Did this come in your email?

Do things look different?

Does this blog look different?

Is everything working the way it’s supposed to?

Just when I think things are stable and running smoothly, technology throws a wrench in the works. I write and illustrate the blog; then I post it. Then it gets to you and your email because you signed up. But Google did away with the sign-up thingie, so I had to find another.

It’s called follow.it. If you’re reading this, then follow.it works. Hooray!

If you’re not reading this, I’m going to have a big conniption fit in the corner. I may even throw things. I’ll call my friend, Steve, who also switched over to follow.it for his blog. And maybe eventually, I’ll take deep breaths and calm down.

Whether it’s my car, my wristwatch, my scanner, or public restrooms, technology has confounded me.

It’s confounded you, too. I had to explain how to comment and share my posts after so much shared confusion.

Some of these posts go back to 2015 – technology is a problem that endures. Back then, I was still figuring out how to work an Apple TV remote.

I’m going on and on, assuming you’re here with me, that I made it into your inbox. Oh, and if you’re reading this on the website (https://3rdthirds.blogspot.com) and not via email, you should see a great big box “To receive Our Third Thirds by email” with a big black “Subscribe” button. That’s compliments of follow.it. It’s easy.

We hope.

What's your 'resting face'?

My writing pipeline got clogged.

I’d written a piece for Valentine’s Day, and I balked at posting it. I was saying nice things about Tim, about Third Third revelations and appreciation of marriage; and it just seemed so … smug. Even though I admitted to “explosions, terrible ‘discussions,’ voiced regrets, shouted furies, quiet hopelessness,” it just seemed so … self-congratulatory. Like, hooray, we’ve made it!

But then I felt bad about putting aside a post that was so nice to my husband (since “nice” is not an adjective I really own); so I just … ran aground. That stalled post was blocking all alternative and future posts.

Combine that with winning a free two-month trial of Team Training at my athletic club and my discovering how utterly exhausting fitness can be. Basically, I ran around the room zipping through exercises that involved things like kettle balls and medicine balls and sliders for my feet. And big long ropes and elastic stretchy things and hanging from the ceiling. Not to mention jumping up and down and squatting for interminable periods of time. After all that, swimming a mile seemed like a rest day.

I was comatose by 7, asleep by 9.

We’d been on vacation and saw relatives, alligators, and manatees. In Epcot Center, in record-breaking rain, Sophie and I were on Spaceship Earth and somewhere along the line, they took photos of us. Afterwards, cartoon characters showed up in a video with our faces. Sophie’s face was pleasant and smiling. Mine was scowling.

“How’d you do that? Did you know when they were taking our photo? How come mine is so grumpy?”

“I just have a better resting face.”

“Resting face? Who ever heard of a resting face? Do people have resting faces?!?”

Well, I guess they do. And what I thought illustrated curiosity on my face actually looks like confusion if you’re generous and pissed-off if you’re accurate.

So then I had to practice a better resting face. Which is impossible while hauling kettle balls and medicine balls and pushing up. Or just sitting around fretting about that bit-of-love blocking my blog.

Someday, I’ll tell you about the valentines my husband has hidden around the house for me for thirty years, but right now, I’m just going to borrow a little quote from one of my favorite authors, David Grossman. In Someone to Run With, he describes the rotten underworld of the city, but then the wise woman of the novel, Leah, says this:

“You need a man with a big hand,” Leah pronounced. “You know why?” 


“Why?” She knew she would now be painted a picture. 


“Someone who will stand with his hand up, open, strong, steady – like the Statue of Liberty, but without that ice-cream cone she’s holding – only his hand, open, in the air. And then” – Leah raised her square, rough, nail-bitten hand and moved it gently from side to side, like a flying bird – “even from far away, from any place in the world, you’d see that hand and know you had a place to land and rest.”

That is my husband’s hand. And when I think on it, my resting face smiles.

Cause for Celebration

I was going to celebrate when I reached 365 posts, and I’m only at 302.

