blogging | Bertram's Blog

Death of a Blog Reader

June 8, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I never got a chance to meet Mildred Gordon, but she became a dear friend.

About a year ago, I noticed that she was liking all my blog posts on my Facebook page. Didn’t know who she was or why she had liked my page. I didn’t know why she read my blog posts, but every day, I got a notice from FB that “Mildred Gordon” had liked my post. I didn’t think she ever left comments, but one day (I’m ashamed to admit that it took me a long time) I realized that the woman named “sumalama” who left comments on my blog was the same as the woman on Facebook who “liked” my posts.

She became one of my staunchest supporters, liked the idea of my embracing adventure, loved that I danced. She offered me a couch whenever I needed one.

To be honest, although I “knew” her, I didn’t know much about her, just what I gleaned from her comments. She once commented that someone had recommended she read my grief posts, and she was glad they did. And so our connection began.

Another time, she wrote: “Pat Bertram, you matter because when I read your blog posts I can forget about my problems and just get lost in your words. Thank you. Please keep writing!” Later, through other comments, I got an inkling of what those problems were: “Friends and family are getting me through metastasis bone cancer. Wish they weren’t so sad for me…I’ve lived a long and happy and adventurous life!”

“Dance for you is what Tai Chi is for me. Even though I can no longer do it, just thinking of the different forms calms me, relaxes me, brings me peace. Lying in my bed, I can imagine myself flowing through the forms, like a slow motion dance, and I am one with it.”

And I learned a bit about her adventures: “Pat, one step at a time. I have started over many times and that’s how I’ve always done it. And I’ve done it alone, with small children. I am not worried about you, now that you have the dance to feed your being.

The kids and I lived homeless in another country for 6 months, many years ago when they were 5, 4, and a newborn. It wasn’t easy. But we survived. And are the better for it. And now this new journey of mine, with cancer, has my friends worried/bothered for me like your friends are for you.

Let them worry, let them be bothered. It’s their choice. Me? I am truly excited for you and can hardly wait to see what your blog shares about the new life you will form!

Best of luck and have fun! Hugs, Millie

And then suddenly, the “like”s and comments stopped. Worried, I emailed her, using the email address she’d used for WordPress comments, but got no response. I didn’t really expect any — any time I’d contacted someone via such an email, I got no reply, as if perhaps I had stepped over a boundary I shouldn’t have.

Today I checked her Facebook profile, hoping to find an explanation. And I did.

Mildred died on May 20th. A celebration of her life was held on May 31st, while I was dancing on stage. Although I didn’t know about the service at the time, my dancing was a much better memorial to her than the tears that are now blurring my eyes.

I’m sorry I never got to meet ”sumalama.” (Sorry I never asked what that meant.) But I am so very glad we connected.

Thank you, Millie, for enriching my life. Best of luck and have fun! Hugs, Pat

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in blogging, life. Tags: blog comments, blog reader, sumalama, Tai Chi. 21 Comments »

Taking the Love/Hate Challenge

June 4, 2015 — Pat Bertram

RAMI UNGAR THE WRITER has nominated me for a love/hate challenge. What I have to do is write ten things I love, ten things I hate, and then challenge ten other bloggers to do the same. I hate this sort of challenge, but love that someone nominated me. (See? Already I’m in the spirit!)

The truth is, there are not many things I love. Dancing of course. Having friends. Freedom. Being published. All the rest of the positive things in my life fall under the category of necessities or disciplines or values.

Although I like walking, it’s more of a necessity — I need to walk. It clears my head, comforts me, makes me feel connected to the world, and provides a means of getting from place to place when I am without a car.

I like blogging, but it’s a discipline as well as a necessity. I need to blog to connect with myself and my online world, but if I don’t adhere to the discipline of blogging every day or whenever I get a chance, I won’t. I’m basically indolent, (a nice way of saying lazy) and need to keep myself focused, otherwise I won’t do anything.

Other things I like, such as my computer, smartphone, and 43-year-old VW fall more under the category of added value than love. Those machines add value to my life, facilitating my connection to the world. (Hmmm. Do you see a pattern here? Walking makes me feel connected to the world. Blogging connects me to myself as well as the online world. And my various machines facilitate those connections.)

There are even fewer things I hate. The top of my hate list is injustice. I despise injustice of all kinds and don’t understand why people/things can’t be fair. I also hate feeling pressured or cornered. Left to my own devices, I am fair, kind, generous. But if I feel pressured, I get resentful and maybe even petty.

