Abby's is packed – boys go to playroom

Abby's is jampacked today. All seats taken. We gave the boys some lessons in table manners - "Please pass the ketchup!" Then we turned them loose to go to the play area that Abby built just for such people as these.

Text added at 11:34 AM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 50 and counting.

I sleep in, come to Abby's and find two cowboys

After getting almost no sleep the night before, I slept pretty good last night. I woke up at 7:45 and thought, " Oh good! I can be at Abby's right when she opens at eight." But I could hardly move. I knew the house was cold but my covers were warm. Jimmy was curled up underneath the top cover atop the side of my chest, Chicago was tucked in alongside my head. I felt snug and comfy. I closed my eyes again, dozed off and pretty much kept them closed until 9:45. Then I came straight over here to Abby's, walked through the door and found two cowboys at the bar. John and Tim. I ordered an omelette and it was damn good.

Now I await my toast, which is dessert to me. I will eat it, slowly sip my coffee, and then, given the fact that I have a tremendous amount to do between now and when I leave for Barrow Monday afternoon, I will get at it. 

Text added at 11:57 AM. The Squarespace nightmare continues - day 47 and counting.

Unable to sleep until Abby's opens, I return to family restaurant

This morning was the opposite of yesterday. Despite having gone to bed at a fairly normal time for me and having had a difficult time falling asleep, come 5:15 AM this morning I could sleep no more. I tried. I laid there for another hour, hoping to fall back to sleep. Finally, I gave up. I wanted to go to Abby's but Abby does not open until eight. I thought about just fixing myself a cup of coffee, doing some work until eight and then going over. But my house is cold. My office is the only warm place in it. I will build a fire to warm it later today but right now it is cold. I did not want to have my first coffee of the day in my office or in the cold house. So I came here to Mat-Su Family Restaurant.

Note: I wrote the above in my phone when I Instagrammed this image while still at Family. I wound up Instagramming four more related images over the course of my breakfast and my followup-meditative coffee drinking, plus one more on the way home.

I will now email all those images to myself. I will combine the four-remaining breakfast images and the thoughts I wrote at the time into one post and then make a separate one of the coming home picture. Then, theoretically, I can say I have done all the blogging I need to do today.

Text added at 8:52 AM. The Squarespace nightmare continues.

Outside trucks inside trucks and one hand not quite on the wheel (Update, 11:39 AM: single picture post altered to become "Three Studies of Kalib at Abby's")

Kalib and I are at Abby's. Yes there have been trains rolling about the house since he arrived, but here are at Abby's there are trucks. Inside trucks outside trucks.

Perhaps it is a foolish quest, I am going to try to post this from here. Well, the text will post. Will have to see about the picture. There will be a school bus later today.*

Sent from my iPhone

*Yes, Squarespace did strip the picture and I am only now - two hours later - finally able to add it back in. In the meantime, this sat here as a picture less post. An interesting thing did happen, though. I expain below, under what will now be the third picture in this post.

Well, all those Mormon church leaders who raised me and my extended family members who remain faithful would or will be horrified to see this. "What kind of example are you setting for your young grandson?!" I can hear them exclaim.

I am content with it The coffee is good. My day begins better because of it.

Ok. This is what happened. I took this last two pictures after I had attempted to post the first picture remotely from Abby's but failed after the Squarespace app stripped it out of the picture. I then decided not to bother trying to post these last two from Abby's but just to email them to myself and combine them with the first in one post which would then become "Three Studies of Kalib at Abby's."

When I post remotely, I cannot post more than one picture at a time, whether I use the app or the mail workaround, but of course when I sit down at my computer I can put as many pictures in a post as I desire.

Interestingly, when I first tried to email this bottom picture to myself, I somehow inadvertantly used the address Squarespace gave me to do the email workaround. I did not realize I had done this. All I knew was the picture I had emailed to myself was not showing up. So I tried again. Again, it did not show up.

Then, when I got to this computer and opened up Logbook I was surprised to see two posts I had not intended to put. Both were of this picture standing completely alone. No text. Not a single word.

This causes me to wonder if maybe the Squarespace failing is that, most often, is less that it strips the picture out, but that it cannot properly handle both picture and text together, but handle either one alone. So, as a test, I will post my Daily School Bus this afternoon from Metro Cafe. It will be a wordless post. Picture only, but I will try a headline.

Then I will see if it successfully posts the picture, and add words in later.

