I drove to church this morning alone, my wife being down in the back after driving home yesterday.  Snow flurries were forecast, and sure enough they started to fall as I was walking across the parking lot and into the church. When the worship surface was over an hour and 30 minutes later, the flurries were coming down pretty good. An hour later when I left Life Group, same thing.

This is the first snow I’ve seen this season. I was gone last Sunday-Monday when it snowed 2 to 3 inches. It was still on the ground when I returned Thursday, but nicely off the road. It was good to see it on the ground, but would have been better had I been able to be out in it.

As I type this, I’m looking out the windows of The Dungeon, our walk-out basement. I see the flakes falling, the snow on the ground down in the hollow behind the house, and on the un-raked leaves in the back yard. It’s a pretty picture.

Well, I didn’t have much to say. I enjoyed the cold have the hot church and classroom. I enjoyed the snow. Now have to head over to the other monitor and do some work.

Our house is piled high with photographs. Okay, that’s hyperbole, but sometimes it seems that way. In the basement, in an antique dresser in the downstairs bedroom, are boxes and envelopes stuffed with photos, along with many loose photos. Photos Lynda and I took. Photos my parents took. Photos their parents took. Photos with negatives. Photos without negatives. Negatives without photos.

Then in the basement storeroom are boxes of photos. Photos from our China trip, and other trips. Photo albums of ours from 1976 to 1986. Boxes of developed Photos Lynda’s parents took. Photos her grandparents took. Photos from even earlier generation.

And I’m not even close to the end. In the secretary in our bedroom, one drawer is all but stuffed with photos we look in later years. The number of these have waned over the years, especially when we had a digital camera. This drawer contains hundreds of photos. Together by the roll of film they came out of. But otherwise un-annotated.

And, one more batch. On our dining room table, and in boxes around it, are hundreds of photos that belong to Lynda’s mom, Esther. Over a year ago, before Esther moved to her current, small apartment, Lynda’s brother began the process of putting these in photo albums. He didn’t get very far. Lynda picked it up, and made good progress. However, not one album is put together; the photos are spread out on the table; others are in boxes next to the table; and the end is not yet.

Since the rise of digital photography, the era of printed photos has mostly come to an end. Today a shutterbug fills a card with bytes, rather than a box with prints. How those cards eventually get to easily viewable media is a question. And, how many of those become prints is another question. But for sure, future generations won’t be filling up antique dressers, storeroom shelves, and dining room tables with thousands of prints.

We have a monumental job to go through these photos. The oldest one I know of is from August 1877. We have lots that are from England that are unmarked. I know these are of either Hepburns or Todds, but beyond that I have no clue who they are. And no way of knowing.

I wanted to illustrate this blog with pictures of the piles of photos. Alas, I have no camera right now, except for the kind that require film. Our digital camera bit the dust almost a year ago. Lynda’s iPad-mini takes photos, but we haven’t figured out how to do it very well. And neither of us have a cell phone with a serviceable camera. So, irony upon irony, I can’t take a picture of the photo problem.

I suppose we’ll get through this. Since we are in good health and neither of us expects to assume room temperature any time soon, we have years to get the job done. If we can complete Esther’s photo albums in a month or two, clear away the boxes, and return excess photos to those who sent them, I’ll feel good about it. After that, I’ll check back in here and let you know where we stand. Or maybe I’ll wait a year or two, till I have something new to say about it.

The busyness of life constrains me. Holiday activities at the house, then travel to Oklahoma City, and coming home with a deep cold, then going back to work to a pile of stuff to do, and I’ve not been able to carve out time for either blog. No time for writing, either.

Hopefully by next week I’ll be back on a regular blogging schedule. That’s the plan, at least.

No time to write any more, and no energy to muster words. Signing off for a while. Not sure when I’ll be back.

I’m back, here at my author blog, and able to post again. Computer problems have prevented me from doing that for a while. It’s a combination of three things actually, or maybe four. I’ll chronicle them for you.

First, back sometime in the second half of 2013, our old laptop died. We’d had it since October 2004. It was a faithful friend, needing little attention. Whatever happened to it, it was gone. That left us with the other laptop and the desktop in The Dungeon. Lynda has her “office” on a card table in the living room, so I let her have the laptop. I have always done the bulk of my writing on the desktop, so I continued to do that. I just didn’t have a computer (excepting my Nook) to use upstairs.

I’ve been looking around towards replacing it. We’ve had Dells for years, so I’ll probably stick with them. We’ve been happy with their products, except for a certain shipping mistake that it took a couple of years to get right. That was in part my fault for abandoning the process rather than pressing the issue. Once I found the right person to talk with they made it right by the next FedEx shipment. But the need to research what’s available, the possibility of leasing rather than buying, and of using cloud-based software has caused me to hesitate. Those reasons, plus wanting to make sure finances are ok to make the purchase. So far I haven’t, but I think I’m getting closer to that time.

