The plan was to schedule a french toast breakfast at 8:30 AM EDT. Yes, EDT. Because for some reason the clock wizards convened a couple years ago and decided to push daylight savings time up into mid-March. I had forgotten this little factoid and when The Commander reminded me about it a couple weeks ago, I thought she was delusional. Anyway, even losing an hour, I was figuring that an 8:30 breakfast would give us plenty of time to get ready. It’s *breakfast* right? It happens in the *morning*, fer kee-reist. I was ready for daylight time, I thought. I have been waking up reliably at five o’clock AM the last few days and I did that this morning too. The problem was that, with daylight time, five o’clock was six o’clock. And so our breakfast guest arrived just about the time I was returning from my not-as-0-dark-30-as-usual walk this morning. That was okay because our guest was the Grinch and he and other folks entertained themselves with a rollicking conversation that I didn’t totally catch but it touched on UFOs and falling down black holes, among other things.

From there? An inspection tour and waterfront drive. Then out to the beach. We didn’t have snowshoes and didn’t feel like walking postholing down the beach, so we walked down the old road to the old Doelle lighthouse-keeper’s house (which, by the way, is apparently being restored or renovated). We veered off onto deer trails part of the time to avoid the remaining drifts of rotting snow on the road. Back for a visit and walk to the beach with our northern correspondent Paulette, who created the art in the photo. And then on to the Dancing Crane Coffeehouse for some chili that totally hit the spot. It was on the way to the coffeehouse that I realized I hadn’t changed the Ninja’s clock and that I’d been relying on that clock for the official time for most of the day, never mind that I have a cell phone that changes time automatically.

Back to reality after that, Glen’s, The Commander’s house and TECH SUPPORT!!! On a Sunday afternoon, no less. The Houghton Lake webcam was down. Usually, this is a matter of the GG fiddly-doodling around with switches and things. Not today. The password into the server on which the webcam photos are stored went bad. Why? Because that host, where I have my “business” website (click at your own risk and beware of link rot, etc.) that I don’t use because I have a, you know, “real” job, decided that all of its customers needed to change their passwords to something more secure. Today. Who knew? They had not informed me.

The process for doing this involved logging in with the old pw and then they would email me with a temporary pw and that would take 10-15 minutes and then I could log in with the temp pw and change my pw blah-de-blah-de-blah-de. Except that the email didn’t arrive and didn’t arrive and didn’t arrive and the GG was at Houghton Lake waiting for news… I called the tech support number and (of course) was on hold forever and that was okay because when I put my iPhone down, I could hear the music and “thanks for your patience” messages, dum-de-dum-de-dum. I began a chat session at the same time and was greeted by “Jason K” and he gave me the typical responses that their system was working so the problem must be on my end. *Finally* the temporary password came through and, after a number of other gyrations, I was able to log on and change my password to a more “secure” password.

I was not impressed by this whole unplanned Sunday afternoon exercise. I don’t know. Maybe my host service was hit by a particularly awful hacker and this was an emergency and, if so, they are forgiven. But if this was a planned exercise, I think they need to hire a few decent business/systems analysts who can write functional specifications for changes like this, thinking through all of the ifs, whats, and buts of the potential user experience.

Now. Uber Kayak Woman is playing the mbira in the living room and leftover lasagna is in the oven and there is a fantastic pie cooling and salad and the Grinch will be along soon and the garbage doesn’t have to go out until tomorrow night and so I won’t be involved in that argument because tomorrow morning I will be putting my troll costume on again and heading back down to Megalopolis.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.