shot in the dark

Posted by admin | October 9, 2019

Jynx has diabetes and needs a shot of insulin twice a day. As I am the early riser in the family, it is my job to do the morning one. Often, I haven’t put on my glasses when I go downstairs to let the dogs and cat outside for their business. While they are all outside, I get Jynx’s breakfast ready. I also ready the shot.

The mornings have been getting longer and I hate turning on the light when I am just going to need it for a moment. I guess I’m just lazy. I’m also being a little frugal in not wanting to waste the little bit of electricity.

So, no glasses and no lights on when I go to inject Jynx. I’ve only managed to stick myself twice. Once was because I went in and then back out the other side of his skin tent, hitting me. The other time was he moved as I was going in and got my hand instead. The needle is so small, though, it didn’t faze me. I also didn’t depress the plunger into me during those incidents, so all is good. Except for the whole contamination of the needle thing.

At the Kansas Book Festival, I made a big play to get new subscribers on my newsletter. It seemed to go great and had a bunch of people wanting to be subscribers. Emails went out asking for the new people to confirm and then there was nothing. I was confused. Where were these seemingly energetic people jazzed about my stuff?

I tried to resend without a single acceptance. I then emailed them from outside the newsletter mailer software and got a few responses. Actually, I got several bounces (so the emails had typos), and then others saying they never got my emails. They checked their spam and only one person had an email in their spam. I’ve contacted the email senders and they suggested that my email address wasn’t a good one (this is my website one, matthew@olson777.com as they’ve complained about my gmail address from the very beginning), and gave me steps to fix it. I contacted my website people and they took care of things on their end. Sent another round of emails and still nothing. I then switched to my gmail and still haven’t gotten anything going. I’m so frustrated, I’ve switched my newsletter software going forward (actually starting with the October newsletter that went out on the first). Hopefully, nobody will be lost in this transition and I hope I don’t lose people in the future.

Sometimes a shot in the dark is warranted like with my newsletter. Most of the time, it’s just stupid, like with Jynx. To each their own.