I took this picture the day before our annual visit to the vet. They look pretty content, don’t they? Well, not on the morning of our visit. Getting Walter into the carrier takes two people. Mimi goes in easier, but she’s scared. Both of them are. Still, I want my babies to be healthy, so we do it. They’ll go back to being happy soon enough. Like, as soon as we get home and I put those carriers away!
I trust you, Mama, but I would prefer to stay at home!
I got some distressing news from my Internet provider today. Apparently, they don’t service WordPress.com. That means that connecting to my blog is sporadic and frustrating. I’m connected now, obviously, but in the future I may need to take my laptop to work to be able to post anything on a regular basis.
In case you’re wondering, it’s AT&T Internet Air. I called them and spent a half hour with their tech services, and in the end the nice man who’d been helping me said, sorry. Nothing more we can do.
The night before I spent two hours with one of WordPress’s Happiness Engineers, who was also very nice, but ultimately we realized the problem wasn’t with WordPress. So I’m frustrated. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post since connecting is so difficult. I’ll keep trying, of course.
Technology is not perfect. We’ve come to depend on it, but things like this happen. At work, one of our customers has a very flawed system for reporting claims, which is what my department handles. A co-worker says they just need AI, but the bottom line is, garbage in, garbage out. They used to say that a lot, remember? Now it seems you don’t hear it as much, but it remains a fundamental truth for computer science.
It looked sort of like this.
My dad worked with computers for years, starting in 1959. We used to go down to his offices and see the giant green computers all housed in one room. I was in awe of them. These machines would spit out all kinds of code that my dad and his colleagues refined as much as possible. Recently he told me that at one point, a large number of employees were working on a project and they split up into teams that each worked an eight-hour shift, so someone was working on the project 24 hours a day.
His shift was 4 a.m. to noon. One day my mom said she didn’t think she could handle that schedule any more (it left her dealing with three small children alone most of the time), and he told her, it would end on Thursday. She was dubious. How did he know? Because that was the day they were going to ship the program out to the customer, he said. Any problems that came up after that would be dealt with as they arose.
It seems that’s similar to the way problems are dealt with now. How many updates do we get to our operating systems? No one, not even Microsoft, can guarantee that their programs are perfect when they first release them.
So I’m holding out hope that my problem with my Internet is being addressed. For any number of reasons it isn’t practical for me to change providers. If my posts are more sporadic than ever, you’ll know why. If they’re more frequent, it’ll be because I connected and took advantage of the situation.
I was bound and determined to get a picture of Mimi for this week’s post (not to imply I publish a Caturday post every Saturday, but let’s face it, lately that’s been the case). Unfortunately, this was the best shot I could get of her. She kept moving on me! She’s a tough one to get a good picture of in the best of times. Still, you can see a bit of her sweet personality in this shot, something that’s hard to capture. The ears say she’s on alert, but that was probably because I was hovering over her.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot. I have fears of several types of disasters, and the two that scare me the most are fires and tornadoes. In both, I not only could lose all my possessions, I could lose my cats. I’d be heartbroken over that.
I think about the things that would disappear out of my life and do what I can to minimize some of the losses. I have a safe deposit box for all my jewelry (“all” being a misleading word–I don’t have much, but what I have, I value). I got that when I thought about what would happen to a favorite ring of mine in a fire. It’s gold, and would likely melt. Since there was something I could do to prevent that, I did it. Now my jewelry sits there and I never wear it. Not that have occasion to anyway.
I’ve been working on a novel, and I save every chapter in the Microsoft cloud. I’m trusting that it’s safe there and no one could hack in, but the reality is, my novel needs so much work a stranger probably couldn’t do anything with anyway.
But those are the things that are relatively safe from disaster. What if all the hand knit items I’ve made over the years were suddenly gone? I’ve had to give some of them away because I don’t have room for them, but there’s still plenty I’ve hung on to. I have some beautiful shawls that I actually use, a few timeless sweaters I still wear, and that sort of thing. And all my knitting books and patterns! Okay, I’ve trimmed that collection down quite a bit, but I particularly treasure what I have.
Yes, I have renter’s insurance, which would buy me some new furniture, dishes, and clothes. But it wouldn’t replace the Snoopy mug I got when I sixteen or the handmade cards a friend has given me.
So what would I do if I lost all my possessions? You can bet I’d cry some. But if my cats were safe and I was safe, I guess I’d find a way to rebuild. Looking around now at all the things I own, such as the book of poetry my great-grandfather gave my great-grandmother on their wedding day and the Christmas ornaments friends have given me over the years, I know I can’t keep them all safe.
So I need to value what I have while I have it. But these are treasures that will eventually fall into ruin one day anyway. Who knows what will end up in a landfill when I die. I need to build up treasures for eternity. I can lose all my possessions, but I cannot lose the love of God.
Some friends moved my table out of the storage room and into the living room, where it takes up a lot of space. However, Walter has adapted and enjoys sitting both on top of and below the table.
The good news? I believe I’ve sold the table. I’ll really believe it when it’s gone and I have the proceeds, but it’s looking good!
My World With Words 
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