Month: November 2021

The Ultimate Food Fight

Fandango11 Comments

There is an significant ideological schism between the two sides. Neither group is inherently good or bad, just different. The winning team would be the one that could create the biggest wallop and potentially herald in a period of conciliation without either side feeling cheated.

So now, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to announce the winner of this great debate. Will it be the ubiquitous russet potato or the holiday favorite, the sweet potato?

And the winner is…

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (schism), The Daily Spur (good), Your Daily Word Prompt (wallop), Word of the Day Challenge (herald), My Vivid Blog (cheat), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (sweet potato).

#WDYS — Four Generations

Fandango27 Comments

She was his great grandmother and he was now in her care after her daughter, his grandmother, and her granddaughter, his mother, had both succumbed to COVID-19 last year. Her own husband was long gone, and was her late-daughter’s husband. Her late-granddaughter’s husband, the boy’s father, had skipped out on his wife and son shortly after the boy was born. So it was up to her to take care of him.

She lived in a relatively rural setting and there was no school nearby to send the child and she felt she had to do whatever she could to prepare him to survive in the trouble world around him. But she had to do it quickly because she was very old and didn’t know how much time she had left.

She used most of her savings to buy the boy a laptop, hoping that he could use it to learn things that would help him in the future. She wanted him to understand how to use technology and to discover all he could before she left him on his own.

The boy was smart and she was amazed by, and very proud of, how quickly he absorbed information. And he was thrilled to share with her all of what he discovered on that laptop.

One day she sat with him on the wood deck outside their small cottage. She told him that she would soon be moving on and that he should, even after she was gone, continue to educate himself. He cried and promised that he would not let her down.

“I know, my dear child,” she said. “I will still be with you in your heart and in your mind and I know that you will make my spirit very proud.”

She passed a few days later and the boy took some clothing and his laptop and went out into the big wide world, feeling confident that his great grandmother had put him on the right path.

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See? prompt. Photo credit: Sasint @ Pixabay.

WordPress Responds

Fandango26 Comments

If you read my response last week to Paula Light’s The Monday Peeve, I was on a rant complaining how, for more than a year now, the WordPress iOS app for the iPhone was causing issues with my ability to both like and comment on some other bloggers’ posts.

I opened up a support message and attached a link to my TMP rant. This is what I got in response:

Hi again, Fandango,


Thank you for reporting this! I’ve tested this, and I could reproduce it on WordPress.com sites with a custom domain. In my case, I couldn’t like a post at all, even after a refresh. My “likes” didn’t get saved on the post, and this is frustrating! I understand how annoying this is. We will keep a close eye on this one.


This is similar to the issue that the WebView (Apple’s library for providing a web browser experience within an iOS app) doesn’t recognize that we’ve logged in to the app and WordPress.com. I have reported this as a bug to be looked into by the developers, but as you already know, I can’t promise you a timeline for when this will be fixed. However, I will highlight this to the team and hope they can prioritize this bug since it’s been happening since iOS 14 was launched.


Once again, thank you very much for your time in reporting this. We appreciate your patience while we look into this matter.

Note the “Hi again, Fandango.” Obviously this happiness engineer was one of those who was involved last year when I exchanged myriad emails with the support team. At least she agreed that this bug is frustrating and annoying. But once again, she seemed to be assigning blame to Apple for the issue. She committed, just as she did last year, to have the WordPress developers “look into” this, but failed to offer a timeframe for resolution. Again, this bug surfaced almost 13 months ago.

I wrote back and said this:

I hope your developers will give this issue a high priority. One of my blogging friends suggested that I switch from my iPhone to an Android device, but no one should have to do that in order to use the WordPress app for a smartphone. I’m sure there are many WordPress users who, like me, blog primarily on their iPhones, so this bug must be affecting a lot of us and is seriously detrimental to our WordPress blogging experience.

Here’s the response I received…from a different happiness engineer:

I agree and we understand how frustrating this is. We will keep a close eye on this one. Thank you again for reporting it. We really appreciate that.

So things are pretty much as they have been for more than a year. An acknowledgment that there is a problem, that it’s frustrating and annoying, and that they’re going to have their developers look into it. And, once again, no ETA on when I might anticipate a resolution.

Déjà vu all over again.

Truthful Tuesday — Holidays

Fandango20 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuy, has published another one of his Truthful Tuesday posts. Frank is changing things up a bit on this Truthful Tuesday prompt. Instead of asking us specific questions, he is giving us a topic and asking us to discuss it. This week’s topic is “holidays.” Frank wants to know…

Whatever holidays you may celebrate this time of year, how ready for them are you?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes Omicron. While Omicron sounds like it should be the name of a high tech company or the latest Android operating system, it’s actually the name of the latest coronavirus variant. Omicron is supposed to be highly contagious and because it’s so new, scientists don’t know how effectively the current batch of COVID-19 vaccines work on Omicron. So much for holiday plans.

Our extended family is a mixed bag of Christian, Jewish, and atheist, so we celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah. Chanukah this year is already underway and our plan was to have our kids and grandkids over to our house this coming Sunday for a Chanukah get together. And we were all planning to get together again around Christmas at two holiday gatherings, one at the home of our daughter’s significant other’s parents and the other at the home of our daughter-in-law’s parents.

This Sunday’s Chanukah party has been postponed until we know that our jabs (and we’ve all gotten our boosters) are effective against Omicron. Hopefully, by the time the Christmas gatherings come around, we’ll know whether the vaccines we’ve all gotten will keep us safe against the latest variant.

We thought, up until this past week, that we were safe and ready. And we had planned for the holiday season accordingly. Now everything is sort of up in the air.

Welcome to life in the second decade of the 21st century.

Fandango’s Story Starter #22

Fandango21 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you an incomplete “teaser” sentence and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that partial sentence. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

When I looked inside, I saw no sign of life whatsoever, except for…

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and to tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

FYI, I “borrowed” and slightly modified today’s teaser from blogger Pete (aka Mister Bump). In a line from his response to my flash fiction prompt yesterday, he wrote, as part of a sentence, “…she saw no sign of life whatever, except for….” So thanks, Pete, for inspiring today’s Story Starter.