But…

I have news.

“Our Third Thirds” has received a First Place Award from the National Federation of Press Women. And because I won that, I get to put this on my website.

Now I just have to figure out where it should go and how to get it in there.

A Third Third technological challenge. Stay tuned.

And because good news comes in batches, I have more. My one children’s story – Hanukkah in Alaska – the story that lives a charmed life and provides me with continuing good news out of the blue – has done it again: PJ Library has picked it up AGAIN for distribution to children as their November book-of-the-month!

For a whopping 31,300 copies for both the U.S. and the U.K.!

This came with an interesting request: I had to make some changes to include the U.K. audience. For some little cross-cultural tidbits, here they are:

• “shoveled driveways and paths,” had to be changed to “cleared driveways and paths.” A friend said that’s because in England, they use spades, not shovels.


• The little girl’s “thick, baggy pants and a sweatshirt” had to become her “thick, baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt.” That one stumped me until another friend said that “pants” in England are “underpants.”


• “Mom” became “my mother” because English mothers are “Mums.”


• And, of course, “color” wouldn’t work in a “colourful” world, so it’s just gone.

But you can still color me pleased!

How to Comment / How to Share

Now I have a discovery: I have finally figured out how to comment on my own blog! I mean, I know how to comment on it as me, but I wasn’t sure how you could comment as you. The problem is that list of “profiles” for you to choose amongst, and I have no idea what they are. I’m sure you don’t either. (Repeat: We are not tech dinosaurs!)

So here’s how to comment on the blog as you:

• If you get the blog by email, click on the title in blue. That will take you to the blog website.
• If you get to the blog through the home page (3rdthirds.blogspot.com), at the end of each post where it gives the time I posted, it either says “2 comments” or “No comments” or however many comments. Click on that.
• Now you’re all at the same place. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see “Post a Comment” and a box to type it in.

• The confusing part is the “Comment as: [Select profile…]” Click on that and there are a bunch of choices, most of which I have no clue about.

• The easiest, for many folks, is Google Account, which then asks you to sign in.
• Then there’s Anonymous, but if you want to leave your name, what do you do?
• This is my big discovery: Click on Name/URL, enter your name, and you don’t have to fill in a URL! It will still work! You don’t have to have any special account, secret handshake or password!
• Then you just click “Publish”

Now, how to share a blog post that you really liked:

And I am incredibly excited because this represents a technological victory! I found a problem the tech developers hadn’t!

At the end of each post, after the last sentence, are a line of six little gray boxes. The first box lets you email the link to the post, and the other boxes give you the option of posting to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. But these are tiny, ugly, gray boxes, and I wanted bright, colorful, big boxes.

So I went to AddThis to get their boxes, but their boxes didn’t work on my blog. No matter how late I stayed up trying to make them work. Finally, Mike in Support, wrote “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.” I’d discovered a new problem! Mike made a video of how he fixed it. He fixed it by clicking here, there, everywhere, copying, pasting, whizzing around, erasing, fixing, zipping all over. I had to watch it twenty times with the pause button going constantly, but I finally got it! It works. At the very end of the post you will now find...

This should make it easy to share. Or: while on Facebook, go to the Our Third Thirds page, and share from there. Or on Pinterest, it’s Our Third Thirds Blog.

Whew!

And now, I look forward to hearing from you … and all the people you share with!

Happy birthday, Our Third Thirds

It’s now been a year of blogging. 170 blog posts. Lots and lots of illustrations. Hooray! But time for a performance review: Is it doing what I’d hoped, both for me and you? Is it doing things I didn’t expect; did it surprise me? You?

The problem is that Internet writing can often feel like a black hole. I don’t see an audience, hear any applause. Instead, I get “likes” and comments and analytics telling me how many page views I got. I just came across a bit from Penelope/Meredith who said blogs tend to go away unless readers show their appreciation. “It takes … will to produce [a blog]. It takes hearing from, and feeling the support of, your audience to marshal that will.” How else will I know if my blog works for you?

