The Daily School Bus: Caught at an intersection in the rain at the very beginning of the day

Well here I am, at 8 AM about to enter the parking lot to have breakfast at Abby's Home Cooking. I had already begun my turn when I saw this school bus headed down Church Road past the intersection ahead. There was no traffic behind me, no traffic coming at me. I stopped, right here, not quite off the road, not quite into the parking lot and quickly tapped three frames. Hence we have the Daily School Bus at the very beginning of the day.

I am taking a chance and am posting this from Abby's Home Cooking. If Squarespace strips the picture out, I will add it back in once I return to my house and office.*

Sent from my iPhone

*This post has been sitting picture-less for an hour-and-forty-five minutes. It did not take me that long to return my office, but I had other matters to attend to. Well, it's an hour-and-forty-six minutes. Jim keeps placing one paw on my track-pad, which causes everything to stop in my computer until I remove his paw. So he has slowed me down a bit. Well, one-hour and seventeen-minutes now.

The Daily School bus: a bus gasses up at Tesoro in warm weather; rage

I am so frustrated by what Squarespace has been putting me through that I don't want to make this post. I don't want to make any post. I don't want to blog, period! I am fed up. I want to quit blogging altogether and just go home. I do not need this kind of aggravation and drag on my life. What should be simple, was simple when I first tried and then somehow got made complicated by Squarespace, is now.. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!

Suffice it to say, the Squarespace nightmare continues.

That stated, there are two things about this picture that strike me as odd. One, that a school bus would gas up at a public station. You would think the school district would have their own gas pumps where the buses would gas up. Maybe they do. Maybe this guy unexpectedly pushed the empty mark and didn't dare take a chance on getting back to the school gas pump and so had to gas up.

If they gassed up at public stations all the time, then it seems like you would frequently see school buses at the pump, but you don't. I suppose I could make a call to the school district and find out if they have their own pumps or not, but I am a shy person and I don't want to. Plus, I have a feeling someone might let me know, soon.

Anyway, this is today's Daily School Bus. I actually haven't seen a school bus yet today. I shot this late yesterday afternoon on my coffee break, after I drove away from Metro.

The other odd thing is how warm it looks - because it is warm. 52 last time I checked. It is not supposed to be this warm here this time of year. But it is. I miss the crisp air we should be breathing now and the frozen ground upon which we should be walking. This just doesn't feel right to me. Not that it's unheard of, but more and more this kind of thing is happening to us.

And I am fed up with the far right in Congress - those who deny that what's happening with the climate is happening at all and who, while proclaiming themselves patriots, would savage and break their own nation if they can't blackmail it into abandoning the normal legislative process and bend it to the will of a mean minority that rejects science and equality for those who do not look like them or believe as they do. And I am tired of the individual from my home town who eggs them on, shouts out witty, nasty, inanities, proclaims light to be dark, dark to be light, whips up the emotions of those enraged who do not recognize or acknowledge the true source of their rage, who don't know what to do with their rage and so target it at the "other" - but really at themselves as well.

I just want to quit and go home.

Oh, wait.

I am home.

The daily school bus: from the drive-through line

The daily school bus: from the drive-through line at McDonald's as I prepare to take Margie to Anchorage so she can babysit.

The Squarespace nightmare continues. I am posting this with the email workaround. If Squarespace strips the picture out, then it will be likely a couple of hours or so before I can get home and put it back in on my computer. In the meantime…*

Sent from my iPhone

*Indeed, Squarespace did strip the photo out. It is now just over three hours since I put up the post and nearly four hours since I took the picture. Finally, I am able to sit at my computer and add the picture back in. This is now a 72 percent failute rate for the email workaround Squarespace gave me to fill in for the defective app they market to the public. I never did calculate the failure rate for the app, but without a doubt it had climbed above the 90 percent range when I finally gave up on it and Squarespace and launched this daily school bus process in my effort to prod Squarespace to make their app usable. I am so weary with the headaches - this being only the latest - but the worst - in a long chain of Squarespace aggravations stretching back more than five years.

The Daily School Bus: monkeys capture the bus as nightmare continues

This school bus bearing down upon me and the terrified driver behind me is full of mean, thieving, monkeys.

Where did they come from? I don't know. Wasilla is not the normal habitat of monkeys and there has been no explanation for their sudden appearance here. They are showing up in gangs all over town, terrorizing opera performers and audiences alike and storming bars and fast food restaurants. Last night, they took over the saturday night fight, whalloped all the kick-boxer-wrestlers - including state champion Mac McDermot - the Wasilla Grinder - and sent them fleeing from the arena with their tails tucked between their legs. They are not respecters of gender or age. A medium-sized monkey of extremely ill temperament knocked a biker off the Harley he was climbing onto after emerging from the Mugshot Saloon, stole it, motored away and then snatched a chocolate-dipped ice cream from a tiny, purple-haired 87-year woman who had just gone through the drive-through at Dairy Queen.

Another ripped a Happy Meal from the hands of a toddler at McDonald's and then didn't even eat it. The monkey hurled the meal to the floor and then peed all over the chicken nuggets and apple slices. This really upset the other McDonald's patrons. The manager tried to shut the restaurant down but the monkeys stole his keys, took over the entire restaurant and now only allow monkeys to enter and be served stolen cuisine.