So, under the assumption that you too hate feeling pressured or cornered, I won’t list you by name, but I nominate you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, and you. What do you love? What do you hate?

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Posted in blogging, life. Tags: added value, blogging is necessary, fairness for everyone, injustice, love dancing, loves and hates, the love hate challenge, walking as a necessity. 1 Comment »

Tortoise Sitting

June 2, 2015 — Pat Bertram

My computer has been in storage the past month. I’d been staying with friends, and I didn’t really have a place to set up my machine. Nor did I have enough quiet and alone time to do all the work I needed to do. So I just went with the flow of my friend’s life. Now I am tortoise sitting for another friend while she’s on vacation. Actually, I am housesitting, and Franklin goes with the house. He doesn’t need much care. I’m just supposed to make sure he has plenty of water, kale, petunia petals, and some b-vitamin pellets, which seem to be the extent of his diet. [As an aside, what is a “housesit ting”? MSSpellcheck says housesitting is not a word and wanted me to change it to “housesit ting”. Huh?]

I spent yesterday afternoon and evening on the computer, catching up on some of the emails and housekeeping chores (or rather, computer-keeping chores) that have piled up in my absence, and it felt good. Like coming home. It was amazing how little I did yesterday, but the time flew. When I looked up from my computer, the sun had been long gone, and it was past time to retire for the night.

Other than having a couple of computerized weeks coming up (I am housesitting for one friend this week and then for another friend next week, so I’ll have alone time and a place for my computer) I have no plans. Well, a belly dance performance in December, but that’s a long way off.

I really can’t make plans even if I wanted to — I have no idea when my car will be done, though I have it on good authority they are working on it. The husband of the woman who recommended the body guy went to see what was going on (I think she felt guilty for recommending the fellow), and the husband saw them sanding the car. The body guy apologized to the husband — not to me, to him. Men!!! Still, it’s nice to know that at least a bit more has been done.

Although I didn’t have my computer during the past month, I did have a phone that connected to the internet, so I could continue my research into backpacking, but it’s good to have other things to do online now. The more I read about backpacking long distances, the more it seemed ho-hum. As if everyone in the world were planning some sort of epic walk. I suppose it’s possible they are — I seem to follow trends unwittingly. First writing, now talking about long-distance walking. Just goes to show I’m nowhere near as individual as I think I am. (The truth is, though I don’t like to admit it to myself, I am exceedingly normal, which is how I knew that whatever craziness I felt during my grief process was normal.)

I’m doing well. Despite my precarious-sounding situation, I’m content. Happy even. I hope you are, too.

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Posted in blogging, internet, life. Tags: coming home, housesit ting, housesitting, making plans, petunia petals, tortoise sitting. 5 Comments »

The Magic of Blogging by Email

April 24, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been practicing posting by email to make it easier to blog when my only access to the internet will be my phone. It wasn’t as difficult to post by email as I thought it would be.

The first thing I needed to do was to get a special email address. To do this, go to your dashboard and click on “my blogs.” The easiest way to find “my blogs” is to go to your blog, hover your cursor over “my site” on the left navigation strip, then click on “WP Admin.” You should see “My blogs” on the left sidebar close to the top.

Click “enable email” for the blog you wish to post to via email. That will give you a special email address. I input the email address in my phone so I don’t have to ever think about it again, and now it’s ready whenever I need it.

To post by email, go to your email on your phone and open a new message. The recipient, of course, is that secret email address WordPress assigned to you. The subject line is the title of the blog. The body of the email is the blog itself. An attached photo will show up on the bottom of the email. Apparently, as of now, there isn’t a way to align the image via email. If you want to realign it — to add it to the top of the blog or to wrap text around it — you have to edit the post on your computer.

There are some really cool aspects of email blogging, for example, the shortcodes. [category a,b,c] will post categories. The categories must already be ones you use on your blog. The brackets are part of the shortcode, and there can be no space before the word “category” or after the last category you use. (In this case, the letter c.) You don’t even have to use the whole word, just the first few letters, but I haven’t yet tried out that tip.

For tags, use the shortcode [tags a,b,c]. Again, no space before the word “tags” and after the last tag. Be sure to separate tags with commas. New tags will be automatically generated; they don’t already need to be in use on your blog.

If you attach more than one photo, they will show up as a gallery. If you want each one posted individually, use the shortcode [nogallery].

