My New Hobby

Believe it or not, I seem to have developed a new hobby this week, the very last I would have expected.  I can't seem to stay awake.  At all.  This morning I slept until after 10 a.m., which is unheard of.  And then, waking so late, I was very lethargic trying to get moving so took a nap.  In the afternoon, i went to Atria and stayed my usual hour, then came home and fell asleep.  I have been napping off and on throughout the evening and finally just got up (12:30) to ssee if Yahoo was finally finished with its upgrade and if I could still post entries to Funny the World.  But as I sit here, I am ready to go back to sleep as soon as I can.

I never think of myself as having jet lag.  Traveling never seems to bother my sleep patterns much since they are so weird to begin with...and this seems a bit late to suddenly start experiencing jet lag, but...whatever...I'm enjoying the sleep, even if I'm missing my life while I'm doing it!

This Yahoo thing has been frustrating.  I knew it was coming.  Yahoo sent out messages a month or so ago, but I chose not to pay attention until I suddenly could not access anything on Funny the World.  Yahoo has become Aabaco Small Business and it involved a re-working of the web site.

I didn't remember if it was ultimately going to affect me or if things would continue as they always have and so I have worried these past 2-3 days when I could not connect.  Whenever I tried, I got the message

Sorry! We're currently updating our system. Please return and complete your request after 6:00 p.m. PT on November 15. When you do, you'll see our new name, Aabaco Small Business, and a completely rebranded website.
We apologize for any inconvenience this delay may cause."

First it was after 6 p.m. on November 15, then November 16 and finally November 17.  i had little hope of it actually being ready for prime time tonight either, but when I tried just now...there it was ,looking like it always did (when I figured out how to connect, that is...it's different, but now that I've bookmarked the pertinent pages, I shouldn't even notice the difference). 

The visit with my mother was nothing out of the ordinary.  I finally remembered to break it to her that her friend died last week.  I wasn't sure how that would go and if she would have to be reinded of who Dodie was, but she didn't need reminding and was shocked and saddened.  I told her I had no information on the cause of her death and she said, somewhat wistfully "maybe someone will call me," so I let her other friend know that it was OK to call.  I couldn't guarantee that it wouldn't be like breaking the news all over again, but her friends were concerned about the effect of telling her over the phone and I think that will be OK now.

She's developed a new "thing" -- reading her watch.  She can be at times obsessive about it and seems to have trouble each time trying to figure out what time it is.  She obviously doesn't need a watch, since she has noplace to be, but having it on her wrist is important to her.

The weather continues to be a big topic of conversation.  Today she asked the usual question "is it hot outside?"  I told her that no, in fact it was cold (about 59).  After that each time she looked outside she would tell me that the sky was so blue but somehow it looked cold.

I've read some new thigs about Alzheimers / Dementia in the last week.  One was a list of ways to tell if a person has dementia or Alzheimers and with I think one exception, it described my mother to a T.  The other was a book written for caregivers (as in people in an assisted living facility who care for dementia patients) about how to enrich their lives, how to handle difficult situations, etc.  So much of the situations discussed sounded so familiar.  I sure wish I could get her doctor to do a baseline, but that would involve getting her to a doctor and that's not likely to happen until her required annual physical since it takes an act of God (literally) to get her to agree to see a doctor.  But next time I'll try being more insistent.


But for now I find I am once again falling asleep.  Apologies for a really boring entry.

Do You Yanoo?

Dr. G has come back into my life. He had a huge web design edit which I spent a good part of yesterday doing. In truth, I would love to teach his staff how to do this stuff, but that doesn't seem likely to happen. So whenever he needs changes, I charge him big bucks (though people tell me I'm not charging him enough), work a couple of hours and pad my bank account.

I got most of his corrections made and posted to his web site. When I originally set it up, it was on Yahoo, just like Funny the World is, so I was logged into Yahoo under his log in and password.

When I got ready to post my own journal entry last night, I went to log out as Dr. G and log in as me and couldn't do it. It wouldn't let me connect to the log in page.

That was strange, I thought. I even tried going to Internet Explorer and logging in from that browser, thinking this might be a Firefox problem. But I had no better luck there.

I tried connecting to yahoo.com and received a message that the site didn't exist.

Yahoo didn't exist? Oh my...NOW what's going to happen?

I sent a message out on Twitter asking if others were having problems. I only received one response, but she said she'd been having problems with the site all day, so that made me feel a little better.

I sent out a note to my notify list saying that I couldn't post to Yahoo. And I went to sleep, confident that the Great Gods of Yahoo would have the problem all fixed by morning.

I guess my subconscious worried about it all night because I awoke at 5 a.m. with a headache and wondering if Yahoo was back. I tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't, so I got up to check. No. Yahoo was not back. I checked Google for "Yahoo" and expected to see huge news stories about Yahoo servers crashing, but there was no news whatsoever. And all the links led to yahoo, none of which worked.

I'm intelligent enough to realize that something is wrong with the yahoo servers, but I continue to hope that somehow I'll find a workaround.

This is the first day that I've been home and haven't posted a journal entry since I started this journal nearly nine years ago. There have been a few days when I didn't post entries, but it was usually when I was on a boat in the middle of the Thames or somewhere in the Australian outback, or somewhere else without internet access.

When I first started my journal, it was Geocities and Geocities was so cutesy that when you joined, you chose a "neighborhood" and then it gave you a map with available "homes" to choose. You could pick which person you wanted to be your neighbor. It was all very graphic-designed.

It wasn't long before it just became Geocities without all the map and the houses and you just posted directly to the server, which I've been doing now for nearly nine years. In all that time this is the very first time I haven't been able to post. I've heard of other people who have had problems, but it has been completely reliable for me. Until today.

Early in the life of this journal, I heard horror stories of people whose servers went down and they lost their entire journaling history. At that time I started keeping a backup. I went back to the very first entry and backed the entire journal up to the present, so if something catastrophic happens to Yahoo and, god forbid, it loses all its files, at least I have them.

I know that it will be back up--eventually--and that it's just a matter of being patient and waiting until they fix this...whatever it is...that is wrong with Yahoo today, but it's damn frustrating.

Of course there are always alternatives, and a year or so ago, I started a mirror site on Blogger. I did it because of people who wanted to follow me, but because of the way I structure Funny the World, I can't have an RSS feed on it. So every day I post the same entry on Blogger and I can post THIS entry on Blogger so that I don't miss a day.

But I want my Yahoo back!!!

I posted a note to Facebook to see if others were having problems and two people responded that Yahoo came up just fine for them, so I tried rebooting my computer to see if it might be something on MY computer, but it still comes back with a "page not found." Now I'm REALLY flummoxed.