Sorry about that—between trying to get various things on the business side done and then coming down with what I assume was a viral sinus infection that knocked me on my ass, I have been well and truly out of it for the last couple of weeks. In fact the only think I really had to spoons to do last week was finish formatting all of Nic’s titles that I’d taken out of KU and publish them wide. That was finished on 7/7/23, much to my immense relief.

Once all that was done we had some astounding temperate weather over the weekend so I just kinda relaxed and enjoyed not living in an oven while catching up on the latest episode of And Just Like That (don’t @ me, I loved Sex and the City when it was on and I’m actually watching old eps in parallel with AJLT). It never ceases to amaze me that for a woman who wrote a column about sex, Carrie Bradshaw is astoundingly uncomfortable when it comes to actually talking about it. But hey, her dresses are nice, and I like the additional characters they added to be the Original Three’s new friends. And to be honest I would pay to watch Sara Ramirez read the phone book, they’re just that good.

When it’s 89°F out but the humidity is 72% and you have a heat index of 107°F, yeah, you might need to sit down with some water after going to the store.

So what did I do? I baked. Because 1) I’m stupid and 2) I was desperately craving something sweet, hadn’t gotten anything while I was at the store, and wasn’t going back out there. But I did have Frosted Cinnamon Roll Baking Truffles in the freezer and all the makings for cookies.

So we now have Ultimate Snickerdoodles in the house, and I have had one (and yes, they really are amazing). That’s all I wanted. The rest are hidden so that He Who Should Not Be Eating Lots of Sugar won’t binge on them. I’m putting four out a day in the cookie jar, two for him and two for me. That should be sufficient.

Oh, God, this weather blows donkey dicks. Really hot weather is bad enough in June—really hot weather that has 50% or high humidity? It’s like walking into the world’s biggest sauna, except that there’s no nice smell of eucalyptus and you have to keep your clothes on, which rapidly become sodden with sweat.

We’re supposed to get a break later on in the week where the temps will be merely in the low nineties, and then it goes triple digits for a full week. It’ll be interesting to see if Anita Gigawatt (what we call the electricity grid down here in Texas since giving something a drag queen name is the only way to get lawmakers to pay attention to it) can live up to the call for power.

I am not a well clown so you’re not getting a long post today, sorry. Don’t know what’s going on but I have absolutely no energy and just want to crawl back into bed for the day.

Since I am a grownup living with another grownup and cats who have been fed and watered, I may well do just that. Later, taters.

I have a 500 GB backup external drive for my antique 2012 MacBook pro (don’t laugh, it still runs like a champ and I loathed the changes Apple made to the MBP until last year). Like any properly paranoid writer I like to leave the external drive plugged in and Time Machine running. That way, everything can be backed up daily in case of lightning strike, cat pee, or what have you knocking out the laptop.

Except that the backup drive stopped working about a month ago. I would plug it in, it would light up, I’d hear the drive start to run, then boom. Nothing. Couldn’t find it as an external drive or anything.

As I’ve been what you might call “busy” for the last month I kept thinking, “Yeah, I really need to take the backup drive to Lyndon and have him troubleshoot it, see if he can get it working again.” And five minutes later an emergency would erupt and the thought would go clear out of my mind for days on end. My laptop, bless its heart, kept putting up reminder messages that I hadn’t backed it up for X amount of days and I really should do that, I’d remember that I needed to ask Lyndon to look at the backup drive, and yet another emergency would crop up and I’d promptly forget about it.

Until today, when I was browsing through a friend’s FB page and she mentioned that she was having problems with her MacBook Air. A number of people offered helpful advice, chief among them, “Back up the machine and take it to a Genius Bar.”

Which reminded me that gosh, I really really really needed to have Lyndon take a look at the backup drive. And then I thought, “Well, hell, I’m a capable techy woman and he’s sleeping right now—why don’t I take a look at it myself?”

So I did. Opened up the case—the connection between the drive proper and the plug was a little loose. Tightened that up, plugged it in … nothing.

While it was connected I opened Disk Utility to see if it could find the drive. Boom, it could, which meant that the mechanics of the drive were functional. I ran First Aid and found out that some of the settings had gotten embuggered in a way that couldn’t be repaired.

I thought about it, decided that there was nothing on the drive that I couldn’t live without, and erased and reformatted it. Set it up as the Time Machine drive for the laptop, told Time Machine to do its thing and voila. Everything is backing up again properly. Techy Woman Skills FTW.

As you know, Bob, I like to use compression socks if I’m going to be sitting for a significant length of time while working. They’re comfy, stop my legs from swelling up, take extra strain off my heart, and now come in some really cool colors and designs.

Except. I am now SWAMPED with ads on Facebook and in email for compression socks. People, I can only wear one pair a day, I have four pairs which are washed regularly, I do not NEED any more compression socks and if I do I shall go to my original seller and buy them there (because they have super cute patterns and the socks fit me well).

Now, I thought this was simply a matter of my email addy being sold to other purveyors of compression socks, which sucks but is par for the course these days. Until I started hearing from other friends that THEY were getting swamped with ads for these socks as well and they hadn’t purchased any. I don’t know if it’s just everyone in Gen X getting hit with the AARP package of ads, or there’s a huge glut of compression socks in China and they’re desperate to sell them to fat old Americans, but it’s getting to the point where I may create a rule in my mail app to automatically delete any email with ‘compression sock’ in the subject line.

I understand the need to promote your stuff, I do. But there is such a thing as market saturation and compression socks are rapidly reaching that point.