She recommends:
•    Like posts on Facebook. “Even better, comment.” Facebook only sends out posts with “engagement.” So engage.
•    “Click through to the website. Those clicks matter.”
•    Recommend to a friend.
These things apply to me!

In the midst of my intermittent floundering over the last year, I discovered the required Big Three: Structure, Purpose, and a Sense of Community. I didn’t know the blog would help with all three. I didn’t know it would build connections as people touched base after reading a post. That is the biggest treat!

In the very first post, I elaborated on the ten reasons why I thought the Third Third was such a big deal and what I wanted to happen. This was #9: “How do I re-insert creativity into my life?”

So I’d say that one worked. I write and paint regularly. Sometimes it’s hard; I worry that I’ve run dry and have nothing to say. Most times, a thought is rummaging around in my brain and I am SO GLAD that I have a ready vehicle to try and work out its expression. I like figuring out how to say things both verbally and visually.

The biggest surprise: the positive reaction to the illustrations. I’d always thought of them as little doodles; the ones I drew when I was ten look the same. It has been really, really startling and delightful to get compliments on the art. (Now, spread the word!)

It helps to have a year’s worth of posts that remind me of what I have been doing/thinking/wondering about. Reading over old blogs gives me a nice burst of pleasant reminiscence … and makes me feel less like a lazy shit. So I’ll count that as an unanticipated benefit of the blog.

When readers tell me that posts have spoken to them, that sometimes I help them clarify their own explorations, questions, (anxieties, tribulations), I feel great relief! Your reader comments on the website or Facebook are often so eloquent and insightful they leave me gasping. None of us likes to feel alone. Please, add your voice to the mix.

A year later, and I still don’t have “a theme, an over-arching meaning to this part of my life.” My friend Sharon said, “But you’re a blogger,” as if that gave me definition, an identity. Does it? New in the mail today: blog business cards! At least I now have the trappings of an identity.

I could be very happy as a blogger in my Third Third. I could if I believed I was serving a valuable function. Sometimes I think, “Oh, no, what if I’m just a Florence Foster Jenkins who thinks she’s doing something right and well, and I’m really a dud?”

On the other hand, there’s that starfish story, about the guy throwing a stranded starfish into the ocean. He couldn’t save them all, he could barely save a fraction of them, but it made a difference to that one. So if ten people enjoy my blog, is that all it takes to make me a Blogger-with-a-capital-B?

I don’t think so, so I need your help. If a post resonates, please share it. Comment. Send people to the website 3rdthirds.blogspot.com. While there, take a look through older posts, find one that spoke to you or made you laugh, and share it. (I feel like Peter Pan exhorting everyone to clap their hands to help Tinkerbell or the Velveteen Rabbit wanting to become real.) I’ll be curious to see which posts go out. You can share to your Facebook friends, to your real-life friends, to colleagues or family, even to “influencers.” Please do this widely and often, and you can give me suggestions as to where potential readers hang out and read.

I think I’d like to be a Blogger-with-a-capital-B.

Can you solve it?

My friend Jinnie-the-artist (who has finally accepted that she can label herself that way) gathers a group of us every few months to show off our art projects. They’re always in answer to some sort of challenge; we’ve made artist trading cards, things of certain dimensions, challenges like that. Occasionally we get together to play with each other’s supplies and try out New Things.

This month, it was Inchies, things an inch square. But since we like to be easy on ourselves, we said we could do up to an inch-and-a-half. Everyone else knows a lot about various artistic techniques and media, and they turn out really beautiful projects. Pam (new to the group) showed a tiny fabric landscape – a miniature quilt – that was such a good idea I want to try something like it, too. Kathy did something with a new-to-me pigment powder, Betty carved up the Mona Lisa, and Jane helped me with what kind of glue I might try on a project. Once again, Jinnie did something fascinating with textures on paper and showed us a book she made of muslin cloth coated in dry wall mud. She tries things like that all the time, and the texture was incredible. I want to make a mud book!

