Sometimes, I get a bit too involved with trying to solve a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Today was one of those days – and I still haven’t solved it.

Perhaps tomorrow will be more productive. Or less frustrating.

I had to deal with another recall today – this one was for my car, not the Governor. Under certain conditions, the Engine Control Module might continue to power the ignition coil after the engine is shut off, causing a short circuit – this could lead to a sudden loss of power while driving, which is Not Good.

The process was about as painless as it could be – I didn’t have to wait for a service advisor when I drove in; they had outdoor waiting areas as well as their traditional inside seating, though Diane picked me up about fifteen minutes after I’d gotten to the dealership; I only had to wait five minutes to pick up the car; they even washed it!

Other than that, I’ve been busy working on photos from Iceland – getting timezones consistent between cameras is a real pain, and Apple Photos doesn’t help by making it hard to tell what timezone it’s using. Rumor has it that iOS and iPadOS 15 improve on this, so I’m installing a beta on my iPad to find out for myself.

I’ve gotten up to the day we did the Golden Circle as part of the pre-tour; I took well over 100 photos that day, but there’s a lot of duplication and many of the photos I took from the moving bus are…let’s say “technically challenged”. :-)

It was a very nice day when we took the trip – and it was the Friday before a three-day weekend, so many Icelanders were taking advantage of the day, too, like these folks fishing in some rather cold water.

I got an email from our Temple President this morning asking for my help “to assist a task discreetly” and asking me to reply by email because he was in a meeting. I wondered why he’d sent it to my Board address instead of my personal address, but I replied saying “sure, what’s up?”

Moments later, I got a request to “purchase 5 $100 Apple gift cards at any nearby store and I’ll reimburse you”.

Needless to say, I didn’t buy any gift cards.

If I’d been paying closer attention, I’d’ve seen this when I started writing the reply:

  | On Aug 19, 2021 at 9:58:22 AM, President’s Name <randomstring@gmail.com> wrote:

randomstring@gmail.com is not the president’s email address, of course.

The scammer hit all of the published board mailing addresses this morning; I don’t know if I was the only one to start down the rabbit hole, but the Executive Director did send out a warning a few minutes later.

Speaking of scams and scammers, Diane and I filled out our California Recall ballots and put them in an official dropbox this morning. I’m proud to display my “I Voted” badge!

When we booked our Antarctic wine club adventure for this winter (summer there, of course), we were hopeful – we were fully vaccinated, vaccines were becoming more available, and the trends were good. We were so confident we paid for the full trip in advance to take advantage of a 10% discount.

That was then.

This week was the deadline to cancel with a full refund; after that, if we canceled, the cruise line would still refund most of our money but they’d keep a significant chunk that we could only use as a credit on one of their sailings during 2022.

We searched our souls. We checked the relevant thread on Cruise Critic. We looked at the progress of vaccination in Argentina and Chile. We looked at Seabourn’s options for next year. We thought some more.

And we decided that discretion was the better part of valor – we want to go to Antarctica, but we want to be able to fully enjoy the experience without worrying about the trip being canceled at the last second. And we want to enjoy the trip, including the cities we fly to – and this year, that didn’t seem likely.

So we called our travel agent and canceled.

At least we got to see penguins in Boston last week!

We went to the chiropractor today for the first time in nearly a month. We were talking with the receptionist about our trip to Iceland, and she said she’d like to look at some of our photos while she was going to be out for a few weeks having shoulder surgery.

I thought about giving her the link to our outbound travel day and telling her to follow the “Newer Post” links to see the rest of it – but it seemed like a suboptimal plan. I promised to email her a link to the Iceland trip – then all I had to do was create one.

When I got home, I looked at ways to convince WordPress to show a series of posts starting with the oldest one so that you could just scroll through a very long page in a simple way. And I found one – just add ?order=asc to the URL for a collection of posts.

Then I needed to figure out how to make a collection of posts for the Iceland trip. The easiest way to do that was to create a category for the trip and assign all of the posts to the category.

And finally, I had to send her the URL: https://readthisblog.net/category/travel/iceland-2021/?order=asc – not a thing of beauty, but it works.

I’d already created categories for a few other trips – now I’m going through my older blog entries and looking for other travel that’s worth making more visible. It’s a slow process; I’m up to mid-2002 so far.

Just what I needed – more self-inflicted organizational work!