Cows, Calves, Carts n' Chaos...

For a rockin' story of cows and divine steering pop over to the devotional corner.

For some stinkin' cute pictures and prose of my prairie poppets pop over to the family room.

And now a horror story for your reading pleasure. Yesterday as I was updating Prairie Portraits I noticed that The Hero's label was missing the article. It read, Portraits of Prairie Hero. It works, but didn't match the other labels that all contained the article A. So I pop over to my post editor, select all the posts in The Hero's label, add a new label with the article. Then delete the old label. Every single post vanished. Poof. Gone. No warning that there were photos in those posts that were going to be deleted and did I want to keep them stored, no nothin'. Just a split second vanishing act. Panic. I hoped against all hope that the LABEL had merely disappeared and the POSTS were still there, just not labeled, but no luck. I had seriously deleted every single post devoted to The Hero.

I rush over to my recycle bin, nothing. Desperately search blogger for information on deleted post retrieval... madly post help messages to the Sonlight forum (which is not your run of the mill homeschool curriculum forum, this forum can advise you out of ANY fix I tell ya... ANY.) and while I'm waiting for the emails to start comin' in from Sonlight I do a google search and find Vin. Okay, help is on the way. Seriously, this guy oozes confidence and reassuredness. Only problem being, apparently he wasn't home yesterday till 5 pm, and neither were any of the people who could help me over at Sonlight. For some reason I had this panicked impression that lost information was retrievable for only a short window of time (I had 30 minutes in my head) and I was not going to give up until those 30 minutes were passed. On Vin's site I saw that if your blog is open to Google searches there is a search you can do for your blogs cache and retrieve the posts that way. Oh delight. I thought my blog was open to google. Oh the remorse when I see in my settings that no, I had closed my Portraits to google search, because indeed, why would I want any Tom, Dick or Harry to happen upon it in their Google wanderings. People who know me and want to find it can find it through Prologue which is Google-a-ble. Anyway, that was no go.

The story does have a happy ending. I remembered that I had seen Portraits show up in Google Reader and that it actually has a "follower". A-Team, you don't know how happy I am that you clicked to follow that blog, because you did all the posts are saved in Reader and since the blog is not that old I was able to scroll through all the posts and copy the ones from The Hero and re-post them to Portraits. Can you imagine the horror? I'm only thankful that this happened early on in my blogging experience and not when I had hundreds of posts to that label. And as I mentioned to Dawn in a private email exchange yesterday, it would figure that this would happen to the posts of my MIDDLE child... the one I work extra hard to recognize and build up....

All that to say I spent considerably too much time at the computer yesterday and was preoccupied over at Portraits, so that's why I'm routing you over there today. I hope to start posting some fun Christmas stuff here soon, just simple, short recommendations for a meaningful and RELAXED celebration. Gift ideas, thrift decorating, focusing on the heart of Christmas, stuff like that. But today I need to be productive away from the desk.