Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Just one of those days

One of those da da da days....... I can't remember the words although the music is clear enough in my head.

I woke up later than usual but did not think much of it. Played with the fuzzies and generally took my time getting the morning chores done. Then I went online to get my mail and the speed demon must have taken over. I had a lot of mail, good mail, interesting mail, orders and communications and messages. I like emailing with people all over the country and beyond. It is one of the perks I enjoy most about this business.

Then I got an email from Deidre (thank you) telling me that after trying to unsuccessfully order Chocolate batts she was not returned to my website. Sounded like two problems-- the add to cart button and the return to my website director. One I knew I could fix quickly. I went onto paypal and made another add to cart button for the batts. OK! so far so good. Then I wrote my sister asking her to test out my shopping cart.

So you want to know why I couldn't do that myself? I have tried but I am not allowed to send myself money through paypal. Myveryownsister has become my tester and consultant in these matters. She wrote back saying, "uh oh". She was not redirected to my thank you page as promised but was instead sent to an error page. They are so annoying.

OK so I went back into paypal and checked my settings. Looked good and correct to me. sigh..... Next was to contact a techie at Paypal. This I knew could take a while and sure enough it took way over an hour. He was very nice, patient and good at explaining things. He checked several items, had me change one setting, checked again, asked more questions, put me on hold, did something else, put me on hold, came back with a question, put me on hold and then asked me to buy something from my website. I told him I couldn't do that but he explained that I could with a credit card that was not listed with them. Do you have any idea just how long that took? I am so spoiled with Paypal.

We went through the whole thing from adding the item to the shopping cart through the credit card stuff. Then we both saw that we were not redirected back to my website but got an error page. Only this time it said. Error--no such page found. thanks.html ooooooh I said. My thank you page is named thankyou.html and I know my paypal setting is to that as well. He then had me look at the code for one of my add to cart buttons. Sure enough the html said to go to thanks.html. Oh my gosh. oh my gosh. I have 49 pages on my website. Most of them have way more than one add to cart button. oh my gosh.

OK -- time for either a stiff drink or a lie down. No, it was only 1pm. I realized I had not eaten any food yet today. So I made myself get off the internet, put the cell on charge, and go have a cuppa tea and a bagel. I tried to breathe and be calm. I managed for about 20 minutes, then found myself right back on the computer but with an idea. A possibly good idea.

What if I changed the URL of the thankyou.html to thanks.html? Well, that would only work if the majority of the add to cart buttons were directed to thanks.html. So I checked a few key pages and saw that they were. Now we were were getting somewhere. I merely had to change settings in paypal and then check each and every add to cart button on my website. However this was really less work than I thought before lunch, as I needed to reput only the pages that had thankyou.html in them. I checked every page, every single page. I could not believe I was doing that. Today was 20 cent listing day on eBay. I was supposed to be listing and then doing shipping. I was supposed to be restocking fiber. I was supposed to be dyeing up orders. Oh well....... This was apriori and needed doing now.

OK-- breathe. While I was checking and rechecking I realized that very few customers have been redirected in the last however many months (Could it be years?). That was so sad but now corrected, I hoped. When I had it all done, I asked my sister to check again.
She emailed back with success!!!! YES! Hurray and halelujah! And tonight was Knitting Night. I could look forward to excellent down time.

Wednesday nights are for knitting. A few friends have sacred knitting night from 6 - 9 at Wegmans. We meet, eat, knit and exchange news and views and help each other with any knitting snafus. I felt a bit better that both Ruth and Carol had difficult days and proceeded to knit on the Helmet Liner. I am so impressed with the rigidity of the instructions. They did not start out rigid but evidently the army refused some liners and said they must be just exactly so. Just so translates into only one head size of strict proportions and colors. Someone asked me if the army takes in soldiers by measuring heads? May be so. I don't know but do wonder what people with smaller or larger heads do. Does their helmet wobble around or sit on the top of their heads? Do they squish their brains into them?

Anyway I completed the 6 inches of 2 x 2 neck ribbing and started the head part. That is a bit tricky but doable and actually is interesting in design. That's the part where the face sticks out. It is all circular knitting which suited me just fine tonight as I needed some repetitive simple knitting to help me relax. I am using magic loop which I find a bit tricky to start with but then it works so fine. I changed to number 8 needles, as instructed, letting the number 6's dangle as instructed, but found I was accidentally picking up the wrong needle. Ruth suggested I take off the sixes and replace then with end caps. Too clever.


Onward to the casting on of 59 more stitches, joining and knitting 4 inches and then decreasing for the back of the head. Simple right? I kept having trouble with the magic loop and just could not figure out why. It would not work smoothly as it usually does. Ruth took the knitting, moved the stitches around and showed me this.



Can you see it? You know the "join without twisting" instructions?

I bid you fond good night. Maybe tomorrow I will see my way to tinking back. Not now, not today.

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