I think back to why I created this blog. I needed the discipline of structure, something that would demand I face the Blank Page every day. It has been totally successful in that way. But it has limited my creativity in that the art I’m creating is pretty exclusively blog art, illustrations. I’m not doing much experimenting so the art challenges serve a purpose for me.

Usually, I dawdle around, sometimes not getting to them. This time, though, I had An Idea.

I wanted to do puzzles. On puzzle pieces.

So I went to the thrift store and bought a used jigsaw puzzle for little kids for 25¢. Then I painted and decorated some paper and glued the puzzle pieces on it. When I cut them out with a knife, I had brand new puzzle pieces.

I wrote a puzzle on each. It’s from a long list of similar brain teaser type things which I’ve had for about 30 years. Yes, another find from my adventures in de-cluttering. Now it lives again as a puzzle piece.

See if you can figure them out. Maybe this will be your New Thing for today. Enjoy!

Gasp. Choke. Unwelcome adventures.

Oh, yikes, the wrong people have found me on the Internet. I am beyond upset. I am vibrating with agitation.

I was looking through my blog analytics, and I noticed that two of the blog visits had an extra bunch of letters in the URL. So I clicked on it.

It went to a fake version of my blog: no header, no right-hand side, just the words and drawings. I totally panicked: my computer must be crashing, I’d ruined its brains, my blog was disintegrating. So then I Googled just the extra letters, and it turned out to be on lots of other websites. Just inserted into them.

I asked Google, “What is XXXX?” but all I got was a homepage, written in Asian characters. The Chinese must be violating international copyright laws with my blog; I was a victim of cyber crime! I was also clearly out of my depth.

So then I had to figure out how to ask Blogger my questions, how to get on the “Forum.” Other people put their questions there, but I don’t even know the process.

Brief interlude for hysterical outburst:

I AM a tech dinosaur! There, I said it! I can’t get an answer to a question without negotiating another completely separate hurdle: I have to ask questions about how to post a question. And don’t even get me started on how am I supposed to receive the answers. Why does everything seem to lead to an endless trip down a technological rabbit hole?!?

Deep breath, deep breath. Remember: every hurdle is just another boost to maintain my cognitive abilities.

I figured out how to ask, and I asked. This morning, a very nice guy responded, and his little button said he was a “Google Expert.” Hooray! He said he couldn’t duplicate the result, could I tell him how I found the bad blog.

So I did my Google thing, and they were gone! Everything with that bunch of letters in it was gone except for the home page. So I checked my analytics again, and there was a third person going to that bad site! From Google! Oh, yikes, this was a mess. (Afterwards, I did figure out that was my Expert looking it up, but by this point, I was so freaked out, I felt like every incident was a cyber threat.)

I explained everything to my Google Expert, and he said “It looks like that site is taking content and hosting it on their server. You might want to contact the website owner to remove your content from their servers.”

Cyber thieves taking my stories and pictures! I was furious, but I worried that contacting them was like trying to unsubscribe from spam, that it confirmed to the bad guys that you were alive and then you’d never get rid of them. Not to mention that everything was in Asian characters. But my Expert told me to, so I went to their home page and clicked “Translate.”

Gasp. I’m even afraid to tell you what I found, that it will add me to their list again. Can I say they called themselves “erotic images” without the word “erotic” showing up in Google searches? (Too late.) And they’re sending people to a fake version of my blog! (Deep breath, deep breath.) I even feel icky touching my keyboard.

Immediately, I thought of the butt lineup from Costco, but that was a while ago. Why would I first hit their radar now? Oh, no! It must have been my butt peeing outside, hiding from the bus. Look here: is that an erotic image to you?

So I quickly replied to my Google Expert, asking him what I should do now, but he’s not responding! Maybe he’s checking my blog and Google will remove me! Already, “3rd Thirds” is only yielding searches about Third Graders. Here I am, in my Third Third, and I’m a Japanese porn attraction.

