All posting, including tonight ’s Eyrie thang, will be pushed back until either later tonight or possibly even tomorrow. Heading out in just a bit for the BCHS football game to check out my daughter’s performance, then bringing her back home with me afterwards for the weekend. Big doin’s which I’m very much looking forward to, back with y’all soon as I can be.

Update! Well dammit, that did not go at ALL as planned. First, my friend Zach got hopelessly lost on the way down to pick me up; called me, tried to tell me where he was while the wife and young ‘un talked all over him in the background, and I couldn’t make heads nor tail of where the bleedin’ hell that boy might be, since I’m way out in the boonies and not just terribly familiar with the area my own self. So, he finally gets straightened out somehow, makes it to my dismal shack, and we proceed to hightail it with all due haste up to Bessemer.

On arrival at the high school after much tail-chasing, recrimination, and assignation of blame, we try to find an entrance to the football field (we could see from the road that the game was already well under way, just couldn’t see a way to get in and parked and all). No helpful signs or arrows or anything along those lines, mind, that would apparently have made this business entirely too easy.

We drove slowly through an open gate close behind the home-side bleachers where we could see several cars parked up. Some quasi-official dood hustles his fat ass out, flags us down, and informs us we ought to go back around to the main entrance. Which has a handicapped ramp, see. Which, in my current sad, crippled condition, is not optional. Which condition Official Dood had noted, bless him.

So we did that thing.

We drive to the main entrance, park up, unass the vehicle, and go up to the front doors as told. We try each of the four doors; all locked, natch. As we made our way back out to the car scratching our heads in befuddlement, a young feller opens one of the doors, bellows a hearty halloo, and waves us inside. We go in and he accompanies us down a long, wide hall, around a bend, and right over to the main office. Wherein a white-haired, security-guard looking fellow (no uniform, but sometimes you can just kinda tell, y’know?) says we should go back around the building to the parking lot we’d just left, wait by the line of parked buses for him to join us, and he would be out in a jiffy to personally guide us to exactly where we needed to be.

By then, Madeleine’s role in the evening’s festivities had concluded. She had arranged with her band director to duck out early with us so’s we might get her on back down to chez Hendrix at a reasonable hour. So as we were ambling over to the bus line wondering just what the fucking actual fuck, here comes my kid walking towards us from the far side of the parking lot. She caught our frazzled attention with a big smile and a wave, the four of us piled into the car, and we got the hell out of Dodge posthaste.

To tot up the results of this decidedly snakebit foray, then: No marching band halftime show. No marching band music. No Friday night high school football. Much confustication, aimlessness, and futility. Contradictory instructions from friendly folks who were just trying to be helpful. Lots of driving and milling around. Some time spent exploring the after-hours-vacant, dimly-lit corridors of a school building I have no particular fondness for or connection to, other than that my daughter will be attending classes there next year. Then, it was back home again safe and sound for this intrepid if hapless bunch, sadder perhaps but none the wiser for the experience.

All in all, NOT one of my more productive evenings. Ah well, whatchagonna do. Even so, on the trek back to South Cackalacky—chatting and laughing and rehashing events merrily as we rolled past quiescent farms, cheerily lit homes, and closed businesses—we all agreed that, despite none (0, not any) of our best-laid plans for the night having actually come to fruition, the whole rigmarole of a busted-play of a clusterfuck of a shit-circus had still been a lot of fun. We have no plans to do it all again next year.

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I’ve had a few queries about my snail-mail address for the sending of Fall Begathon contributions, from folks who don’t have any electronic means of doing such, or just don’t feel comfortable about using ‘em. No, I have no intention of posting my home address on the blog, for reasons which should be obvious. But if that applies to you, contact me via the thinly-disguised email addy under the “Correspondence” header over in the right sidebar and we’ll get it all worked out in suitable fashion.

