good ol' days r gone ....

so remember i said a couple of days ago that my facebook fan page had disappeared along with all my facebook notes? well they never reappeared and so i had to reconstruct the fan page. which is fine.... but in the process i decided to reactivate my twitter account and then link the two and basically, i have decided that technology is just way too frustrating.

many years ago when i had a sewing business i was a beta tester for my local internet provider for websites. they wanted ordinary joes (or janes) like me to build their own websites. so i did. and it was quite nice and successful but it never had a shopping cart or a place to enter credit card info. however, it didn't need it because ppl could just email me from the clickable email link and lmk what they wanted and then send me their info. i'm sure it was frustrating to them -- maybe not so much -- idk. i could never do another website from scratch like that. i had an HTML Bible that i used to help me write the correct code for doing things like links, etc. and i've retained a bit of that and still own the book, so occasionally i can go back to research something i need to do on the blog. i really haven't used it much because the technology of places like facebook, twitter, and blogspot really doesn't require a whole lot of it.

but sometimes i want to do something and can't and its frustrating and makes me wish i'd taken a class at school or something. only they never offered this kind of stuff when i was in school because i went to school in the middle ages -- ha ha...

no really, i mean when i learned to touch type (now some of u r sitting there scratching ur heads wondering what touch typing is -- it is exactly as it sounds) we had typewriters (anyone remember those) and they weren't even electric (probably explains y i have carpel tunnel issues). one of the first jobs i had working as a secretary involved typing up psychological reports on an IBM magcard typewriter. "cutting and pasting" meant "programming" a stop in one card, so that it would eject the card at the right place so that u could insert the next card to put the "pasted" item on, then programming that card to eject so that u could put the first card back in and continue the printing out process. and heaven forbid if u mixed up the cards. it was not fun. prior to this technology, though, cutting and pasting truly meant -- cutting it out of one place and taping it into another and hoping when u went to the copy machine that the place where u taped it didn't leave a line on the copy. or it meant retyping the entire paper from beginning to end just to make sure things were in the right places. making "corrections" required u to either retype it, white it out with white-out (omygosh what was in that stuff) and basically, it was a pain.

the first "computer" i ever worked on was back in 1980 and it was an IBM displaywriter (would NOT be considered a computer by today's standards). the first computer i ever owned was a very very early Mac (see above photo of something similar to what i owned) that didn't even have a hard drive (don't ask). they make fish tanks out of them now and i believe there is one in the Smithsonian... when i moved to NH (eons ago) i worked at darmouth college and they were in the "computer age" but not what u would consider the computer age now, and u had to know certain code in order to get things to print out, move stuff around, etc., and we worked on machines called Diablos (u do know that's the word for devil in spanish don't u???). i'm sure they were aptly named because honestly, there were times when i truly felt like the devil was running the entire operation and i had no control over what was printed out. they did eventually move into the era of Macs and wasn't i a happy camper.

now we have computers that can print out DVDs and play music and make movies and mess around with photos and isn't it all so wonderful how easy we've made it? ha ha ....

i am pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things some things r easier to do than others, but some things r just more frustration than is necessary. gone r the days of taking a photo on a SLR film (what's that -- u can't even buy that stuff locally anymore) camera and taking it to the local photo shop (huh??) and having them process and print ur photos. coming home with a packet full of pictures and a sleeve full of negatives (what???) and if u needed more prints in different sizes u had to take the negatives back to the shop and wait for them to be printed (usually a couple of days to a week). now u take a photo with a digital camera, plug it into ur computer and bam u have instant pictures that u can print in all sorts of sizes and u get to print only the ones u like!! who'd have thunk it! but on one level its more frustrating because then u have to make sure u have a printer that has archival quality inks and papers and yeah let's not even go down this road.

sometimes i think we've just made more stress for ourselves by the continual upgrading of our technology. things that we thought would make our lives easier have just increased the need to "know more" about the technology behind it. and who has time for that -- idk. maybe i'm just waxing nostalgic for a simpler time ....

Raising the Faith

i have a facebook account. i've had it for eons. not as long as i have had a myspace (which, btw, i never look at anymore). i've written a zillion notes at my facebook. and i even set up a fan page for Angelic Adornments there. so imagine my surprise this afternoon when i went to upload some new photos to my fan page and discovered it no longer existed. and not only did it no longer exist, but all my notes were missing as well -- and who knows what else at this point. idk what the problem is and i can't get the higher ups at facebook to acknowledge my existence or the fact that some of my important items r missing. after much mucking through the different places to go to get "help" i finally sent them a message only to get a canned response about how they don't respond to individual messages but that they would be "looking into" my issues. how sweet.

normally i wouldn't get upset about this stuff. like the missing notes -- i've got all the important ones in files on my computer so its not like they couldn't be duplicated. but the fan page -- that's the pits. i have a link from my Etsy website to my fan page. there's a link at this blog page to my fan page. i would have to go back through zillions of photos to find all the ones that were posted on my fan page in order to recreate it. and then there is the question of the fans. i would lose them. mind there weren't a lot -- but still.....

as there isn't a whole lot more i can do about this, i have to "let it go" and let the higher ups deal with whatever the problem is. it reminds me about how there r a lot of things that i can do very little about and need to let papa god deal with them.

a couple of nights ago i was watching a live stream of a local church that we sometimes attend. during the service, someone called to say that a pastor from the west coast had collapsed during his service and was rushed to hospital. so we prayed. then later it was discovered that he had passed away and that ppl were going there to pray over him to raise him from the dead. having read some of the works of Smith Wigglesworth, i firmly believe that this is possible.

now before u go all postal on me -- this does happen in this day and age. it has been documented -- so its not something that can't happen. so we all prayed. and we kept in touch on facebook about what was happening. like how they had moved him to another room and that the glory was coming down and we should keep praying. and we were praying. but he did not arise and walk.

now some ppl would look at this and say well, god doesn't exist because if he did this man would certainly have been raised. but as someone reminded me -- did anyone ask papa god what he wanted to do with this man?? i'm not sure that anyone did. most of the ppl (and i have to admit that i was a bit of a lemming and just followed the higher ups here) saw that a man of god had been felled in the middle of a sermon before his time and knew that it was an opportunity for god to show his glory and bring the man back to life. which it was. but it begs the question: does our faith and trust in papa god stay strong even when prayers rn't answered the way we want them to be but the way that papa god sees as best??

i've had plenty of opportunities in the last 5 years to lose faith and trust in papa because prayers i made went seemingly unanswered. but i've also had many prayers answered and i've had many times when papa showed me his love when i wasn't expecting it. what i saw on sunday night/monday morning was a gathering of ppl of faith from all around the world, to pray fervently for a man to be raised from the dead and if nothing else, i saw their faith and trust in papa god and that made mine stronger. strange as that might sound. what i've come to realize is that my reality here on earth -- ie, what i see/hear, etc. -- is not always god's reality. so i have to trust that papa knows better than i in all circumstances and let go -- as hard as that sometimes is. papa god is in control and that gives me a real level of freedom -- freedom from worry, stress, the need to "fix it", etc. its another wonderful gift from papa god.