Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Archives for 2008

I thought I lost my WordPress Database just now! Scary!

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A few minutes ago as I finished the post below and pressed the Publish button this is what my admin area looked like:

Blog Admin Error After Posting
Blog Admin Error After Posting

Pretty scary, eh? I just about had a heart attack!

With the mantra “Oh no, oh no, oh no” going through my head, I opened up a new tab in my browser and loaded the site in the hopes that the blog would look normal. You know … that maybe what I saw in the admin area was just a temporary glitch?

No such luck … the front page of the blog looked like this:

Front page of my blog after publishing a post!
Front page of my blog after publishing a post!

After having another heart attack and aging 10 years (gotta get some wrinkle cream now!) I decided to go to my webhost and check C-panel to make sure that my database really hadn’t disappeared.

The database was still there and I could see that it still had comment and post data in it, so i decided to open another new tab in order to load my blog again. I got the same error messages all over the page, so I added wp-admin to the url and I was able to go directly to the admin area.

Much to my relief the admin area looked fine when I got into it. I use a wp-cache for this blog so I went to the settings area and cleared the whole cache for the blog and it looked normal again.

I have no idea what happened, but it sure scared me! This is my oldest and biggest blog. The thought of losing the whole database and possibly the databases for my other blogs really freaked me out.

I just updated this blog to WP 2.6.2 on Saturday. Up until now there’s been no major problems except for the widget area looking strange on occasion. I wrote about that one one of my other blogs if you want to read about the widget problem. You can actually read about how fun it was to update 16 blogs in that post if you’re interested in hearing about my experiment with the WordPress Autoupdate plugin.

At least having just updated my blog I do have recent backups of the database and files.

So I don’t know if this was a problem caused by the new WP 2.6 or if perhaps there was an error on my hosts server when I was publishing my last post. I suppose it could also be a plugin conflict, but I haven’t added any new plugins or updated any since Saturday when I updated WordPress, and I’ve published several posts since then … so that doesn’t make sense as the cause of the problem.

I guess I’ll have to see what happens when I publish this post! Wish me luck!

Has anyone else had a problem like this immediately after publishing a new post? If you have experienced this type or error, did you ever find out what caused it? Any ideas?





What’s with all the flyer deliveries lately?

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I’m being bombarded by mail these days. Yeah I know … my usual complaints are about spam email and spam commenters … but this time it’s snail mail! LOL

I’ve had a huge increase in mail deliveries in the last while. I guess it’s not enough for the mailman to deliver bills and flyers, but our Postal Service hires people just to deliver flyers in addition to the ones that the mailman delivers, and then of course there’s people hired to deliver flyers for private companies too.

Our regular mail is usually delivered by about 9:30 in the morning, but it seems just about any other time I walk out my door during the day there’s a new set of flyers in the mailbox, on the floor of my porch or stuck in the handle of our screen door. It’s actually becoming a hazard, I’ve slipped on a few glossy flyers that have been placed right outside the front door. Now I’ve got to be sure to look down before I put my foot down … remember I’m a klutz already so I don’t need any extra help with mishaps! LOL

The flyers run the gamut with anything from restaurant take out or delivery fliers to drug stores promoting things like the best diet pills they sell and so on.

Now that we’re having a snap Federal Election we’re also receiving newsletters and promotional mail from all of the major political parties too.

I’ll admit some of the flyers are useful, but the majority end up going straight into the recycling box. I can’t help thinking what a waste of money it is for companies to print out these flyers and hire people to deliver them when I suspect the majority of people receiving them are just throwing them in the recycling bin. (well I hope they are at least recycling!) what a waste of paper, money and resources!

In the past we had a sign on our door that said “No Flyers” but those delivering them ignored our request, and if the flyers were part of the regular mail delivery they still got delivered.

Do you feel that you get too many flyers too? What do you do about it?

Mmmm homemade spaghetti sauce

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My home is filled with the wonderful smell of homemade spaghetti sauce. Mmmm it smells so good! The dog is going nuts – between watching me prepare it and smelling the sauce at is simmers on the stove she won’t stop pacing around with excitement. I don’t know what makes her think she’s going to get any? LOL

Chris is working until 8 pm tonight so we’ll be having a late dinner, but it will be a good one. Spaghetti with my homemade sauce, and a salad filled with our own home grown lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes. Chris will probably want to have some garlic bread with the meal, but I don’t think we really need it. He might win out though.

We don’t have spaghetti for dinner very often, but when we do I almost always make a homemade sauce. Well ok, it’s not totally homemade – canned whole tomatoes, a basic canned or bottled tomato sauce, tomato paste, garlic powered, Italian seasoning, freshly chopped chives from the garden, chopped onion, diced green pepper and a tablespoon of brown sugar (my secret ingredient to give the sauce a slightly sweeter taste) and of course about a pound of cooked lean hamburger. I don’t follow a recipe – I just throw in a little of this and a little of that until it all blends together to make a fabulous sauce. Of course this means that each sauce is different and some are better than the others. Oh well- that’s life. Most are pretty tasty.

It’s usually only during the cooler months of the year that we have meals like spaghetti dinners, roasts, stews or homemade chili. I find these meals too filling and too “hot” to cook during the summer. We stick to lighter fair in the summer.

Do you make your own sauce when you make spaghetti?

Thanksgiving and other favorite holidays are just around the corner

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The remnants of Hurricane Ike passed through Toronto yesterday evening and through the night and now that all of that weather has passed it’s quite cool here today. Brrrr

I guess it’s obvious that the cool weather we’ve been experiencing this month has got me thinking about Autumn and Winter. I want the warm weather to last a little longer, but it doesn’t look like it will. Perhaps instead of thinking of the cool weather I should be thinking about some of my favorite upcoming holidays? It certainly won’t be long before we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving, Halloween and Christmas!

Thanksgiving and Christmas are my favorite holidays. Most likely because it almost always means a big family get together.

When I was a kid we used to always go up to our cottage to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now that I think it about it does seem appropriate to celebrate Thanksgiving surrounded by beautiful natural scenery.

We’d always cook up a feast for Thanksgiving – Turkey, sometimes a ham, sometimes wild partridge, mashed potatoes, gravy, and lots of vegetables such as peas, glazed carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, cranberry jelly and of course, my favorite, Pumpkin pie!

The large table that sat at least 14 people would always have hand crafted Thanksgiving ornaments and of course beautiful Thanksgiving flowers in the center.

All this reminiscing is making me long for Thanksgiving … but oh … won’t that mean we’ll really be into the cool weather by then? Ha, I can’t have it both ways, can I? Perhaps this year I’ll hold a big family Thanksgiving get together.

Have you thought about your Thanksgiving plans yet?

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