I barely got String of Lights back.

From the wordpress sister site

And now it looks as though it might be a random blinking string with several of the bulbs out, at least for the next two weeks. The written portion of my qualifying exams is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday, the 24th and 25th of August. I am nowhere near ready, and I feel extremely guilty and ashamed about this. Indeed, I feel even more multiplenegativeadjectives than usual. I don't think I've ever been this nervous and scared for as long a period of time as this has been. I will do the best I can over these next two weeks, though to be honest, it's too much work for the amount of hours I have left and it's out of the question to ask for more time. I'll be reviewing or re-reading or re-learning. I'll begin to take concise notes in some cases and in other cases to condense the excessive notes I have taken.

I will probably feel like blogging about the process, but I probably won't do it, having already just said too much about it. But I will come here every day and see if anything else appears. Even if nothing does, other than the running log, I'll need to come here.

Last night, tired and nervous, I came to the blog without an idea, but with the intent of following the request that appears above this screen and that I've been staring at each time I come here: "WordPress 2.8.3 is available! Please update now."

Updating means going to the server (Bluehost) and using something like Fantastico (some sort of second-party application) to perform said upgrade and it's a matter of 5 minutes. As I'd done the past 3-4 times, I read the warning that "some files might be erased" and after some hesitation, selected the option to continue anyway, they'd never gotten erased before. But last night it was a matter of 5 minutes to completely erase the just under two years of String of Lights. I tried as much as I dared to restore settings on Bluehost, but over and over again, I found that my login and password didn't work. I'd been given a new one, so I tried that, only to find the empty WordPress blog template I saw on my first day blogging, with its optimistic, happy, "Hello, world!" I tried accessing the blog like a non-admin., typing "www.crphotography.us/valerie" into the the search engine. The blue and white template came up. I couldn't find my orange blog, its words and images and sounds anywhere. I thought of the day I started writing the blog and other days since then and the people who have been wonderful enough to read these posts. My hands dropped from the keyboard and I dissolved into tears. The tears evolved into sobs. This has been what I do for fun; a hobby, a diversion. Certainly light and silly, meant to amuse me more than enlighten, entertain or provoke any reader. But oftentimes it has been for me salvific. And I hadn't realized how much a part of me it was until it just all of a sudden wasn't.

Two Karls provided moral support and tech support. Yes, most of this blog appears on its twin sister site at blogspot, but somehow, it lacks Benjamin's aura of the original. Tech support Karl put me on hold, leaving me listening to flamenco music. And in a manner of 5 minutes this blog came back, intact as it was as of August 2. I reproduce below the two posts I'd made since then, one of which continues in something of a ironic way, if irony can be read through a lens of love and gratitude, that is.