Despite the fact that I’ve worked for a computer book publisher and a technical media organization (jobs I approached as editor and journalist, respectively), I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always grok the bells and whistles.
But I thought I had a pretty firm handle on email, and how it works, and a general sense of wordpress. Actually, it’s wordpress that seems to leave me in its dust all too often.
In the past, when I wanted to email a fellow blogger privately, without online publication, it was easy enough to simply respond to the email notification I got in my inbox. Hit reply, type away, and hit send. I did that on Sunday, logged off, and went about the rest of my day, involving cleaning up the equipment and putting it away after bottling 10 gallons of imperial stout Saturday, yardwork, televised sports, and making a dang good batch of Feijoada Incompleta (a Brazilian black bean soup I’ve modified) if I say so myself.
I logged on today to finally crop and post some pictures of the storm damage we sustained a couple weeks ago, and got quite the rude shock. The email I’d thought I’d sent personally to another blogger had been posted in the comments section of my last post. WTF?!?!
It was germane only to a recent post on that person’s blog, so it was a total non sequitur here–but it sure threw me for a loop. It’s 5 am here (insomnia, again) so I was already “feeling kind of ethereal” (Thank you, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders) and I couldn’t figure out how it happened. How on earth did my email end up in my blog? I couldn’t possibly have been so far out of it that I wrote a private note in the comments section while on the web, could I? Maybe it’s time to call the funny farm …
But now I realize that wordpress has set it up so that, when a comment arrives in your inbox, if you hit reply (which used to send a message to your correspondent, I swear it) it now gets posted in the same blog post. Sheesh. Okay, it looks different in the inbox now, but still. The same Pretenders’ song, Precious, also references Howard the Duck (“Now howard the duck and mr stress both stayed“) and if you remember Howard, you know that his tagline was “trapped in a world that he never made.”
I can relate.
* * * * * * *
This is probably as good a place as any to show what happened to the wayward sailboat I posted on earlier this month, which became a floating home to the homeless guy and his dog. I tried to post these photos in my comment, after our big storm October 13, but don’t see a way to post photos in comments. (I’m not going to claim there isn’t a way to do it.)
Anyway, later that week, after the storm, on a very foggy, still morning, I went out with my camera and found the boat looking like this:
His bicycle is gone, so I know he wasn’t on board during the storm. And it was really rocking on the bay, so I can’t imagine he tried to ride the storm out–obviously, the waves swamped the boat. And now it’s the city’s problem …
OmbudsBen 
crikey. that looks significantly less comfortable than the last shots.
I know exactly what you mean about WordPress. It think it is a terrific blog site, but those guys up there have so much fun tinkering with things they forget we aren’t all geeks out here. I guess I’ll try harder to pay attention to those little headlines they post. They just might affect me.