Call me a robot

I've been MIA from these pages for a while, both in writing and in visiting and commenting on my fellow bloggers' posts. Life has been demanding. Frida and Freddie, my foster pups, had a reaction to their first vaccinations and for a couple of days before we determined the cause, I was terrified all my animals would get sick. Washed my hands until they looked like they would be permanently pruney. In the midst of cleaning up endless messes, I was making phone calls, sending out emails and tackling all the tasks involved in publishing our 24th (!) annual map guide to antiques in the Western states. Deadline's in 10 days and I still have over 100 antique store owners to talk to.

But this morning I took an hour to visit some of my friends' blogs. And I found out that I'm no longer able to comment on any BlogSpot blogs. Call me a robot if you like, but the character recognition tests have become too difficult. To the already hard-to-read nonsense words they've added blurry photos of numbers that look like house numbers, some clear enough and others so murky they were indecipherable. I tried more than a dozen times to reply to Billie and failed every time. My conclusion: either the system is broken or (more likely) it's just gotten too high-tech for my mediocre abilities.

This looks like "htrateg 54," right? Wrong. When I tried that, it was rejected. I tried putting a space before the number, and leaving out the space, with the same results. I tried copying exactly, with capitals where indicated. No joy.

Luckily, I found that my friends on Wordpress and other blog servers didn't have word recognition testing to stymie my freedom of expression. I never set my blog up to include it, and I hope it doesn't. There aren't that many of you reading this blog to begin with.

And, Billie, I'm glad you were able to accomplish your mission and I hope now you can get some sleep.