Wednesday 10 December 2025: Tech issues again

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After 2 disturbed nights on the trot and the previous day’s intense concentration on my annual finances, I really struggled to get up yesterday.

On Sunday night/Monday morning, I was up with the spaniel and his floppy ears, as he was flicking them all over the place and they were clearly driving him mad. In the end we had a chat and he let me massage his bad ear from the outside for about 20 minutes before settling down. On Monday night/Tuesday morning, it was the puppy wanting to play at stupid o’clock. He’s getting much better, though. Sleeping longer. We just need to have that conversation about boundaries…

The poet was up early too as he had a long drive north to Durham, and he’d be on the edge of a big storm all the way up. He’d been to collect the spaniel’s medicine the day before and we’d put the ear drops in between us on Monday night. At 6 o’clock in the morning, we were doing the same again. I went back to bed, but an hour later both dogs were wanting their breakfast. We need to have a discussion about that too, I think. 

I was shattered and I went back to bed again, waking up at 9:10am! And the poet hadn’t called to let me know he’d arrived safely at his destination. So I called him. He was fine, but he’d been stuck behind a road traffic accident for the best part of an hour, and in that atrocious weather too. 

I combined my dirty cuppa with our quiet hour, then I put grown-up clothes on and ventured out in the storm’s edge with 2 dogs on leads (leashes) for the first time together around the block. We’ve walked from the car to the vet and back, and between the house and the car a few times. But we’d never actually got around to a proper walk. 

Spaniel hates to go anywhere unless we’re all together and I have to drag him for the first part of the block as there’s no footpath until we get round to the bungalow estate. Once on the footpath he was fine. Puppy was just great all the way around. Even when a big noisy truck drove by. Back home and spaniel wanted to play ball in the garden, in the rain. He’s used to running around a dog park, so playing ball in the garden is one of the best games ever, even if it is turning the lawn into a quagmire. I indulged him for a while, but puppy didn’t really like the cold rain and, anyway, I had work to do.

We all came back in, dried ourselves off, I had my midday breakfast, and I started work, leaving them to carry on playing in the conservatory, kitchen and hall. Chasing each other around the house is also one of the best games ever. 

One of the jobs I had to do was check my WordPress, as since an ‘upgrade’ just about a week ago, I’ve stopped receiving emails when someone comments on a blog post. I waited until a few plugin updates came in, and I did those, in case it was one that hadn’t updated to the new WordPress yet. But yesterday, comments still weren’t being emailed to me. So I went and logged a bug on the support forum.

I don’t like using the forum myself, and would far rather find a solution either already on there or elsewhere entirely. Sometimes some of the people who reply, be they regular users or official mods, sound as though you’re either taking up too much of their valuable time or that you’re too thick to just address what they think is a minor issue. Most of the time, they’re really helpful. But those some-times do put me off when I don’t have the energy for the holier-than-thou attitude.

I checked my open submissions for December and I updated my reading spreadsheet and my 36-project spreadsheet. I have everything in place for the new 40-project spreadsheet and gantt chart for next year, apart from the extra 4 double columns in my old word-count recording sheet. I’ll probably insert these in January and make sure the formulae work before creating sheets for the rest of the year. As I’m running another kind of record in the same 2026 workbook alongside my old tried and tested system, I’m hoping it turns out to be simpler while still telling me everything I like to know.

I kept checking in with the WordPress Org forum, but they don’t tend to wake up until the afternoon. I think most of them are in the States, and while they’re 5 or 6 hours behind me, many of them don’t get on there until the evening, their time.

I went out to bring the blue (recycling) wheelie bin back in only to find that it hadn’t been emptied and it had been tagged. There are numerous reasons on the tag why they may not have emptied it, but no one had indicated which one we’d violated. I have no idea what’s gone in there that they don’t like, but really? This close to Christmas? Don’t they expect Christmas boxes any more?

I turned to the next bookazine, which is out the first week in January, and I did a few jobs there. I moved all of my assets to a single folder and made a Scrivener folder. Then I did the cover, the welcome letter, 3 of the short stories, the credits page as I worked through the stories, and the also by… page.

By the end of the day I had a few responses to the WordPress issue before closing down. It seems it’s a new feature that’s causing all the issues, an identical feature that did the same thing several versions ago and was scrapped. I’ll have to wait to see if there’s a fix scheduled, or if I can downgrade to the previous version. But if they’re forcing us to pay to have our emails sent to us, I’ll be seriously reconsidering my presence on here. I’m already paying for the service.