Also, the response so far to the Little Richard poll has been lopsidedly in favor of me doing the post, so I’ll get cracking on putting that together soon as I’m able. Gonna be a pretty arduous task, honestly; there’s a lot to tell, and I can only hope I remember all of it. Sadly, after doing a bit of searching, my 2017 obit for the late, great Pat DiNizio seems to have vanished from internet history with nary a trace, thanks to the über-destructive Rooskie hack of the site around that time. Too many years of writing went up in smoke from that maleficent intrusion, which just annoys the living shit out of me.

Meeting Pat a week or two after the Little Richard shows—and utterly humiliating myself by not realizing who it was I was talking to and pretty much rudely blowing the man off, then having to crawl over and beseech forgiveness for my bare-knuckled arrogance and stupidity once I’d realized what I’d thoughtlessly done—was one of those unlooked-for offshoots I mentioned the other night, one of surprisingly many. Ah well, whatcha gonna do.

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After further problems cropped up last night with the Techozoic theme I’ve spent way too much time trying to make work, I finally gave the whole mess up as a lost cause and implemented the trusty Coop-O-Ween theme a bit earlier than I usually would. That ain’t necessarily a bad thing, I don’t think, and I hope y’all CF Lifers will agree. After that: the highly-anticipated return of dear old Scrooge Picard, a holiday favorite.

With that, guess what’s playing even now on the classical-music radio station? Just this: the theme song “Walking In The Air” from the Brit rip-off of Frosty the Snowman, The Snowman. Coinkydink? I think NOT!

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I gotta tell ya, this WordPress software, for all I’ve commiserated with other blogger friends of mine about certain decidedly unlikeable aspects of it, is one hell of a piece of blogware. Remember how last night I mentioned, in the throes of exhaustion and eyeball-ache, that I’d need to find a way to offer a Desktop/Mobile choice since this new-to-me theme I’m using was utter shite when viewed in my Android browser?

WELL. Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy: all’s I had to do was install a theme-switcher plugin—of which there are dozens available out there, free of charge—capable of detecting what platform the site is being viewed in and then automagickally switching back to the old theme I’d been using for years for any sail-foam OS so as to display the site to much better advantage, albeit sacrificing some of the newer theme’s functionality. Tested it on my own phone, works like a charm, no glitches, no hassles. Amazing thing, this modern world we live in, innit?

And to think, before you know it it’s gonna be time for the Halloween à la Coop theme, then Scrooge Picard. Oh, the fun we shall have…

No Eyrie tonight, sports fans. Over the weekend I ran across a nice-looking WP theme that I’ve been piddling around with, trying to shoehorn Ye Olde CF Blogge into the thing so’s it’ll work right. The theme has lots of pretty nifty-galifty customization options and features but, being based on a fluid layout scheme instead of the fixed-layout the old one has, there’s a right fair amount of jiggery-pokery to be done here before it’ll work properly. Figure on some unexpected wonkery to be going on hereabouts, as I ladle out generous dollops of skull-sweat attempting to get this little birdie to fly.

Update! Okay, this is turning out to be a right royal pain in the ass—for some unfahtomable reason, the central column wants to float over to the left, thereby obscuring part of the Butthurt Report Form, which is just completely unacceptable. Also, for some other unfathomable reason, the antiquated Feedreading Blogroll widget, which I haven’t been able to make work properly for a long time now and eventually just gave up on, actually works with this theme…assuming the linked blog even HAS an RSS feed, which apparently no Blogspot blogs do. Go figger.

Well whaddya know about that update! It appears that some Blogger sites DO have RSS feeds, and then again some of ‘em don’t. I repeat: go figger.

Oh fer cryin’ out loud update! Well dammit, even though options for such are mentioned here and there in the settings, this new theme is utterly useless for sail foams, near as I can make out. Need to figure out a way to implement a Desktop/Mobile switcher somehow, but it ain’t gonna be tonight, I’m just about tuckered. Plus, I think my poor old eyeballs might actually be bleeding at this point. Been a while since I did any website tinkering at this level, I fear.

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Error happened.