(sob)

Subscribe instructions ... simplified

Nothing like a technological glitch to send you down the rabbit hole of Google-land. And nothing like the rabbit hole of Google and Google Help Groups to leave you feeling incompetent, confused, and defeated. Depressingly, there’s a whole gang of us down there, shouting into the ether.

How this all started was because of the number of requests I get about how to subscribe to my posts. I point out the little box in the upper right that said “Follow by Email,” thinking that would be sufficient. BUT, I discovered the little box doesn’t appear if you’re viewing this on a smart phone. You have to go to the website.

I know it’s a little confusing because there’s another box underneath it that says Subscribe, but it has little boxes for “Posts” and “All Comments.” What are they for? Those are for RSS Feeds, the source of my journey into Google-land today. We’ll come back to them.

As I looked around on other blogs, I realized that a lot of them use the word “Follow” when they’re talking about Twitter. I am not on Twitter and don’t follow anybody on Twitter. And if you’re just looking to get my posts in your inbox, having the word “Follow by Email” on the subscriber box could get intimidating: will it sign you up for Twitter? As of right now, I changed it to say, “Sign up here to receive Our Third Thirds by email.” Does that work better?

After you type your email in the blank, click on “Submit,” and convince the computer you’re not a robot; it sends an email to you, asking you to verify that you really want to subscribe to my posts. Another batch of folks get derailed here. Sometimes it’s because there’s a typo in their email address, sometimes it just must get lost. But you can always try again.

So I wanted to learn a little bit more about RSS Feeds. I visited Robin, who reads my blog that way, on a service called NetVibes. She puts the things she likes to read on her NetVibes account, and when new stuff is published, it goes to her in one big package of “things to read.” Up pops my blog. For Robin, that works as a way of putting those “things to read” in one spot.

While in Google-land, an article described all the terrific things I could learn about my blog and its readers. The author praised the nifty pie chart that shows how readers were accessing his blog – email, on the web, NetVibes or some other feed service. I’ve looked all over, but my pie chart is nowhere to be found. My data shows my NetVibes is “invalid,” even though Robin is looking right at it.

So that became another question for the Google Help Forum. I didn’t want to miss the answer, so I checked the box to receive notifications. Uh, oh! I hope this means I only get answers to my question, not everyone else’s. See, this is why the word “follow” can get intimidating. If you get swamped, there’s no “unsubscribe.” Then you have to Google to learn how to stop notifications….

One response said the answer was described perfectly here … but the link didn’t work. I tried reaching a real human being to ask my questions, but that required joining Google+. Uh, oh, that sounds like following, like more notifications, like Twitter.

Precious daylight hours went into this trip down the rabbit hole. I found too many things I can neither explain nor understand and too many contacts and sources that have expired, were dead-ends, or look defunct. Maybe it proved too much for them, too.

I have that spacy, brain-dead, exasperated feeling that comes from too much machine and not enough humanity. Tomorrow will be a better day; I’m going to clean my bathrooms.

Out of the blue...

Every now and then, good luck just happens. Here I was, sweating over a particularly difficult blog post, trying to figure out my own complicated thoughts and put them down in uncomplicated words. Seeing hours go by, fretting over all the hours, beating myself up for taking all those hours.

And then, good news happened right out of the blue.

Way back in 1996, the children’s book author Eric Kimmel visited Anchorage, and I volunteered to show him Alaska. Martin Buser had offered to give him a dog sled ride, and I drove Eric out to the dog lot. In the car, we got to talking, becoming friends, and Eric said, “I’ve got an anthology I’m editing about Hanukkah. How about giving me a story about Hanukkah in Alaska.”

So I did. And he included it in A Hanukkah Treasury. And the story lived happily ever after.

And then, out of the blue, in 2012, I heard from Henry Holt, the publishers. They’d received an order for 10,000 copies of “Hanukkah in Alaska” for the PJ Library’s December 2013 book of the month. But it wasn’t a book … yet; could they make it a book?