The Daily School Bus: Squarespace nightmare reasserts itself with vengeance; Kalib at Taco Bell: the photo Squarespace deleted from my previous post

Yesterday, I tentatively started "The Daily School Bus." While snapping images of school buses I come upon is one of my many strange photographic passions and school buses will likely always keep popping up on this, or any other blog I might launch to replace it, for as long as I blog, I had none-the-less hoped bus stardom in a daily feature would be temporary. As I explained yesterday, after starting out with some mildly annoying, sporadic, quirks I could work my way around in relatively short order, the performance of the Squarespace iPhone app I have been using to post for two-and-half months steadily degenerated - often deleting my pictures and posting only the words. It got ever more frustrating until finally it became impossible to work with. I sometimes made between 20 and 40 retries to publish a post, only to have the Squarespace app delete the photo each time.

As I explained yesterday, I made a formal complaint to Squarespace. Squarespace acknowledged the problem promised to fix it - and a number of others I pointed out - and to notify me when they do. But then Squarespace has made such promises before with other annoying, time-wasting problems, sometimes taking years to make the fix, sometimes never making it.

I have invested so much in time, effort and even money into this blog - into Squarespace. I am completely fed up with this kind of thing. I got into computers in the mid-80's and into the net not long afterward and in that time I have had to deal with many frustrations, as has anybody who boots up and goes online.

Yet, nothing else I have experienced has even come close to the aggravation and amount of wasted time that my investment in Squarespace has cost me. I must be incredibly foolish to have stuck with them for so long - since 2008. Squarespace does, however, provide the tools to create a good blog structure and they have a support staff that always gets back to you and they usually do their best to address the problem, but the underneath the bright structure they have created is a foundation so flawed that sometimes the problems seem to be unaddressable.

Over the years, I have received received many reassurances from Squarespace that they were working to address this problem or that and to improve their complete product. So, despite my many bad experiences, having already invested myself so deeply into their platform, I have wanted to believe they would solve all their problems and make my blogging experience with them a good one. But now Squarespace has pushed me over the edge.

So, both to explain to readers why, due all this aggravation and wasted time, I must cut back on my blogging, I tentatively launched The Daily School Bus yesterday. The school bus pictures would serve as place holders to keep my blog on life-support while Squarespace maybe got their act together and fixed the problem, as they promised. 

When I tapped "publish" on my iPhone ap to post yesterday's introductory explanation, I fully expected the app to strip the photo out of the post as it had done with single other attempt I had made to post over the previous three days. In one life's many ironic coincidences, the app successful put up the full post - picture included. When this happens, it is a simple, quick, and beautiful thing. Although I had received no notification the problem had been fixed, this gave me hope that perhaps it had.

Not long after, I made the Kalib-Dusty post. It, too, went up; full and complete. My hopes rose further.

Next, up was Two artists collaborate, 1 of 2. I began to feel optimistic.

Unfortunately, when I first tried to post Two artists collaborate, 2 of 2, the Squarespace app failed. I did a couple of retries and finally the app put the full post up, picture included. Now I was wary again, but willing to keep going. I don't like it all, but, as annoying as it is, I can tolerate two failed attempts to post if the third succeeds.

Next, Kalib and I went to Taco Bell, where I took the above image right after we got our food. I quickly added the text you see in the picture-less post just ahead of this one and tapped, "publish." The Squarespace app posted the text but stripped the picture. I then tried and tried again - sometimes getting as many as four, identical, picture-less posts, all saying the same thing, stack up on the page before I deleted any of them. After ten tries, I lost count but I really wanted to get the post up, so I kept trying. I must have tried about 20 times total. Finally, having had not only my blogging experience but my lunch experience ruined, I gave up. I kept my frustration hidden from Kalib and I happy to say he did enjoy his lunch experience at The Bell.

Afterward, I returned home, emailed these two images to myself and then attached them to the text in my computer the normal, slow, laborious, Squarespace 5 way, just as I had long done before I switched to the iPhone and the Squarespace app.

So now The Daily School Bus is officially launched. I will post one school bus image a day until Squarespace notifies me they have fixed the problem - or until I give up and go find another blog host altogether. Switching hosts would create an enormous headache for me, but maybe that's what it is coming to. After all these years, and after all this time and effort, not to mention money, I have invested into this blog and into Squarespace, I'm afraid my confidence in Squarespace is finally all but shot.