Then, shortly before we left for our May trip to Boston, I was suddenly unable to log in to this website and make changes. On the login page I got 17 error messages, all related to specific lines of code or needing to enable cookies. But cookies were enabled. Talking with a couple of people in an on-line writers group, I learned that it appeared that the theme I had selected, Erudite, had been abandoned by the creator. Some change in WordPress, perhaps, hadn’t been upgraded on the theme. I went to the theme message board and left a message. So far as I can tell there’s been no answer.

Finally, a Facebook acquaintance, John Doppler Schiff (that’s what he goes by), said he could go into the code and bypass the Erudite theme and get me up and running with a default theme, after which I could do business as normal and pick a new theme. That was delayed for the thing I’ll mention in a later paragraph, but now it’s done. He said it took him all of five minutes, perhaps less. Next week I’ll go about looking for and installing a new theme. I think that’s fairly easy to do.

Then, the day we left for Boston, I couldn’t get on a browser on the laptop. We were rushing to get things together and get on the road, so I didn’t worry about it, thinking it might be a temporary glitch. Alas, when we got home I found out it wasn’t. Still no browser. I could connect to the Internet, because I was able to save files to Dropbox.  I took it to the shop, and learned that the problem was related to the XP operating system, now no longer supported by Microsoft. But the computer was licensed for Vista, so they were able to upgrade with no software charge. That was great. The week they had it, not so much. Or the fact that the second monitor no longer works.

Then came the big one. On Tuesday, while I was speaking at a lunch meeting of a professional group, a text came in. When I was done speaking I saw it was from a nephew, who wrote, “You aren’t in Turkey, are you? Think your e-mail was hacked.” I got back to the office to find it was true. It’s happened twice before, and changing the password was sufficient to recover. But this time the hackers were malicious. They changed my password, deleted my stored e-mails, and changed the primary e-mail address so that security notifications would go to them. Then they set up a mimic e-mail account but with aol.com as the ending, and began firing off e-mails that looked like they came from me.

I’ll make this short. Over a period of five hours I was able to get it all changed back. That included an hour and a half on hold waiting to talk with Yahoo. An hour of that would have been unnecessary if a certain webpage of theirs worked. It didn’t, so I had to call them. But I’m not upset with Yahoo. They were able to restore the deleted e-mails (I may have lost two hour’s worth, at most). I alerted aol about the bad guys, though I don’t expect them to do anything. No harm done except to the nerves. If any security e-mails went out to the aol address, I suppose the bad guys might have more information than I’d like. I’ll have to see if anything happens.

So, except for replacing the second laptop, I’m up and running again. For the last month or two I’d been pretty regular in my posts to this blog, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Hopefully I’ll return to that with no problem.

I have been extra busy this week, mainly with workplace related issues and at-home things to do. I’m working on a post for later today, and if I can find enough time on breaks/lunch I’ll have something posted before the workday is over.

Yesterday, driving home on my evening commute, traffic was awful. Not awful in the sense of heavy, but in the sense of drivers doing extremely stupid things. Cutting people off. Crossing a five lane highway with a car length to spare. Running red lights. Failing to take a turn when it was safe. Driving at excessive speed, even more so than normal. Zooming in and out between cars just to be one car ahead when stopping at the next traffic signal.

I wanted to say, “Suppose they learned to drive in Bentonville Arkansas, and suppose they were idiots. But I repeat myself.”

Now, today, the craziness seems to be in the on-line writing sites I look at. A literary agent has made a post, “I Don’t Need No Stinking Agent,” a push-back against various self-publishing, anti-agent gurus. Then, in the Indie Author Group on Facebook a fight has broken out over negative posts. Yesterday, at the agent blog I read most a guest post was a blatant sales pitch for a writer development service costing $37 or $55 per month. About half the comments were negative. This morning that post had been pulled.

What’s going on? Is there something in the air that is causing normally sane people to do crazy things? Are the stars aligned in Vertigo, or whatever crazy scheme people think controls their destiny?

Today is primary election day in Arkansas. That could be the reason for the Bentonville traffic nitwits but not the on-line stressors. I just know I’ll be driving home very carefully tonight.

I haven’t posted anything here for a while. I’ve been writing, just not here.

Last week, May 3-4, I attended the Story Weaver’s conference of the Oklahoma Writers Federation, Inc. This was my first time to go to this conference and my first general market conference. I spent several days preparing material. I figured this was my last big hurrah as far as pitching In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People goes.

Since coming back from Oklahoma City on Sunday, after family activities for several days, I’ve been busy with two projects. One is preparing two submittals requested at the conference. I got the second one in just before 10 p.m., so that is over. The second is proofreading and final editing of FTSP. That’s going fairly well. I’ve read 138 pages of the 321 page manuscript. I had hoped to finish this by Friday, but obviously won’t.

I also completed a column for Buildipedia.com, my twelfth. I’m under contract to do another, which is due May 18. I expect them to keep coming at two per month.

I’m also spending a little time on The Candy Store Generation. That’s what I shared at BNC Writers Monday night, and what I hope to get back to in a big way as soon as FTSP is put to bed. Still 8,000 words to go, but some research needed before going too much farther.

Consequently, I haven’t spent much time with my blogs, especially this one. And I don’t expect to for the next week at least. I’ll try to pop in and let you know what’s going on, but realistically I just don’t have the time to spend on it now.