So the publishing adventure began. There was only one moment of horror: when I realized the illustrator had turned the first person narrator into a little boy. She was a girl – had to be a girl! It was after all Sophie’s swing, Sophie’s moose, Sophie’s story. Crisis averted, the little girl became the hero of Hanukkah in Alaska, the book! And the book lived happily ever after.

In 2014, Storyline asked permission for an actor to read the book for video. That sounded good. Time passed, I forgot about it.

Then, just yesterday, out of the blue, came the word that the video was done, with Molly Ephraim reading it. It’s beautiful! Take a look yourself at Hanukkah in Alaska, the SAG Foundation video. And I guess the video will live happily ever after, too.

Saved from a difficult post, right out of the blue! That story is my lucky charm.

Growing big

My good friend Julie shared a YouTube video of Brené Brown. I’d never heard of her before, but how could I resist someone who’s described as a “vulnerability researcher.” She talked about the critics in our lives, the people who rain negativity on us, even when those critics are ourselves. She’s my New Thing for today.

In blogging, there are the horrible critics – which I have not encountered, thank heavens – who write despicable comments online. Hooray, I’ve received none of those! I had enough of those with my Daily News columns. The hate mail, the nasty Letters to the Editor. But when I see the online comments on other Internet pieces, it’s almost enough to dry up any creativity and abandon the medium; it’s almost enough to abandon the human race.

But if you’re a glutton for criticism, you can find it easily. With blogging, it comes in the form of analytics. You get all sorts of information about your blog: how many people look at it, how many subscribe to it, how long they spend looking at it, whether they come back to it after the first time. This can become a compulsive habit. Are there more people reading than yesterday? Than a month ago? You can even find yourself checking the map where viewers come from and asking yourself, “Why isn’t my sister in Berlin reading my blog?”

Very soon, if you’re me, you say things like, “This is a dud. It was just an illusion that this could matter in your Third Third. It’s a dud. Let it die.”

And then, because I’m in my Third Third and have a personal history, I think back over Previous Duds I Have Launched. I’ve had so many that fall in one category, I’ve even given it a theme: my problem is Big-ness. For whatever reason, I’m missing the gene or the skill that grows something big.

I’ve had lots of ideas and realized many of them. They were good seeds, and they germinated and grew, but they didn’t become mighty oaks. When other people talk of fundraisers, for instance, they talk about the ones that raise a quarter million dollars for charity, and we just haven’t cracked those big numbers for the BizBee. Other people’s little drops become oceans, but mine somehow remain little drops. They’re fun little drops, and they do good, but Big-ness remains elusive.

Which brings me back to the blog analytics. Every now and then, there’s a huge jump in the numbers. That meant that someone posted the blog on Facebook and it got shared … and shared to the public, not even just friends. At first, I thought the analytics machine was broken. Those days make me feel really great. I receive lots of emails about how much people enjoy the blog – and the pictures – but numbers somehow mean it’s real, not just anecdotal.

But on other days, I think about the vast proliferation of blogs in the world, about how I’m practically writing a diary and how presumptuous to put it online and I should just keep it my little secret because it’s too embarrassing to put it out there for ten people. (Which is admittedly an exaggeration, but inner critics don’t worry about exaggerating.) And maybe it was just meant to be a novelty and soon people will just get tired of my adventures and those little pictures.

But if LOTS of people are reading it, that’s a different story. That means it has relevance, serves a purpose, translates as practically a public service to Third Thirders. I don’t have to feel so horribly, mercilessly, relentlessly exposed.

I guess I’d better watch that Brené Brown video again. I seem to have missed getting the message. In fact, right now, at this very moment, I’m planning a replacement blog post for this one:

Or we can try a little experiment in blog analytics. Please share your favorite Our Third Thirds post – you can find it in the Archives. On Facebook or social media, make it public, not just to your friends, so it can be shared. Call it an experiment: Can Big-ness happen?

