My Christmas Day - was Well, Different

Unless you have hidden your head under a blanket with your ears stopped up, you know that much of the USA and Canada had lots of snowfalls, deep freeze temperatures, and for all I know, you may have found yourself or your family stuck in an airport with flights cancelled. Yikes! What a Christmas, eh?

Well, in my case, my plans were simple; I would go to church in the morning, then go visit my friend in a nursing home and take her a turkey meal complete with a big piece of my butternut torte for dessert, and then I'd go home and have a light lunch and then a nap, before it would be time to go to the home of the batchlor who had insisted that he wanted our usually gathering of singles who had no home to go to - at his apartment.

I like leftover turkey for the week after Christmas, so I'd made a full Christmas meal and if our host phoned to say his turkey had not turned out, I could bring enough for everyone and 'Save the Day.'

There was no fresh snowfall on Christmas Eve when I got home from church, so I was surprised to find I had to shove away a snowdrift when I tried to get out the back door to drive to church in the morning!

The path through the garden was knee-deep in fresh snow! So I grabbed my light-weight aluminum shovel to use for a cane, and I waded down through that deep path. I was sure I didn't have time to shovel it clear, and now I was convinced I'd have to shovel outside my gate before I could back out.

I stared as I unlocked the gate. A big truck had been by on the alley, and the tracks were about 8 inches deep. A drift on the other side - where I usually back to when about to leave was close to 3 feet deep! I took to shoveling snow with energy!

But I didn't have half the space done in front of my gate - up to the alley tracks, when I stopped to pant and consider the situation. Even if I shoveled all morning, - well, I didn't have that kind of strength or stamina. Secondly, this was Christmas Day. The one day of the year that the restaurant is closed all day. Otherwise, the man with whom they had a contract for clearing the parking lot with his bobcat would be around in an hour or two, and he might clear the alley also.

I concluded that I better give up and go in to phone the church and email a few people who expected me to be there for my volunteer work, that I would be watching the LIVE video service online.

After lunch I decided that I was rested now, I could go out and shovel the path through the garden, and then I'd be able - hopefully - to leave later for our Christmas meal at Lynn's place.

When done, I came in utterly exhausted again, and not convinced that I could really leave without spinning my wheels in the alley. So I called Lynn to say I was sorry, but I couldn't come.

He said he could come get me about 4 pm.

I had a nap. Then looked out the front porch door and saw that there was a snow drift on the steps and the whole path to the city sidewalk was filled in. Deeper than my boots. So I bundled up again, and went out for my third shoveling spell!

While I was sitting around inside waiting for my ride I realized that the distance from the city sidewalk to the street was also deeper than my boots. So... yes, I went out a 4th time to shovel that distance too. I came in convinced that I was going to be super-duper sick on Monday.

Lynn finally arrived at 5 pm, and it turned out he had got stuck at the intersection at the west end of my block. He didn't say how he got out of that problem.

So we had a late, but decent Christmas meal after 6 pm. and Lynn brought me and another guest home about 8 pm. I went to bed feeling very, very spent.

I slept in by two hours the next morning, but otherwise was fine - which really puzzled me.

<*> TIPS & SOLUTIONS: <*>

If a Website Serves Up a "Security Warning" - Do Not Panic

I've been explaining this three times in the last two days to ministry clients for whom I built a website. This may not be your case, but if you run into it, here's the explaination. Plus options.

It used to be - a few years ago - that website owners had to pay over $100/yr to get special security steps to be taken to protect their websites. Then at some point a few years back, they decided to make this mandatory, but also offer it as a free service from the hosting service to the website owner. There was really nothing for them to do any more.

If you read the back-end of your site, or in the cPanel (controls area) of a site, you will find a link to SSL/TLS status.

Click on that and you will see whether your security certificate has been renewed yet not not. I think a lot of them were to expire on Dec/30th. But the staff may not all have got to work on Friday, and so they fell behind doing this auto renew. click.

But if you have access to your cPanel, you can do this yourself. It only takes 30 seconds.

However, browsers like Firefox, etc. remember the last time you visited that site, and saw thw warning, and so without fetching the site page fresh, they just serve up that warning page again. And again. And again!

The easiest answer is to hit the refresh icon on the browser which forces the browser to go get a fresh page from that site or URL instead of serving an old one.

If that doesn't clear things up. I find that rebooting the computer will do it. But pause for about 30 seconds before you let it boot up again, or the memory the browser has for that site will still be there, and you still get that warning.

Of course, if you are not the owner of the site, but you know who is, you might try to reach them by phone and suggest that they go hit the button for "forced Auto renew" in their cPanel or Control panel (it has different names with some companies). In about 30 seconds all the lines for that site turn green and that's all to do.

But website owners should do this as soon as possible so they don't lose angry customers through this frustration.

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