Warm Days, Hot Bats, and Technology Issues

November 1, 2016
Chicago, Illinois




Holy crap! It's the first day of November and the daytime temperature reached 75 (where's that key?...dammit!...must be some way to....) DEGREES Fahrenheit (24 Celsius) this afternoon. It's unbelievably warm for this late into autumn. But I'm not complaining a bit. The trees are exploding with color, and outside is absolutely gorgeous. My roommate made arepas - a taco-like thing from South America- filled with chicken and avocado, and we decided to go outside and eat our dinner picnic-style on the grassy common area of the apartment complex. Maybe Chicago is trying to woo me into staying. If so, it's pulling out all the stops. This may actually be a historic year. The Chicago Cubs baseball team is in the World Series for the first time in 71 years, and haven't won the championship since 1908. After going down three games to one over the weekend, it looked pretty dismal. But they have clawed their way back, and tonight their bats are on fire, and they are currently up 7-2 in the bottom of the seventh inning. If they win tonight, then I WILL be watching tomorrow night along with the rest of the city. This place is going to be a madhouse.

I've decided that I need to move this blog to another platform. In order for me to keep a bit of anonymity, I changed my user name on the blog from my real name. Unfortunately, this had the effect of changing the name on my outgoing emails to Unknown Cynic, which is probably confusing as hell to those people with whom I am corresponding. I asked a friend who has been fairly successful in using her blog to support her travel what she would recommend for a blog service. Very quickly, she answered with Wordpress, the hosting site she uses. It's user friendly, she said. It's got great tech support, she said. You'll love it, she said. All of that sounded great, so I downloaded Wordpress and started to create my new blog there. 

It ain't all that friendly. Not to me. I played around with it for about an hour, and still was unable to figure out how to change the headers and subtext from the advertisement and "your message here" sample text. Probably child's play for...well, a child. I'm probably going to have to get a tutorial or take a class on how to use it. As seen from the beginning of this post, I'm not very good at figuring out the secrets of the computer. Pencils and paper were so much easier, weren't they? But learn I must. Hyperlinks and plug-ins and HTML, oh my! I'll feel so accomplished when I can add pictures and video to my page. But the stories will always be the important part. 

Game 6 is over. Cubs 9, Indians 3. Tomorrow night, I'm watching history.


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