There is no joy without striving

"Tuck says she's the new Kiri Te Kanawa. Where have we been?" we captioned this image of Renée Fleming a little over a year ago. Click here to watch and listen to her breathtaking "Ave Maria" from a November 2005 concert of "the world’s best-loved sacred songs and arias in front of a packed audience in Mainz’s beautiful Romanesque Cathedral."

The struggle is all. Don't let Barack or HIllary tell you the gummint owes you something. With every handout accepted, you give up a piece of your soul. There is no joy without striving.

"In spite of the frustration and so on, I'm enjoying it," says Mr. Tuck re the Buddhist-monk-gravel-raking-like essence of building his ship model from the ground up.

We could say the same of our now two-days-long and counting effort to restore the dozens and dozens -- 150 now and counting into probably at least one more day of effort -- of image files lost because of some Beta testing thing TypePad did without notifying us. It was up to us to stumble upon the horror of realizing a ton of our precious images had disappeared into some cyberaceous black hole. Then we worked back, notifying them in a help ticket and learning from them that indeed they had been up to something, but as Colleen informed us:

We can ask engineering to see if they can make your images work again on the dynamic platform but I don't know how likely that is for one isolated case like this.

The upside for us was getting to review dozens and dozens of totally awesome pictures of puddies and such from the last period of time . . . Like drowning, so they say, your life flashing before you. PLUS. We allowed ourselves to become "bogged down" in reading a few of our best blogposts of the last year and a half. Good stuff. As we are forever saying, we are glad to report that we still agree with ourselves.

Comments

[goomp]

I am glad the restoration gives pleasure and satisfaction as well as the boredom of repetitious key punching. Thanks for the opportunity to hear again Renee Fleming's glorious rendition of the Ave Maria.