Some housekeeping details...

I was shocked this summer to realize that this blog will soon have one million views.  This was particularly surprising because I had chosen at the outset not to have it listed on Blogger, wanting to keep it just between family and friends and like-minded cruisers, more out of privacy concerns than anything else.  But Cruise Critic and word-of-mouth are powerful messengers.  I thank you so much for following along and for your encouraging emails.  I still maintain that this blog is my diary, not a travel guide, but it is knowing that you are vicariously cruising with us that compels me to keep writing, and, in the end, G and I receive the biggest benefit when our travel memories are preserved for years to come.  Again, thank you!

However, realizing that someone besides Mom is reading along prompted me to do some clean up this summer.  You may have noticed the tabs at the top of the page (unless in mobile view), pointing readers to the first post of every season or collection of cruises.  I also reduced the labels on the left side of the page, editing hundreds of posts to ensure that each label only tags key useful information.  I played with the cloud listing for labels, but couldn't get comfortable with it (the accountant in me rebelled at the varying sizes of words), and so you're still left with a long list of labels.  But I hope you find the blog a bit more readable with the changes.  

Also fixed...my use of 'anyways' instead of 'anyway'.  Yes, I knew the word was really 'anyway', but thought 'anyways' was acceptable, too.  Kind of like 'I've got' instead of 'I have'...I'd probably write the latter but say the former.  And 'try and'  instead of 'try to'.  'Try to' is the correct one, but 'try and' is still widely used.  But a friend took a proofreading course over the summer and set me straight over breakfast one morning.  It is clearly 'anyway' and I was clearly wrong. ;-) In retribution, I removed the erroneous 's' from 97 posts (and sometimes more than one per post!).  Apparently, I use 'anyway(s)' quite a lot.

And now the port planning procrastination makes even more sense...

Anyway (ooh, that feels awkward), there remain some things I didn't - and won't- change, simply because they are a part of our family vernacular.  I say 'fry' and 'fried' instead of 'cry' and 'cried' (speaking of that, I fried when Peyton Manning carried the Lombardi trophy onto the field at Mile High Stadium at the season opener against the Panthers.). The word in our house is 'harious', never 'hilarious' (we have McGee to thank for that), and 'noculars' not 'binoculars' (ditto) and 'cordian folder' instead of 'accordion folder' (ditto ditto).  'Fuzzy water' is club soda or sparkling water...it would feel foreign to call it anything else.  These are my idiosyncrasies and I'm sticking with them.

I'm inserting this pic here because it may be the closest the Broncos will get to the Lombardi trophy
for awhile...and because watching Super Bowl 50 on MUTS on the Emerald Princess is probably
my favorite cruise memory ever. Also, not our house, not our plant, not our big screen TV. ;-)

I tried to read one or two past posts a day since we returned home in March, to catch the most egregious typos and autocorrections.  Good grief, they were many and embarrassing, so numerous that I haven't yet gotten through all of them.  But that is the reality of preparing a blog post every evening instead of waiting until I get home (which would never get done).  I'm tired, and maybe a little tipsy, and though autocorrect is my very BFF (you have no idea how forgiving it is and how much time it saves me), it can turn on me faster than a teenaged girl.  If I don't catch it, the errant words stay in the post in perpetuity. Or at least until I take the time to proofread the post months or years later. So, nearly perpetuity. A perfect case in point:  I was responding to a friend's email this morning and meant to type 'bolstered my spirits' and thankfully realized before I hit SEND that it was autocorrected to 'blistered my spirits'. Very different meaning, that!

I thought I had done a good thing, pretty-ing up my blog a bit, but too soon realized that the road to frustration is paved with good intentions.  As soon as I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 10 on September 14, it all turned ugly.  The Blogger app I'd used for years has not been supported or even downloadable for awhile. I was aware of that, but wasn't aware that the app would crash every 6.2 seconds with the new operating system.  Blogger cavalierly suggested that all of their former app users instead utilize Blogger.com to prepare and edit posts, refusing to acknowledge that the scroll function does not work on an iPad or that many of their bloggers work in a mobile environment. Blogger.com on an iPad is useless after about two paragraphs per post...and you know I seldomly limit my posts to two paragraphs!

I was up until the wee hours of the morning that night trying to figure it all out.  I tried other browsers (Chrome and Puffin), I tried other apps and was almost to the point of giving up on blogging this season until I remembered the way I had originally published blog posts...by emailing them to the blog. I tested that and was relieved to see that at least that method still works; however, it allows no editing from my iPad once a post is published (and I need to have the ability to edit (see above re: egregious errors)).

Still searching, I came across the app called BlogTouch Pro.  It was the third app I'd tried that evening, and it was definitely the charm. The price was $4.99 but at that point it seemed a steal. WYSIWUG, editable, and I can add photos to my posts. I've written these first few posts on it for practice, saved them without wifi and then successfully uploaded them using wifi.  It all seems to work fine, but I have learned that things that work perfectly at home sometimes falter in the world of cruise ship wifi.  Hang on, this could be a rocky ride, blog-wise.  And if you're a blog writer who uses the Blogger app on a mobile iOS device, this is the only alternative I can recommend...at least so far. 

 

Still, being able to leave my laptop at home makes those sorts of minor annoyances worthwhile. After all, I prepared three years of blog posts on an iPhone...it's all easy after that!