Let's see if this self-portrait with black cat posts*

I feel a little badly. True, Margie has come home a day earlier than I expected and has brought Lynx with her and that is good. I am happy about it. But I feel bad I so falsely claimed to be all alone in this house during the days she spends in Anchorage babysitting Lynx. Of course I am not alone! Sorry, Jim. Chicago, I apologize to you, too.

And all you tropical fish…

*I'll be... it did post the pic - on the first try. Maybe Squarespace has made the fix. They haven't notified me yet, but maybe they did make the fix and are cautiously holding their breath to see if it really takes. I hope so and in that hope I am not going to run the longer story of explanation, unless I soon learn I really need to.

Lynx on the inside side of the window

I got a call from Margie telling me to come in and pick her and Lynx up, because Lavina's work has unexpectedly sent her off to McGrath for a couple of days. So here I am, picking them up right now.*

*This particular "right now" actually happened nearly three hours ago. Anyone who has followed my recent posts knows how buggy my Squarespace app has been acting. Again, when I originally tried, Squarespace repeatedly posted the text but not the picture, so I gave up until I could get back to my office in Wasilla, where I planned to email the photo to myself and combine it with the text the old fashioned way. After I sat down at my desk, I decided to give the Squarespace app one more try and, lo and behold, it posted the picture. I hope this means the app has been fixed and Squarespace has not yet notified me. I will see what happens next try.

A horse kick to the head

Tim Mahoney joined me at Abby's, right after I had finished my omelette and was polishing off my coffee and toast. Tim always has good stories to tell and he never repeats himself, the way many storytellers do. Today, he told me about how he was once shoeing a horse for a sister, when the horse suddenly kicked him in the head. The world went strange, his vision narrowed down to a tight tunnel. He staggered about, peering out at the world through this narrow tunnel until gradually his field of view widened. He reprimanded the horse, then went about his business and put in a full days work.

When he awoke the next morning his arm was bent and twisted in a funny way and was twitching. He yielded and went to the doctor. There, he learned that the horse had broken his neck – C6. The doctor told him he was lucky to be alive, let alone walking.

Note: As I wanted to post this picture and this very short version of a much longer story, I decided to postpone until later, probably tonight, the account of why the Squarespace App is forcing me to suspend the method of on-the-fly blogging I have been doing. Again, the app failed to post this picture and posted text with no picture. Again, I had to email the picture to myself and upload it to this blog from my computer in the old-fashioned way.

An amazing convergence of education, coffee and omelette

Joy of joys! Regular readers know how I delight in taking photographs of chance encounters with schoolbuses and how I like to have my breakfast at Abby's Home Cooking. So you can imagine how thrilled I was just now to turn into the parking lot of Abby's and see this schoolbus right out front, just leaving. I barely had time to get a shot off.

Note: 9:46 AM: "Just now" was actually over one hour ago. Due to unrelenting technical glitches and bugs in the Squarespace app I use to make these Instagram posts, I was unable to post this image from my iPhone. The text posted, but not the image. After many, many, tries I gave up and emailed the picture to myself. Now that I am back home in my office, I downloaded the picture and posted it the old-fashioned way. This has been a problem with this app from the beginning, but usually after two to four tries, it would finally post the image. No more. It has just gotten worse and worse and worse. Ten tries, 20 tries, 40... sometimes it will ultimately post the image and sometimes I just have to give up. I am certain some readers will want to suggest things like deleting the app, then downloading it anew.

Trust me, I have done all these things and over the past three days or so have spent literally hours communicating with Squarespace support and finally they concluded they have a major problem in their system. They have promised me they will fix it and let me know. Squarespace has made similar promises to me about other, less critical, issues, without ever following through. Hopefully, this one is serious enough that they soon will.

Until they do, I am going to have suspend this method of blogging. It had appeared to be the dream to simplify everything and save me time but has evolved into a time-devouring nightmare that I can no longer tolerate. I will make one more post later in the day to better explain. I will also see if I can come up with an alternate plan of action by then.

The remaining 50% of my social activity for this day

This morning, I posted a pic from Abby's Home Cooking and speculated that my human interaction there would constitute 50% of my social activities for the entire day. I postulated the other 50 percent would take place at the drive-through window of Metro Cafe. That is exactly how it worked out – but it turned into a much bigger deal than I had anticipated. Kristina greeted me at the Metro window and then Carmen with her Aunt Felis, sister to her mother and her Uncle Paco. I had never met them before. I would relate their life history to you, but I had to move along so the next customer could pull up to the window. Hence, I did not get a chance to learn their history.