After opening the envelope that arrived in the mail this morning and reading the contents I was rather surprised to find myself breathing  a small sigh a relief at the results. I had known about the dark area they spotted in the bottom of my left lung during first CT scan I underwent 3 days after surgery and was assured by my surgeon that it was probably just a bit of pneumonia, not exactly an uncommon occurrence when one has the type of operation that I had.

No problem, I thought. Perfectly understandable. Heard about that sort of thing myself more than once over my lifetime so I put it right out of my head that there was a possibility, however slight, that it might be something else.

Still, there must have been small part of my wee brain sitting in a dark room worrying it’s little head off about this so I figure it must have been this same little guy that heaved that sigh when the results of the CT scan filtered down to it’s small room, knocked on the door and asked to be let in.

Now I suppose I could end this post with a smartass line such as; “Now where did I put that pack of smokes?” but since I gave up that nasty habit well over 3 years ago I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate or reflect on the true nature of the situation.

So I guess I’ll have to leave up the last line to the imagination of (all 5 of) my readers?

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Nearly two years now since my disabilities forced me from the working class and you’d think I’ve become used to used to this new “life in the slow lane”—but I’m not. Sure, the effects of these disabilities, especially the one which recently required surgery, kept me down and out but it didn’t stop me from getting frustrated with the whole mess.

Now it’s down to taking the time to get back on my feet from the surgery itself. Once I do that I’ll have to bounce going back to work against progressive deafness and the increasing chronic pain due to a back injury (limits me to light labor only). This would be no problem if I was say about 230 miles farther south than I am since work opportunities there for my type of folks are much more plentiful shall we say than up here near the border of Canada even in this day and age. But up here I am and up here I stay so I’ll just have to deal with it when the time comes (there is plenty of advantages in living up here though, both present and future, aside from lack of employment opportunities).

The problem with combination of living here and the idea of possible employment is that this town has one of the highest unemployment rate in the state of Vermont (17.8%). The other problem is the majority jobs that are available often require heavy labor which leaves me right out of the picture. The other types of jobs require a CDL which I can’t get, being an adult supervisor to troubled kids/impaired adults with behavioral problems (uh…no thanks) or being a certified nurse (nope). I also don’t have a teacher’s certification and that about wraps it up for available jobs around here.

I’m not really belly aching about this as I still have a ways to go before I can even begin to consider working again but once in awhile I just have to get things of this nature off my chest and that’s what this blog’s all about.

In the meantime, I just wish it would stop raining long enough to let me finish mowing the lawn.

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Everyone see how that works?

No?

Okay, I don’t blame you.

It goes like this. Although I’m still going 3 to 4 days without posting I’m actually accomplishing more on those days then I was accomplishing previously. In other words, I’m being more productive when I’m not posting instead of just being (understandably) a layabout.

The problem now is that doing a bit more chores than I have been and running a few more errands than I have been is taking a great deal longer than than it used to thus taking up more of a given day than it used to. And, of course, at the end of the day with all these extra chores and errands that I’m now managing to accomplish I’m completely wiped out. And this means I’m not up to posting. At the least writing up posts for this little site of mine requires me to be in a position other than passed out on the floor/bed/couch/what-have-you.

This, however, does have it’s drawbacks in that I’m still managing to follow all these interesting news stories and blog posts that have me slavering to pound out posts with my opinions on these news stories and blog posts. Not that anyone really cares what my opinions might be but more along the lines of a personal release sort of thing. I mean, if you eat a smorgasbord of information every day it’s got to come out somewhere (I’ll refrain from the obvious analogy).

The whole point of this rather blithering post is that I’m getting better. But man, it’s taking it’s time about it. Realistically, and as much as it irritates me to admit it, I’m probably looking at the better part of a year before I’m 100% again. And, as My Lady keeps telling me, if I overdo it it’s just going to take that much longer.

Okay, so I’ll settle for 92% by early 2010?

(Disclaimer: Author is not to be held responsible for any meanderings, bad analogies, bad grammar, misspellings and/or any other weirdness in the above post due to the fact that he mowed the lawn, ran two different errands, wrote the above post and is now late for his medications. He should recover from all this within the next 3 or 4 days)

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But the big problem driving a quick update is a bug in the core upgrade feature. It seems that in the case where the upgrade can’t be completed for some reason, the upgrade feature was deleting the wrong files when it attempted to clean up. Oops!

Fortunately, this problem can be easily fixed by performing a manual upgrade.

Not everyone has been affected by this problem but if it does rear it’s ugly head it can be frustratingly random in that it often doesn’t give a reason as to why it failed. In other words, when this problem does occur, more often than not it leaves no entry in any of the default WordPress error logs of what might have went wrong. And in that case it’s hard to discern from the usual flurry of upgrade problems due to the few non-compatible plugins that always crop up.

For myself and my two little sites it went rather strangely in that both sites use the same plugins, both were running 2.7.1, both are on the same host/server and both are setup the same way with the exception of themes (the site themes were irrelevant in this case anyway). One site auto-upgraded with no problem whatsoever while the other turned belly up and died—badly. And just for the record, I’ve never had any auto-upgrade fail in the past whether it was built-in or by plugin.

For all that it the problem was easily fixed by an old fashioned FTP re-upgrade so to speak and it’s all running along nicely now. And again, not all users have been affected by this although I’ve not come across any solid reason why this is.

Ah, the beauties of doing it yourself–gotta love it (if you didn’t then you’d never be doing it in the first place). And yet another fine reason for always backing up prior to any upgrade.

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I can’t really say that I’ve been disappointed with my host though. They really do their best at keeping things up to date and running smoothly and they succeed at this more times than not. They also spend a great deal of time “tweaking the kernel” which seems to me would piss the kernel right off but it appears he doesn’t mind so much in fact, it actually seems to make him run that much better.

Either way this means that the site will probably go down for awhile tomorrow while all the flapping is going on. Hopefully all this migrating business will be completed within the expected time frame and no extra flapping will be needed. After all, I haven’t migrated since early 2008 (took the bus the last couple of times) and I’m out of shape.

Now, where did my wing expanders get too?

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