"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly" (Failing and Flying, Jack Gilbert, 2005)

I have to laugh, then I have to cry.

As a new blogger, I have been humming along, putting up blog posts each Friday, finding photos and artwork that I want to share, and delighted with the knowledge that I have readers -- thank  you!!!! I have been pleased that people respond to my blog. Again, thank you for taking the time from your busy day.

Here's a photo to brighten your day.

I have often disparaged myself for not being an 'expert.' I am not a master watercolorist, writer, printmaker, maybe human being. I've dabbled in all of these things. My brain is wired just like the Internet, I think. I find something interesting, start working on that, and then I get caught by an extension of that idea or something totally different, and I am off and running in that new direction.  Sound familiar too?  I envy the people who latch on to something and become masters of their craft -- whether that is teaching, being an artist, speaking in front of groups, or helping people in need.

When blogging was still a new idea, someone suggested that I start a blog. I wasn't ready for it, and pushed the suggestion aside. Now I can see that all my disparate interests give me an advantage. Writing each blog has been the easy part. When I start one blog post, other ideas that I want to write about pop into my head. So far, I have a good backlog of stories to tell.

Now I have to cry. When I set up my blog, I signed up to receive email notifications of each new post. I wanted to be sure that others received their email notifications too. Lately, I haven't been receiving the email notifications. I checked that my email address was still listed.  Yes, it was. So now, I've gone down into the world of 'techie-speak.'  This is just a sample of what I found:

"This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.

Line 1, column O:  Use of namespace:http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008 [help],?xmlversion='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?.,?xml-stylesheethref="http:www.blog..."

Etc., etc. etc.  

Now I had to laugh. After reading the entire page, I jumped right to it and made the page-ful of corrections!

Hardly!

What I did figure out:  Blogger doesn't like Word documents. So, next week, I will see if using MacTextEdit makes a difference. 

I remind myself that "Everything worth doing is worth doing badly".

If you have signed up to receive my blog posts by email, I really appreciate it. I hope you will continue to do so! I am still trying to figure out why the text is all squashed together in emails and why my layouts don't always appear in the same way as I've created them on the layout page.  I know I need to start at square one and learn some coding so that I can figure out what they are talking about when they say, "the feed is valid, but interoperability..." So here I go again: the perpetually excited student. I hope you will stay with me on this quirky journey!

Here's one more photo to enjoy over the holiday weekend!