If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It!
Sorry it’s been such a long time since I posted! The long time has a long story behind it, most of it entirely uninteresting. It all started, when in hindsight, I got the NOT so bright idea to consolidate all my websites with one hosting company. Mind you, I have three: work, guide business, and author. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to have all my websites hosted by one and the same company? You’d think I was astute enough to realize I needed to proceed with the change one website at a time. But no, not me, not even close. I possess the rare and refined gift of doing things the hard way, so I pinched my nose and jumped into the deep end. In hindsight, I should have jumped from an airplane with no parachute or just gone ahead and slit my wrists. I turned a mild inconvenience into an extended nightmare. I lost my work email address, during a very busy work and travel stretch. Hours on the phone with tech support with no resolution. Finally, someone determined the new webhost couldn’t “authenticate” my email address because my laptop possessed an outdated operating system. Of course, there wasn’t enough diskspace to install the new OS on my old machine, so I had to purchase a new laptop. Argh!!!! How does all this happen seemingly instantaneously and all in rapid-fire succession? Everything was working just fine before I sought to make it just a little better, then all hell broke loose, absolutely nothing worked. The .csv file with my blog subscribers would not transport to the new site, so I had to enter them one by one. I confess before it was all over, I wanted to take a Louisville slugger and smash every piece of tech equipment I own into a thousand pieces. I arise from the ensuing malaise a full four months later two thousand dollars poorer and with less hair, I’m sure of it. Over the years, family members and friends have told me more times than I can count, “Shane you need to recognize when to leave well enough alone”, or “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They saw something in me that I’ve been reluctant to see in myself. Maybe it's some sort of psychological obsession, but whatever it is, the lingering effect of my recent encounter with the familiar calamitous results has my full attention. Hopefully I’ll be a bit leerier of myself the next time I want to make things perfect and learn to leave well enough alone. But everything is not only working again; it’s working better than ever. Plus, I have a new computer! So, in three months ask me if it was worth the pain.
On another note, my website and blog are back up and running just in time for an Alaskan adventure. I’m guiding old friends from Mississippi on a fishing trip next week. I leave Wednesday morning from Denver in the rig you see in the photo. Of course, I plan to fly fish for trout and grayling in northern BC and the Yukon along the way. Jean plans to fly up and meet me in Anchorage and spend time with Kyle, Mary, and August while I’m guiding. We will then drive home together down the ALCAN in early September when the aspen and birch are golden. The trip is a celebration of our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary and retracing our Sabbatical trip in 2017. I’ll keep you posted.