These three shortcodes can be placed anywhere in the email and it won’t affect the text of your post.

Magic!

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Posted in blogging, How to, internet. Tags: adding tags to email posts, attaching image to email blog posts, blog by email, shortcodes, WordPress. 1 Comment »

Testing 4 5 6

April 20, 2015 — Pat Bertram

(Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.”)

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Yesterday I tried out the post by email feature on WordPress but forgot to add tags and categories. so today I need to try to do that too. I’m disappointed that the photos appear at the end of the post rather than at the beginning or in line with text, but I’m pleased that I can post at all. The main problem is that the photo appeared after my signature line, so I’m experimenting with putting the signature line first. If it’s too annoying let me know and in future posts by email I’ll just leave it off or just not worry that the photo is tacked on as an afterthought.

I’m also trying to do this without wifi because obviously if I’m out in the middle of nowhere I’ll be lucky to have a signal of any kind and definitely no wifi.

I took my last walk in the neighborhood today, and then ended out in the desert. I’ll miss that easy access to the wilds, but there will be more wilds in the future. This is an interesting time in my life, that’s for sure.

Posted in blogging, internet. Tags: photo, post by email, WordPress. 7 Comments »

Testing 1 2 3

April 19, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I figure since my internet access might be a problem, I should learn how to blog by email. I read the tutorial but there is no way to find out if I learned anything unless I test myself. Okay let’s do it. Abracadabra! Post!

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Posted via phone. Since this smartphone is probably more intelligent than me, blame any mistakes on the phone.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in blogging, internet, writing. Tags: courage, posting by email, testing. 14 Comments »

Desert Procrastinations

April 4, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I have about 12 hours of work I have to do this weekend, so like any well-disciplined person, I got up early, went right to work . . . and checked out Facebook and emails on my computer. Then, because apparently I hadn’t procrastinated enough, I spent a couple of hours resurrecting old email addresses. They hadn’t been used in so long, I had to go through a lot of rigmarole to prove I was human and that these near-defunct emails were mine. (Tell me honestly — can you remember the exact day you opened your email account? And if you have one that’s been inactive for a long time, can you remember the exact day you last used it? Well, gmail expected me to remember. Sheesh.)

Actually, a couple of the email addresses were not strictly mine — they were emails I set up for Jeff. (I don’t have any idea why I decided to keep them alive. But they are available if he ever decides to contact me.) A couple of other addresses were emails I had set up years ago when I was playing around with downloading music. In one case, I used the email a single time before it became flooded with so much spam, it became unusable. (It’s not often you can tell exactly where the spam originated, but since that was the only thing I had done with that email, it was obvious.)

Realizing this online activity wouldn’t get my work finished (or even started), I turned off the computer and went for a walk. A long, long walk. It felt good to stretch out. Felt good to visit the desert again. (Felt even better not doing my work!)

desert knolls

I had a few pangs of nostalgia thinking that in a couple of weeks this near-private patch of desert will no longer be mine. I’ve grown fond of the stark landscape, the tans and taupes,

the rare but brilliant spots of color.

Still, the thought of all the new places I might walk offset the wistfulness.

When I returned from my walk, I got right to work . . . on this blog.

I just can’t seem to force myself to get the 12-hour task done. The job is tedious and almost anything would be more fun. Watching water boil, for example, would be more fun. Or watching rocks race each other across the desert floor.

Maybe I’ll get up early tomorrow. Start working before I know what I’m doing.

Yep. That’s what I’ll do.

For sure.

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Posted in blogging, life, photography. Tags: desert walk, old email addresses, procrastination, well-disciplined person. 2 Comments »

Centering Myself

April 3, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I’m sitting here trying to find my center. I had a great day up until now. Jazz class, great weather, sold my dad’s couches. Found myself smiling at odd times. Just felt great.

Then I came online and had to deal with frustration after frustration. Not with the internet or the computer or even Facebook for a change, but with people. Misunderstandings. Folks who can’t follow directions. People who assume . . . whatever the hell it is they assume.

I’ve been trying to teach neophytes how to blog, and yikes. People, even older folks — especially older folks — don’t seem to know how to follow directions. But, as a friend always says, “Not my problem. Not my circus. Not my elephant.” As long as I stay around this area, I’ll probably have wifi, but if I take off “into the fog” as another friend put it, then internet connections will be sporadic. I certainly won’t use my limited data allowance (and my limited desire for writing long emails via phone) to help people who should be able to help themselves.

