why I’ve been missing during the coronavirus pandemic

Es­ti­mated reading time is 3 min­utes.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE BLOG POSTS GONE, long time passing? The past few months have seen ab­solutely nothing posted on any of my blogs. This does not mean that I have not been busy. I just haven’t been busy pub­lishing things I wrote. At a time when more people are prob­ably reading things on the in­ternet that they never had time to even find be­fore, I have been silent.

Here are the rea­sons why:

•  In Feb­ruary and March, my wife and I had the plain, old-fashioned flu: headaches that ap­proached the “pounding” level; fevers that, for­tu­nately, topped out at 100; achy mus­cles in the neck, shoul­ders, and lower back; and fa­tigue (just moving about the house was an effort).

•  My wife had a head cold that in­cluded a sinus in­fec­tion that caused one ear to ache.

•  This was fol­lowed by my wife passing two kidney stones, each a gaw­daw­fully painful experience.

We were “seeing” our doctor reg­u­larly via Zoom and were tested for COVID-19, which was neg­a­tive. 1

 

Mac iMac Late2009 27inch 1200 copy

Curraaash!

During this time, my com­put­er’s hard drive crashed and died and I had to find a new used iMac. We found one lo­cally on Craigslist and I am now working on an iMac with a larger hard drive, more memory, and a faster processor! I was able to re­store all of the files, doc­u­ments, and im­ages from the dead com­puter, but there were some weird ef­fects on each along the way.

I write this one ar­ticle for six blogs. Right now, you are on the Neal Umphred Dot Com. If you got here from one of my other blogs, click on the back­ward arrow on your browser (←) to re­turn to that blog.

Prior to the crash, I had mi­grated all of my blogs from my old host—once a re­li­able in­de­pen­dent com­pany, now just an­other ac­qui­si­tion for a bigger com­pany with little in­terest in any­thing but the bottom line—to a new host. They “fixed” all my web­sites’ files and data­bases and coör­di­nated all my plu­gins with their servers. I was thrilled to be with these people!

Then my sites started going tem­porarily of­fline for ex­ces­sive use of re­sources, a problem that I had never had in my seven years with my pre­vious (and rel­a­tively inept) host. It seems that my new host is not des­tined to be my per­ma­nent and I am looking for my second new host in six months.

Cur­rently, things seem rea­son­ably “normal” and I will begin posting new ar­ti­cles on this blog and each of my other blogs:

Rather Rare Records
Elvis – A Touch Of Gold
The End­less Sixties
GCC – Global Cli­mate Change

After I get some­thing new on each blog, most of my at­ten­tion will be fo­cused on the Elvis site for the fore­see­able future.

This is just a brief note to let readers know why there haven’t been any new ar­ti­cles pub­lished on this blog in the past few months. Click To Tweet

Flu 2020 viruses 1500 A

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page and here was lifted from an ar­ticle ti­tled “The epi­demic on the way: Why winter flu is so bad this year” on the New Sci­en­tist web­site. Written by Debora Mackenzie and dated Jan­uary 2018, the sub-title is, “Flu is an un­der­es­ti­mated killer, taking more than a mil­lion lives around the globe an­nu­ally. This time, the mu­tated virus seems to be hit­ting even harder.” 2

 


FOOT­NOTES

1   Everyone in my both Berni and my family have fared well during the Great Coro­n­avirus Pan­demic of 2020. So far.

2   As I needed to use this photo for posts in six blogs, I played with the color bal­ance in five of them.

 

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