Day: January 23, 2023

SYW/BI — 01/23/2023

Fandango20 Comments
Share Your World
Blogging insights

It’s about 9:00 Monday night here in the post-operative acute care orthopedic rehab center and I just had the best dump I’ve taken in eight days, which makes me a happy camper! So I thought, before I turn in for the night, I’d celebrate my accomplishment by taking a few minutes to respond to two of my favorite Monday prompts, Di’s Share Your World prompt and Dr Tanya’s Blogging Insights prompt.

Let’s start with Share Your World. Di asks:

1. Do you find it relatively easy to fall asleep at night?

Before my accident, I found it relatively easy to fall asleep, but not so easy to stay asleep due to having to get up and pee at least once during the night. Since my accident last Saturday, I’m so exhausted from pain and the physical and occupational therapy sessions I’m having four times a day, I fall asleep almost the instant I close my eyes.

2. Do you remember your dreams?

Maybe for 15 to 30 seconds after I wake up. But then my dreams, for the most part, just disappear from my memory. The only exceptions are recurring dreams that I’ve had and I can usually remember them because, well, they’re recurring.

Interestingly, I’ve had a lot of really weird dreams since being in the hospital, and I do remember at least the gist, if not the details, of some of those dreams.

3. If you can’t sleep, do you watch TV, read or listen to music in the hope you will nod off?

I either play solitaire on my iPhone or read blog posts on my iPhone until I can no longer keep my eyes open and am able to nod off.

4. Can you literally sleep anywhere (chair, sofa, bus, train, flight, etc.)?

If I’m really tired, I can, indeed, fall asleep pretty much anywhere. But a nice comfy bed is always my preference.

Now for Blogging Insights. Dr Tanya asks:

Do you write directly on a device? Are you old school, do you write on paper first?

When I first started blogging back in 2005, I’d draft my post using Microsoft Word on my laptop and then copy and paste it to my Blogger-hosted blog. But for the past six or seven years, I draft my post using either WordPress.com on my iPhone or using the WordPress app for iOS on my iPhone. Today, I almost exclusively use the iOS app.

Do you re-draft? If so, how many times?

Except when I’m responding to a Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, where the only editing you’re technically permitted to do is to correct typos and misspellings, I do a lot of redrafting. I proofread, edit, move things around, re-edit, re-proofread, and do it as many times as I think necessary before I’m happy enough with my post to hit Publish. I’d say, on average, I have ten to twenty redrafts for each post.

Staying Alive

Fandango55 Comments

On Friday I’m scheduled to be leaving the post-surgical orthopedic rehab facility as I enter the next phase of my return to normalcy. I will be transitioning from inpatient physical and occupational therapy sessions to at home sessions. My primary care givers will no longer be doctors and nurses, but my wife. She will also be my primary meal preparer and housekeeper. She will also assume a huge burden of physically and emotionally caring for me as a result of my stupidity that caused me to fracture my hip. And I couldn’t be more grateful for her presence in my life.

I’m still in a serious amount of pain at the site of the surgery (my left hip) and my left leg feels almost like dead weight, unable to follow the simple instructions my brain is sending it. My energy level, particularly after going through rigorous physical/occupational therapy sessions, is drained. I know it’s going to take a lot of time, effort, and patience before I will be back on my own two feet, literally.

So, on to the point of this post. I have been able to keep my daily FOWC with Fandango prompt going because I usually have a few weeks worth of those daily posts scheduled in advance. And I think, even while focusing on my physical recovery, I will be able to keep them going. I’ll probably be able to keep my Flashback Friday posts going, as that mostly involves reblogging a previous post. But I have other prompt posts that might not fare so well in the near term:

  • Monday’s Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge (#FFFC)
  • Tuesday’s Fandango’s Story Starter (#FSS)
  • Wednesday’s Fandango’s Provocative Question (#FPQ)
  • Sunday’s (sometimes) Fandango’s Who Won the Week (#FWWTW)

These posts will have to go on hiatus until I get my mojo back. I just don’t have the energy or motivation right now to keep them going. If any of you would be interested in temporarily (or possibly permanently) taking over any of these challenges, please let me know. Otherwise, these four aforementioned posts will be off the radar for a while.

While I’ve been trying as best I can to read and respond to your comments on my way fewer posts these past nine days, I have not done as well keeping up with your posts. I hope, as the weeks go by and my recovery proceeds, to resume reading your posts more regularly and to be able to respond to the prompts and challenges many of you post.

And again, thank you for your well wishes since my fall.

Cellpic Sunday — 1/8/23 Take Two

Fandango11 Comments

Good News. In a comment on this post, Sweeterthannothing wrote, I *think* if you go to edit the post and look at the side bar to the right where the tags and stuff are there is an option to look at how many revisions have been done, you might be able to reverse it there? It was a bit painstaking, but I was pretty much able to go through those revisions and recreate the original January 8th Cellpic Sunday post, which is below.

John Steiner, the blogger behind Journeys With Johnbo, has this prompt he calls Cellpic Sunday in which he asks us to post a photo that was taken with a cellphone, tablet, or another mobile device. I thought this might be fun so I decided to join in.

You may remember from this post last month, my wife got a new Chromebook to replace her aging Macbook. My job was to get her Chromebook set up and to transfer all of her files from her Macbook to her Chromebook. Of course, her Chromebook didn’t come with a user manual, so I Googled “transferring files and photos from a Mac to a Chromebook” and there were many helpful sites and YouTube videos.

Her Chromebook is a 2-in-1 (i.e., it can be used as a laptop with its integrated physical keyboard, or as a tablet with an on-screen virtual keypad). My wife has no intention of using it as a tablet, though. She want to use it as a laptop. That’s where I ran into a problem. Her physical keyboard wasn’t working. Only the virtual keypad.

Again, I went to Google to find out how to switch from tablet to laptop mode. Again, all sites said “easy-peasy,” but nothing worked for me. No matter what I did, the damn virtual keypad wouldn’t disappear and the physical keyboard was useless.

So I took the photo below with my iPhone and called tech support at ASUS, the brand of Chromebook. if you look carefully, you can see my. reflection in the Chromebook’s screen.

Fortunately, I got through to a human being. l explained the problem. He asked me a few questions, assessed the situation, and then provided me with these instructions:

  • Press and hold the power button for five seconds until the screen goes totally dark.
  • Wait 10 seconds.
  • Press and hold reset arrow key (circle arrow above the 3 key) AND the power button until laptop reboots.

Bingo. The virtual keypad was gone and the visual keypad was working. Yay! And I didn’t have to pester my son.

If you wish to participate in this fun cellphone photo prompt, please click on the link to John’s post at the top of my post to see his photo and to read his instructions.

Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge #203

Fandango18 Comments

Welcome to Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Each week I will be posting a photo I grab off the internet and challenging bloggers to write a flash fiction piece or a poem inspired by the photo. There are no style or word limits.

The image below is from Pengfei Liu at Unsplash.com.

For the visually challenged writer, the black and white photo shows an apparently homeless man wrapped in a quilted, hooded jacket and a sleeping bag around his lower torso and legs sleeping on the sidewalk outside of window display of Rolex retail store.

If this week’s image inspires you and you wish to participate, please write your post, use the tag #FFFC, and link back to this post. I hope it will generate some great posts.

Please create a pingback to this post or manually add your link in the comments.

FOWC with Fandango — Sweep

Fandango27 Comments
FOWC

It’s January 23, 2023. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “sweep.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.