But then, I could be in the neophyte category myself soon, so I should be more accepting. If I don’t have access to wifi, then I’ll be doing my blog posts via email when cell service allows, and that’s a whole new dimension of blogging. It doesn’t really seem difficult, just a different way of doing things, and like most things, when taken one step at a time, it’s doable. Apparently, the first step is to create a secret and private (is that redundant?) email address to send the blog post to. (It has to be secret/private because anyone who had the address could post to the blog as me.) The subject line will be the title of the post, the body of the email will be the body of the post. I just need to make sure I have a phone email service that takes rich text formatting. Photo attachments will show up in the body of the post. Categories and tags are added by short code. For example: [category x,y,z] and [tags a,b,c].

Maybe I should practice first. I don’t want to be up in the mountains somewhere with a very rare cell signal, and then screw up the post.

But not today. Today is complicated enough, though I have re-centered myself. No more frustrations. At least for the moment.

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Posted in blogging, life. Tags: blogging by email, centering myself, frustrations, neophyte blogger. 1 Comment »

Countdown To Homelessness

April 2, 2015 — Pat Bertram

Such a very strange time in my life — this countdown to homelessness. Strangest of all is that I, a world class worrier, am calm — even happy — about the whole thing. I do have occasional brief moments of panic and just as many moments of excitement, but mostly I think my situation is . . . amusing. Yes, that’s the word. Amusing.

I find myself musing about the future. I find myself bemused by the chain of events that lead me here. I find myself smiling in amusement at the possibilities of an uncertain life. And the necessary research keeps me amused for hours.

Oddly, I am quite content with the thought of living nowhere in particular, but the truth is, as long as I am alive, I do have to be physically present somewhere, and that does give me pause. There is no place I really want to be, and the thought of being anywhere in particular spooks me.

The main conflict right now comes from my desire to continue taking dance classes, but unless I find a place to stay here, I will be heading out. (Maybe just for the summer or until I can find a place here. Thanks to the internet, every place is everywhere, so I don’t have to be present to continue looking.) I have offers of places to stay in an emergency, and I will probably take people up on their offers since I have promised to continue taking classes until June. (We have a performance at the end of May — a Hawaiian War Chant and a trio of Tahitian Apurimas. I love both these pieces. Energetic and so very exotic!)

I am leaving future to the fates, God, the universe . . . whatever you choose to name the Great Unknown. If I find a place, I stay here in the desert. If I don’t, well, I have friends to meet all over the country, and actually, all over the globe. But specifically, I have offers of places to stay temporarily in Northern California and Texas. Invitations to hike in Door County. Lunch in Ohio. A dear friend in Louisiana to connect with. An old friend near Tucson to reconnect with. A friend to meet in Quartzsite (and maybe even a place to stay if she hasn’t sold her RV.) An invitation to visit a friend in New Zealand. Plans to meet a friend in Australia. (If you want to be added to this list, please let me know!)

To be honest, considering the state of my finances, I should get a job, but there’s nothing much I’m suited for except looking after the sick, old, and dying (it’s all I’ve done the past 10 years) and I’m ready for LIFE.

I’d considered getting a van and turning it into a camper, considered getting a larger car that I can sleep in, but somehow (not sure how, exactly) I decided to get my ancient VW Beetle restored. It started with my wanting a paint job so I wouldn’t look like a bag lady living in a decrepit car, but no place would paint a car with rust even if I signed a waver, so the rust had to be removed, and if I did that, I might as well have the dents fixed, and if I did that, I might as well . . . see? Somehow it all just happened.

And somehow, my future will just happen, too.

I do love the idea of traveling around the country in my bug, visiting my online friends, camping out in remote and not so remote areas, getting a feel for the world and my place in it. (Maybe preparing for some sort of epic walk while I’m at it.) Since I have no experience camping and have no gear, there is a whole new realm to get to know. Where can I tent camp for free or almost free? I don’t want to be around RVs, won’t need the same sort of amenities, and wouldn’t really be a part of that culture, anyway. And I definitely don’t want to camp in the middle of a busy campground. So I’m researching tent campgrounds and camping equipment. I covet the eight-person tent I saw — multiple rooms, plenty of space, even a closet! — but it seems a bit impractical. There are wonderful camp toilets, but the practicality ends with the cost of the liners and fillers. They would be fine for a week or two, but months? No. Way too expensive. So, lots and lots of research!