A year's worth of posts

If this were my old newspaper column, a whole year would have already gone by – 52 weeks’ worth. Instead, it’s only been 2½ months. That’s some crazy pace. So I’m going to consider this a milestone and think about what the blog does for me.

When I started this blog, I was pretty depressed. This Third Third – and my expectations for it – was eluding me. I was floundering with no end in sight. I was beating myself up for lacking discipline, wasting time, being valueless. And I was bombarding everyone my age with “and what are you doing in your Third Third?” I was a demon at my college reunion and a one-question fanatic in my social life.

Somewhere in my vast stretch of time-wasting, I read Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh. I read the book, which developed from her blog, which is mostly pictures but also text. It’s truly wonderful, and it gave me Ideas (so it wasn’t a waste of time after all).

I don’t like reading blocks of text on the computer so I thought I’d add my doodles, too. And then, because it helped me to clarify my thoughts when I put them down – those ten things on the list in Identity Crisis #314 – I felt better.

And when I did it the next day, I felt better again. I was being creative! By the next day, I felt disciplined. And when people told me they liked it, I felt valued. When I tried drawing something difficult, capturing something just so, I felt like I was stretching myself. And when I craft a story, I have to think very hard about how to develop it, how to construct a beginning, middle, and end. I like thinking hard.

Wow, just one thing – this blog – and it could solve a whole lot of my dilemmas. And the ones it didn’t? Those were the ones friends and readers weighed in on and helped the discussion along. Relocation anyone?

Last week, probably because of the latest round of mother-care issues, I was horribly anxious. So anxious I couldn’t quiet the frantic ramblings in my head. At one point, I felt like running screaming into the street. My whole self vibrated, and I couldn’t write. So then I decided I must be “empty.” I’d used all my good ideas up. How embarrassing to announce in my blog that I’d run dry, good-bye. Third Third fizzled.

Mostly, I think I’m a glass-half-empty sort of person. When it’s not empty, it’s so-full-and-isn’t-it-so-interesting-how-that-is-and-why-is-that-the-case-because-there-are-so-many-glasses-in-the-world-and-so-many-different-things-to-fill-them-with. You get the picture. In my often black-and-white world, a glass half-empty – glasses not overflowing – might as well be completely empty. And curiosity is both the cure for a bad mood and the symptom of a good one.

Wise people would say this is a case for moderation. I’m guessing other people may have learned this by their Third Thirds. I’m slow.

But this I know: When I finally sat down and wrote this week, I felt better. Cured even. Some people do it with exercise, some people play the piano. I’m going to sit right here and tell a story about it.

Marj: On losing one's mind

My friend Marj and I have reconnected over this blog. She jumped wholeheartedly into retirement, relocation, and even grandparenthood while I am still bumbling my way around my Third Third.

So Marj offers advice and experience and leaves me laughing in the process. (She says that when the movie is made, I should insist on Emma Stone playing me. Emma Stone is NOT in her Third Third; Emma Stone hasn’t even entered her Second Third….)

Anyhow, my New Thing for today is to have my first Guest Blogger: Marj. Enjoy!

“Literally everyone I know thinks they are losing their minds. I find that reassuring because if EVERYONE thinks they are losing their mind, that means we are all OK. Because statistically only a percentage of us will lose our minds. But how do we know which group we are in, and how can we tell when it starts?

“I bought some new jeans and decided to cut the tags off and wash them because I had a partial load of laundry almost ready to go.

“But as I was walking thorough the house to the kitchen to get the scissors to cut off the tags, my husband urgently called me to come over to the window – there was a large squirrel playing in our yard. He had told me about the squirrel earlier in the day (as I was reading the newspaper), and now that it was back, he wanted to be sure I saw it. After commenting appreciatively on the squirrel, I continued in the kitchen, having no idea why I was there. I went to the refrigerator and got a diet Coke while I tried to figure it out. Then I saw the jeans lying there and resumed my project.

