Still Learning...

Carla Lee - around age 19

A funny thing happened on the way to the blogosphere yesterday….I got sideswiped. Yep, that’s right. I was caught unawares, as they say, by the fact that I know so very little about what I’m actually doing here on my blog.  I had worked several days on the piece honoring my Mother and actually had it ready to post two days ago.  How hard could that be?  Right?  Oh, ye who know so little.

One thing I did know was that it would be best to compose my article on my computer’s Word program so that I could work on it and perfect it before copying and posting it.  So, after making sure that I had every word correct, I was determined to do that yesterday morning. I had essentially tried to do the same thing the day before, but adding the photo was way too intimidating for me.  Whenever I put it in, it kept appearing at the bottom, and I didn’t know how to change that.

Being the clever girl that I am, I went to Google and looked for tutorials. None of them actually said to me what I wanted to hear, but it suddenly dawned on me that I needed to put the photo in first and maybe then the words would wrap around it.  Eureka – it worked!  So after reading my piece once again, I posted the photo, put in the article, hit preview (everything looked fine), then hit publish.  Neat. I had published a blog with a photo!

Not too long afterwards, a friend and ‘follower’ texted me to tell me how much she liked the tribute to my Mother. (Thanks, Wanda!)  Being so happy that someone had liked it, I went back to proudly read it again.  Wait a minute…what?  A critical word was missing.  That little word ‘to.’  What had happened?  Had I not proofed that piece a million times?  So back I went to my original work on my computer, and there it was, right where it was supposed to be.  Why didn’t it ‘copy’ along with the rest of words?  Did it just not want to be here?

Well of all things!  (...and so much for ‘pride.’)  I knew that I needed to change that mistake immediately, and that’s when all of the problems began.  Instead of just going in and simply adding the word, I decided to copy the paragraph again to see if the word would copy with it.  Big mistake. Not only did it not copy the word, the whole font was bigger in that paragraph than the rest of the piece.  What followed was like a scene out of a Marx Brothers movie. Change the piece; preview it; see the mess. Over and over, everything kept changing. Oh, lordy.  What had I gotten myself into?

I was actually having a slight panic attack at that point. I knew that as soon as I had published it, people would be notified that I had posted a new blog.  So if you are a ‘follower,’ there is no telling which version you actually saw if you visited my site right after notification.  I’m pretty sure that there were at least five.  What’s on there today certainly does not appear in the same form that was originally posted yesterday.  The photo never got back in the same place, and I was too afraid to mess with it anymore after I finally got the font to appear as the same size in the whole piece. If anyone ever asked the question, ”How much more damage can you do?” -  they never knew me! I can mess up with the best of ‘em.  And all for that little word ‘to.’  Humph.

In all of the things that I lovingly said about my Mother yesterday, I didn’t mention the fact that she was a perfectionist.  Her daughter is not. I spent years thinking something was wrong with me because I didn’t do things as well as she did or like the same things that she liked.  It finally dawned on me one day that I was just different, and that it was okay.  She, of course, knew that.

I can hear her laughing right now.  “You still have much to learn, little one.”