As for the monkeys on this bus, I was driving by Tanaina Elementary, alma-matre of all my children, sipping a 12 oz Americano with cream I had just purchased from Metro. The driver had hurriedly ushered the children onto the bus and was closing the door when the gang-leader monkey spotted my coffee. Forty-two monkeys then stormed the bus, bound and gagged the driver, sent the screaming children off the bus to walk home and then came roaring after me.

They want my coffee. They are not going to get my coffee. I am going to turn onto a rough road and outrun them. A school bus full of monkeys can never catch a Ford Escape on a rough road. The bouncing might cause some of my coffee to slosh out of the cup and spill, but I think I can save most of it.

Oh, dear me! What if there are gangs of monkeys stationed on every back road, just waiting for people fleeing in Ford Escapes to drive right into their traps?

Damn monkeys!

Note: As previously explained, I am posting one school bus picture a day, and no other pictures of any kind, as a protest against the malfunctioning Squarespace iPhone app, to remind my readers why it has become too complicated and time-consuming for me to post as I had been, and hopefully to help prod Squarespace into correcting this problem as close to immediately as is possible.

The Daily School Bus: Squarespace nightmare reasserts itself with vengeance; Kalib at Taco Bell: the photo Squarespace deleted from my previous post

Yesterday, I tentatively started "The Daily School Bus." While snapping images of school buses I come upon is one of my many strange photographic passions and school buses will likely always keep popping up on this, or any other blog I might launch to replace it, for as long as I blog, I had none-the-less hoped bus stardom in a daily feature would be temporary. As I explained yesterday, after starting out with some mildly annoying, sporadic, quirks I could work my way around in relatively short order, the performance of the Squarespace iPhone app I have been using to post for two-and-half months steadily degenerated - often deleting my pictures and posting only the words. It got ever more frustrating until finally it became impossible to work with. I sometimes made between 20 and 40 retries to publish a post, only to have the Squarespace app delete the photo each time.

As I explained yesterday, I made a formal complaint to Squarespace. Squarespace acknowledged the problem promised to fix it - and a number of others I pointed out - and to notify me when they do. But then Squarespace has made such promises before with other annoying, time-wasting problems, sometimes taking years to make the fix, sometimes never making it.

I have invested so much in time, effort and even money into this blog - into Squarespace. I am completely fed up with this kind of thing. I got into computers in the mid-80's and into the net not long afterward and in that time I have had to deal with many frustrations, as has anybody who boots up and goes online.

Yet, nothing else I have experienced has even come close to the aggravation and amount of wasted time that my investment in Squarespace has cost me. I must be incredibly foolish to have stuck with them for so long - since 2008. Squarespace does, however, provide the tools to create a good blog structure and they have a support staff that always gets back to you and they usually do their best to address the problem, but the underneath the bright structure they have created is a foundation so flawed that sometimes the problems seem to be unaddressable.

Over the years, I have received received many reassurances from Squarespace that they were working to address this problem or that and to improve their complete product. So, despite my many bad experiences, having already invested myself so deeply into their platform, I have wanted to believe they would solve all their problems and make my blogging experience with them a good one. But now Squarespace has pushed me over the edge.

So, both to explain to readers why, due all this aggravation and wasted time, I must cut back on my blogging, I tentatively launched The Daily School Bus yesterday. The school bus pictures would serve as place holders to keep my blog on life-support while Squarespace maybe got their act together and fixed the problem, as they promised. 

When I tapped "publish" on my iPhone ap to post yesterday's introductory explanation, I fully expected the app to strip the photo out of the post as it had done with single other attempt I had made to post over the previous three days. In one life's many ironic coincidences, the app successful put up the full post - picture included. When this happens, it is a simple, quick, and beautiful thing. Although I had received no notification the problem had been fixed, this gave me hope that perhaps it had.

Not long after, I made the Kalib-Dusty post. It, too, went up; full and complete. My hopes rose further.

Next, up was Two artists collaborate, 1 of 2. I began to feel optimistic.

Unfortunately, when I first tried to post Two artists collaborate, 2 of 2, the Squarespace app failed. I did a couple of retries and finally the app put the full post up, picture included. Now I was wary again, but willing to keep going. I don't like it all, but, as annoying as it is, I can tolerate two failed attempts to post if the third succeeds.

Next, Kalib and I went to Taco Bell, where I took the above image right after we got our food. I quickly added the text you see in the picture-less post just ahead of this one and tapped, "publish." The Squarespace app posted the text but stripped the picture. I then tried and tried again - sometimes getting as many as four, identical, picture-less posts, all saying the same thing, stack up on the page before I deleted any of them. After ten tries, I lost count but I really wanted to get the post up, so I kept trying. I must have tried about 20 times total. Finally, having had not only my blogging experience but my lunch experience ruined, I gave up. I kept my frustration hidden from Kalib and I happy to say he did enjoy his lunch experience at The Bell.

Afterward, I returned home, emailed these two images to myself and then attached them to the text in my computer the normal, slow, laborious, Squarespace 5 way, just as I had long done before I switched to the iPhone and the Squarespace app.

So now The Daily School Bus is officially launched. I will post one school bus image a day until Squarespace notifies me they have fixed the problem - or until I give up and go find another blog host altogether. Switching hosts would create an enormous headache for me, but maybe that's what it is coming to. After all these years, and after all this time and effort, not to mention money, I have invested into this blog and into Squarespace, I'm afraid my confidence in Squarespace is finally all but shot.