Anticipation!

I started this blog post during Christmas vacation.  It had been one of my goals over the holidays to get all the iPhone pictures of the last couple of years (roughly since our last camera died) organized the way I always organized our camera pictures.  Another goal had been to use those pictures, once organized accessibly and backed up on our triple-redundancy backup system, to get the blog caught back up.

Then I glanced at the blog itself to see how much catching up I had to do, and I noticed that all of the photographs showed broken links!  All of the photographs on the blog were gone!  Well, it turned out on closer inspection that only the photos from 2013 and 2014 had disappeared, and in looking into the problem (which preempted the blogging project, as you can imagine), it turned out that the 2013 and 2014 image folders on my justmorons.com website had simply disappeared.  I took this up with Network Solutions engineers, who were as baffled as I was.  No one could make any sense of it.  In the end there was nothing to be done.

This morning I just scoured my laptop and found to my great satisfaction that I am kind of a computer pack-rat: I very rarely delete the converted files that I upload for the blog.  So I was able to find all the properly named and web-friendly images, recreate the 2013 and 2014 folders on justmorons.com, and upload all of the pictures to the appropriate folders.  So the blog appears to be itself again.

I may now resume my winter project of getting caught up from late 2013 to the present, even as I make it a point of blogging the present at least once a month.  (More than that is just unrealistic at this point, but this blog has proved such a valuable resource over the years — when did Molli get chicken pox?  wasn’t Maddie a vampire princess last Halloween, or was it the year before? — that I am unwilling to let it slide into irrelevance.)

The catching up posts will surely be abbreviated, but at least they’ll record the major events of the girls’ lives with photographic and some textual documentation that will ensure we have their childhoods enshrined on these pages for years to come.

(Side project: I have the whole damn blog backed up in multiple formats and will continue to look into a hosting solution that won’t take months of labor, will have a better photo storage option than “put your pictures on your own website and then link to them,” and will be as easy to access and update as this one on blogger.com.  If you have any suggestions, I am all ears!)