.

And go fold clothes. No one has come up with a technology to mess that one up, not that I know of, anyway.

"New, improved." Bah, humbug.