Two weeks ago, I had written a fantastic ode to the end of the summer. I saved the post in WordPress (my blogging platform) and left for some breakfast. When I came back, I noticed there was a new WordPress update and another for a plugin I’ve used religiously since the beginning called Jetpack. I updated both only to find that I couldn’t publish my awesome post for Summer Farewell. Think of plugins like apps for your smartphone. You get notices of frequent updates, which are usually patches for security holes or in other cases enhancements. You would be foolish not to update these on a regular basis as they become available, but that is for another discussion. I took the usual steps of deactivating each of the plugins on my site to determine the issue that was preventing me from posting only to find (after several of you emailed) one issue after another. Jetpack is one of those plugins that has over 30 different services within one and has been around for a long time, It’s awesome, it’s stable, not bloated, and doesn’t slow down your site. However, after disabling each service that I did use from within the plugin itself, I determined that their ‘spelling and grammar’ service for writing posts was indeed the main culprit. I wrote to the author of the plugin confirming all the steps I had taken to come to my conclusion and he was very helpful (unlike other authors who either never respond or are just complete assholes). Unfortunately, he did not have an immediate fix so I had to dump the plugin and replace each of the pertinent services with alternate plugins for the full functionality of Party Favorz. It’s likely I’ll go back to them at some point but for the time being, the most important issue was getting the site working. During this process, I had also rolled my site back to a previous state only to lose my awesome post and I didn’t have a copy on my hard drive [sigh]. Recreating it again was out of the cards. Thankfully, I had already uploaded the mix to Amazon for storage, which is where you great folks are downloading from. At the same time all this was occurring, Windows 10 on my computer forced the Anniversary update and totally wrecked my computer. After the update, I was only getting a black screen. When I tried to roll it back it did not work. I had to reset my computer a multitude of times and start all over again, only to find that the very first update to Windows would cause the same black screen issue again. Then I read about the millions of people that either had that issue or one of 20 or so from their obviously not-well-tested massive update. I started a chat with them in their forum and performed all of the steps they suggested then one day they just stopped responding so I called them. I sat on the phone for 2 hours and no one ever picked up, yet they still had the balls to send me a text to ask about my experience calling support. Are you f*****g kidding me? While all this is going on, I find out on Monday that my father had been admitted into a geriatric psych ward because of thoughts of suicide. My father and my best friend have been dealing with progressive Parkinson’s for a long time now and dementia (Alzheimer’s runs in our family). Sometimes he’s fine and we can carry on our friendly discussions as he’s a Trump supporter. Any mention of Hillary will totally set him off LOL. Other times, he thinks he’s someplace he’s not are conjures up grand stories of unbelief. My parents are rapidly draining their retirement money with his ongoing issues and my mother is doing her best to take care of him. They can’t afford assisted living. My sister flies down from Dallas every couple of months to help out and has taken over their finances.