Whether or not I ever do any of this — camping, traveling cross-country, taking a freighter to New Zealand, staying here and continue taking dance classes — it’s a true experience rethinking what is necessary for both my comfort and safety. The internet is a necessity, of course, but I can use my phone to post my blog (which I would do whenever I could find a signal) and use truck stops and other public places when I need to use the computer.

If I’m traveling in my car rather than on foot, I’d have no problem carrying enough food, water, shelter, pillows whatever I need for comfort and cleanliness. But safety? Eek. I just read about a guy sleeping in a tent who had been bitten in the head by a black bear. Oh, that is so not on my agenda!! Nor are ticks and miss-quits (as a friend calls mosquitoes because they never miss and never quit). So more research needed!

Do you see what is most important to me? Internet, comfort, safety, in that order. Hmmm. Don’t quite know what to think about my priorities. Might have to research that too.

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Posted in blogging, internet, life. Tags: camp toilet, camping, free campsites, restoring a VW bug, using phone for internet. 17 Comments »

The Internet, Twitter, and Other Frustrations

March 16, 2015 — Pat Bertram

Frustrations abound, the most significant one being a spotty internet connection for two days. It took almost the whole day yesterday to post one not-very-interesting article. Today I’ve been trying to research Twitter and the best way to use the site. I can’t see Twitter as a way of making friends like I’ve done here on this blog and on Facebook, but several people have told me it’s a good way for an author to sell books. Of course, they have also told me I won’t sell books via Twitter because my books are not sold as cheaply as self-published books, so who knows if Twitter will make any difference in my life, but it’s worth a try.

So many things are confusing when it comes to Twitter. For example, you can only follow 2,000 people, yet the most active people on the site follow more than 10,000. (Apparently, at some point, the cap is lifted.) The limit has something to do with keeping out robot accounts and controlling spam, but it doesn’t make much sense because the number of tweets a person can tweet a day is capped at 1000. I don’t care who you are. Posting 1000 times a day constitutes spam in my opinion!

The most confusing thing is that Twitter will tell you what you are doing wrong, such as unfollowing too many people in a day, but they won’t tell you how many people you can unfollow. I can see the bewildered look on your face as you wonder why you would want to unfollow someone you followed. Well, once you hit 2,000 followers, apparently you can’t add more until you have approximately that many following you, so if you want to follow someone specific, you have to unfollow someone else.

There used to be a service called TwitCleaner that would tell you who unfollowed you (a lot of folks will follow you, hoping you will follow then back, and once you do follow them, they unfollow you) but Twitter changed their API (application program interface), making the service ineffective and it went out of business. Now, though, you can do some of it yourself. If you go to your twitter page and click on “following” you will see all your followers and if they are following you back. If they don’t follow you back and they aren’t someone you are interested in, they are safe to unfollow.

Another thing that is so very confusing is that you can set up your blog and various other sites to post directly to Twitter, which is what I used Twitter for — a place to automatically link my blog posts in the hope of getting someone interested in my articles. But — and this is a big but — what Wordpress posts is the title and link and your name (and theirs), and you get almost no views that way. People like color, graphics, hints of what the blog is about, hashtags (hashtags are like tags on wordpress; they give people a way of finding your posts) and if your blog post is automatically posted on Twitter, all of that is missing.

It’s like hootsuite.com. A lot of people use sites like that to post articles and comments to all their sites at once, but anything posted from hootsuite is posted outside the parameters of (for example) Facebook’s algorithms. Those algorithms are what dictates who and how many gets to see what you post, and they reward those who garner a lot of interactions. But if you post via a secondary site rather than directly to FB, your “pebble” leaves no ripples.

Then there is the egg situation. If you don’t post a photo for your profile, the empty space where your photo would be looks like an egg, hence the name “egg” for those with no profile picture. Very few people want to deal with blanks, so the general consensus is to ignore eggs. And yet, sometimes eggs are simply those with no time to fill out the information. So do you follow eggs or not?

Lots to think about while I’m waiting for the internet provider repairperson to come. And that, of course, will add to the frustrations, because you and I know the truth. When they get here, the internet will be on one of it’s “up” cycles.

But it’s all part of the game. I’m just glad I’m able to play it, frustrations and all. Maybe someday I’ll even figure out how to make all this information work for me.

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