Apparently the groundhog was not playing around when he said we had six more weeks of winter ahead of us. Exactly one month after his prediction, it snowed again in Atlanta. And it snowed all day long. But that wasn’t the only chill I experienced in the early hours of the morning. I was awakened by the familiar chime of my Blackberry’s email alert. Actually, it was after several familiar chimes that I finally shook the sleep out of my eyes and squinted at the display on my phone. My email was lit up with people worried about my whereabouts.
Huh? I was in bed—where I had been since posting my blog the night before. But wait…the email was asking me why I hadn’t posted a blog last night!
I bolted from my bed…
Actually, it was more like I struggled to disentangle myself from the blankets, and tripped over two dogs and one cat on my way out of the bedroom. I managed to find my way to my laptop and quickly pulled up my website to find out what had happened.
I knew I posted a blog. I watched myself do it. But suddenly, I was having flashbacks to the night that I fell asleep writing and dreamed I wrote a fabulous blog only to wake up with just a few lines on the page. Was last night’s blog just a dream?
I stared at the Daily Blog page in horror. There was no new blog posted last night! I looked quickly at my documents to see if I had saved the blog there—my usual practice.
I easily found the file I was looking for, and it was exactly the way I remembered it from the night before. I hadn’t lost my mind at all. I had written the blog at the very least! But where had it gone?
I pulled up the web history for my site and that is where I found the Daily Blog I had posted just a short time before midnight the night before. It wasn’t where it belonged, but it was there nonetheless. It was on the home page, a lonely little blog, completely out of place.
So at 10:02 am, I moved the post from the home page to the blog page, and proceeded to reply to all the emails that had questioned my continued heartbeat.
In retrospect, as mortified as I was that I had made such a silly mistake, it was very nice to know that I would be so missed. It’s always nice to know that someone would notice if I suddenly did disappear. Surely my husband and children would miss me. They would at least notice my absence when they ran out of toilet paper and laundry detergent.
I would like to say that I have put processes in place that would prevent me from making the same mistake twice, but unfortunately, no process exists. You will just have to trust that I will take much more care in the future when posting my Daily Blog. I even plan on having it put into my will that in the event of my death, someone will need to update the Blog daily with interesting musings about what was discovered when my closet was cleaned out. Or whether I died with my underwear on inside out. Sounds morbid, but I’d like to think I could be funny even in the face of imminent death. I suppose time will tell—unless I figure out a way to mess things up and get myself banned from dying. That would be a perk of being catastrophically clumsy now wouldn’t it?
But since I’m not dead yet, I suppose I should keep writing about the awkward moments ever present in my life. With several layers of ice and snow on the ground today, I kept safely indoors for most of it. It’s safer for me that way. And, as my husband reminded me over and over again, we didn’t do a damn thing today!
I did watch the snow fall for a good bit of the day. It was truly beautiful. A decent winter snow storm forces you to take a nice long look at the softer side of life. I think sometimes we forget about the simple things—the quiet things. Like watching snow fall. Or listening to the sound of your children breathing as they sleep—or the dogs snoring.
As for me, I was forced to mark another tick on the calendar as my vacation slipped one day further into the abyss. Is it unkind of me to wish the snow would fall for a while longer? I mean…long enough to keep me home until April maybe? I could get so much writing done if I didn’t have to worry about little things like work or sleep.
Until the next time…I’ll be building a snowman in the living room where it’s warm!