WHERE HAVE ALL THE BLOG POSTS GONE, long time passing? The past few months have seen absolutely nothing posted on any of my blogs. This does not mean that I have not been busy. I just haven’t been busy publishing things I wrote. At a time when more people are probably reading things on the internet that they never had time to even find before, I have been silent.
Here are the reasons why:
• In February and March, my wife and I had the plain, old-fashioned flu: headaches that approached the “pounding” level; fevers that, fortunately, topped out at 100; achy muscles in the neck, shoulders, and lower back; and fatigue (just moving about the house was an effort).
• My wife had a head cold that included a sinus infection that caused one ear to ache.
• This was followed by my wife passing two kidney stones, each a gawdawfully painful experience.
We were “seeing” our doctor regularly via Zoom and were tested for COVID-19, which was negative. 1
Curraaash!
During this time, my computer’s hard drive crashed and died and I had to find a new used iMac. We found one locally on Craigslist and I am now working on an iMac with a larger hard drive, more memory, and a faster processor! I was able to restore all of the files, documents, and images from the dead computer, but there were some weird effects on each along the way.
I write this one article for six blogs. Right now, you are on the Neal Umphred Dot Com. If you got here from one of my other blogs, click on the backward arrow on your browser (←) to return to that blog.
Prior to the crash, I had migrated all of my blogs from my old host—once a reliable independent company, now just another acquisition for a bigger company with little interest in anything but the bottom line—to a new host. They “fixed” all my websites’ files and databases and coördinated all my plugins with their servers. I was thrilled to be with these people!
Then my sites started going temporarily offline for excessive use of resources, a problem that I had never had in my seven years with my previous (and relatively inept) host. It seems that my new host is not destined to be my permanent and I am looking for my second new host in six months.
Currently, things seem reasonably “normal” and I will begin posting new articles on this blog and each of my other blogs:
Rather Rare Records
Elvis – A Touch Of Gold
The Endless Sixties
GCC – Global Climate Change
After I get something new on each blog, most of my attention will be focused on the Elvis site for the foreseeable future.
This is just a brief note to let readers know why there haven’t been any new articles published on this blog in the past few months. Click To Tweet
FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page and here was lifted from an article titled “The epidemic on the way: Why winter flu is so bad this year” on the New Scientist website. Written by Debora Mackenzie and dated January 2018, the sub-title is, “Flu is an underestimated killer, taking more than a million lives around the globe annually. This time, the mutated virus seems to be hitting even harder.” 2
FOOTNOTES
1 Everyone in my both Berni and my family have fared well during the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020. So far.
2 As I needed to use this photo for posts in six blogs, I played with the color balance in five of them.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)