 

“Got the tags off, put the jeans in the washing machine, and went to the bedroom to get the laundry basket with the rest of the laundry. On the way to the bedroom, my husband asked if I knew how old the tomatoes were. I went to take a look at them to try to figure it out. It was hours later when I went to the closet to get some shoes that I realized the laundry basket was still there and the jeans were still unwashed in the washing machine.

“I attribute a significant portion of my problem to my husband. He asks random questions at random times, makes irrelevant comments all day long, and feels no guilt for causing me to lose my train of thought. Apparently he HAS to say whatever pops into his mind as it pops into his mind or he will lose it forever. And I HAVE to have him group his comments and questions and save them all until I am not trying to do anything. This is retirement. Ask any woman.”

Marj also told me earlier: “I had no idea you want A Job. My goodness! You and I are so different! When I retired I wanted my husband to get a job – but that didn’t work out for me. Whenever I scanned want ads on his behalf, he always said why would I want to do that? I thought it would be great if he had a place to go all day, and for us (me) to have more money to spend.”

Not to mention, the jeans would get washed….

I am not a tech dinosaur!

One of the things I dislike about being in this Third Third is the popular perception that we don’t know our way around technology. I have created my own podcasts, mixed my own music on Garage Band, and created lots of iMovies. I use computer short cuts, know how to Skype, and update websites with HTML. But…

The Apple TV Remote Example

This is my Apple TV remote. A skinny silver thing with three buttons.

This is a test: Can you figure out how to watch Netflix with this? What buttons would you press to make it go?

The instruction booklet that came in the box lists six things you can do with your remote. I know about menu, pause, and play. That only went so far. Frustrated, I’d start pressing buttons and every now and then, a good thing would happen on the TV. But I was so busy pressing buttons, I couldn’t remember what did what.

Finally fed up, I Googled “Apple TV Remote,” and all sorts of advice popped up: how to rewind, fast forward, go into slow motion. Things like, “hold this button for 3 seconds while you do that to the other button” and other things happen. Who are these people, these good Samaritans who figure odd stuff out and then tell the rest of us on Google? Are they holding buttons on everything for 3 seconds, testing things?

Is it so hard for a manufacturer to include all this in the instruction booklet?

The Blog Bog

When I started this blog, I started it on Tumblr. I did the first two posts, and then friends tried to “follow” me. Uh, oh. They all wanted a post to go right into their inboxes, but with Tumblr, you have to “join” Tumblr. Then you have to create a screen name. If Tumblr already has someone with your name, they suggest rather bizarre new ones. That’s why I have a follower named pleasanttrashtyphoon and yourwhomeuniverse. She’s named both those things because the whole business was a little confusing. And nothing goes into your inbox; you have to go visit Tumblr and have things “fed” to you. Kind of like going to Facebook and having your friends’ posts in your feed.

But do any of us really need another thing to check? (See future post on wasting time…)

So I switched to Blogger and re-entered my first two posts. Picked out the template with the fonts and design and colors I wanted. But when I previewed it, it wasn’t what I’d picked. So I called Steve, whose What Do I Know? blog has been around for years with all sorts of interesting posts and features. Steve came over and we spent about 4 hours of Steve showing me around, teaching me new doodads. I’d forgotten that cutting-and-pasting usually messes up the HTML by adding all sorts of unwanted things to the template so I had a lot of clean-up. Hooray! My blog mostly looks the way it’s supposed to.

But there are still things I don’t understand. Like,

• why is the title of my post the nice blue I picked but older posts lose the color?
• And how do I exit a bulleted list to go back to my initial format?
• And why now, a few hours later, is the nice blue color now navy blue?

My daughter once showed me a game on her phone. No instructions. “What’s the objective of the game? How do we play? What are the rules?” “No need,” she said. Then she’d click on something, triggering something else happening, and we’d go to a new level. Miraculously! Finally after a couple of hours of this, I said,

 She said, “I was secretly Googling it whenever you were concentrating on the phone.”