Streaking Along

Short post this week because I don’t have a lot to say, but I really wanted to maintain the streak.

I check my website traffic almost every day. When I glanced at the dashboard Monday morning, I saw a small bump beyond the onesie-twosie rate I’m used to. By Monday afternoon, there was an obvious spike. Found out at dinner that night that Youngest Son had mentioned at his job that his dad was a writer. So, shoutout to Trafera Muskogee!

I had a minor freakout Wednesday when I did my daily website check. The backend—the WordPress Dashboard—didn’t load, giving me a message about a bad function in one of the widgets. All sorts of horrible scenarios played through my mind, from a billing issue to a server crash to a hacked site. I poked around and checked a few files, then remembered what a great tech support crew Nixihost (affiliate link) has. Literally five minutes after I opened the support ticket, they had things fixed.

The problem turned out to be that they upgraded the default version of PHP on their servers because of end-of-life notices on PHP 7.4. The current version of the theme I’m running doesn’t really like the newest version of PHP, so in technical terms, it puked. I discovered that my theme (Fernando, by 9Seeds) is no longer supported, so sometime in the next few months, I’ll get with my web guru and choose a new theme. I can’t really complain, because I’ve been running Fernando for five years now, which is a pretty decent run for a blog theme.

It’s the end of an era at the local Chick-Fil-A. Ever since it opened in 2016, there’s been a Mueller working there. Oldest Daughter opened it and quickly became a shift manager before moving to a pharmacy after sixteen months or so. But by then, Middle Son was working there and brought Youngest Son aboard not long after. Then Middle Daughter joined up. The boys left for greener pastures late last year, and now Middle Daughter has turned her notice in. She’s teaching dance at two different branches of the studio she danced with, and she needs something that’s a little less demanding. She starts working in a couple of weeks at the same coffee shop where Youngest Daughter works.

Writing

Tuesday and Wednesday I didn’t get a lot of writing done because I was researching for Ghost. I still don’t know much about the antagonist in the story; I don’t even have a name for him. For that matter, I don’t necessarily even need his name for a while, or maybe at all, depending on how I write things. At any rate, I had to spend at least a couple of days learning about PTSD and serial rapists. As I said on Twitter, I needed some brain bleach after all of that, especially Tuesday.

I do manage to come up with some dark themes for my books sometimes.

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