So Mom was having a crisis. . .

And, as I’m sure Daddy would have said, “When Mom has a crisis, we all have a crisis!”

It all started when Mom decided to downgrade her WordPress plan for the blog. For several years she’d had the “Business” plan, because she was going to try to sell doll clothes, and then digital downloads of our Foster and Panda stories. It was all part of the “Debra Kay’s Online Finger Puppet Emporium” dream. But, since none of that really materialized, she started thinking that maybe she should go back to the “Premium” plan to save money. Why pay for services you’re not using, right? It was time to renew anyway, so she thought this would be a good time to do it.

She contacted the WordPress “live chat” person, who was very nice, and they walked her through all the steps to downgrade to her previous plan. Let me tell you right now that it’s a lot easier to upgrade than it is to downgrade. Let me make it a little clearer: don’t try this at home! After a while, she had followed all the steps and our blog had been reset back to the way it was in March of 2019, right before she had gone on the business plan. But there was a slight problem.

Along with the color scheme and background designs being set back to 2019, so were the blog posts! Yes, you read that right. All of our posts from March 2019 until now were missing! (You can see Panda having a time of travail in the hallway). Mom was about ready to cry, but she went back on the live chat and they said they were in the process of loading up all of our content, and that it would just take a while.

There was nothing to be done but go to bed. Mom kept checking on her phone to see if the posts had loaded up yet. Meanwhile the live chat had closed down and there was only the “Email us” option. Turns out, the Premium plan has live chat 24/7 from Monday through Friday, while the Business plan has it on weekends too. So, since she had downgraded to Premium on Friday, at midnight her “coach turned into a pumpkin” and she could only email her questions to tech support. And she would have to wait until morning for a reply.

By the second day, she realized that, while the posts were back, the photos were not. There were empty boxes where the photos should have been. There were only gray boxes instead of photos in her media gallery, when she looked on her phone or iPad. When she looked on her laptop, the photos showed up, but they were out of order. That’s when we noticed the new vitamins she bought. We didn’t know there was a Vitamin M, but I guess you learn something new every day. They seemed to be calming her down a little bit, so that was a good thing. She also made popcorn, which she says is comfort food. Who knew?

Meanwhile, or stats were booming. But it was because Mom and Aunt Gail were constantly checking the blog to see if the photos were back. For some reason, even though she was signed into WordPress, every time Mom would check the blog it would record as an outside view, which made it that much worse. The tech support people did email her with some answers, but our photos were still missing.

To be honest, Panda and I we were getting a bit concerned. Try as we might, we couldn’t figure out an answer to our dilemma. The only place anyone seemed to be able to see the blog correctly was on mom’s laptop. It wasn’t working on Christy’s laptop, and it wasn’t working on anyone’s mobile devices. Mom was starting to wonder if the whole blog was going to be ruined forever. Four years of stories and photos lost in cyberspace? It was enough to make her take a nap and think about it later. She “Googled” a lot of different things and found some possible causes and fixes, but she was afraid to try them in case it made everything worse. The only thing to do was to wait till Monday when the live chat would open back up for the people on Premium plan.

But this morning, the photos were back, not only on our laptop, but on everyone’s mobile devices as well. Needless to say, we feel so much better now! We also may eventually upgrade back to the Business plan, but if we do, we’ll do it very carefully.

Meanwhile, there just may be more adventure awaiting us in Mexico . . .