The best laid plans...

I had had a real brainstorm about filling this space for the next 10 days or so while we are away in Nags Head: republish some of my favorite posts about vacations and some of the memorable trips we have taken, complete with pictures and links to more. They were older posts, and many new readers hadn't seen them; this, I thought, was a perfect way to share my sense of being on vacation and bring everyone up to date at the same time. There would be no music because Hipcast doesn't yet have a "delayed publish" feature, but that would be the only difference.

I set about that task yesterday. Comcast was having one of the worst days I'd ever seen, up for sporadic seconds and then down for minutes, all day long. I slogged through it, finding the eleven posts (including good recipes) I deemed worthy of re-runs. Between bouts of sitting before a dead computer screen for interminable periods, I made a few changes in each entry and posted them with consecutive future dates, using blogger's delayed publishing feature. The whole production took a couple of hours. When I was done, I pressed "view blog"--and discovered all those posts had published yesterday. Blogger had ignored the consecutive future dates. Thinking I had made a mistake, I deleted all the incorrect posts to start all over again.

It was only at that point that I discovered that blogger didn't regard those re-worked posts as copies, but as new, stand-alone posts. I hadn't just deleted the incorrectly dated posts, but the originals, too! Australia, gone! New Zealand, gone! Cowan's Gap, Nags Head, gone, gone!!

OK, I think I've used enough exclamation points to describe my feelings yesterday. Between the damn ISP itself and blogger, I was not at my best. Finally, my friend Nan suggested I look into the Google cache, and some exploration there points to a way of salvaging the writings. I won't be able to restore them to the blog, but at least I can save them to my own drive and have them, which is something I've been meaning to do with all my posts, anyway.

So a word to my wise fellow bloggers: don't get too comfortable with this powerful tool we all use. When it wants to screw you, it can, and there's not a single human voice you can turn to. Be careful!

It'll be over and out after tomorrow--we'll be driving south, probably into Hurricane Hannah (sounds like a song) on Saturday, and I will be back at this computer on Tuesday September 16. I'll be checking in sporadically and leaving my ubiquitous comments you-know-where, so don't think you've heard the last of me! I'll be watching when I can, and I'll be full of stories and pictures when I get back.

Bye!