The Sunday Post is hosted by the wonderful Kimba, the Caffeinated Book Reviewer. It’s a chance to share news, recap the past week, take a look ahead, and showcase our new treasures—I mean books!
My Week
After four whole days of nailbiting apprehension, my blog is back! Huzzah!
On Friday, I updated a plugin and lost the entire blog, including my my admin screen, to the “white screen of death” — AKA an http 500 error. In a panic, I immediately contacted tech support at my webhost to see if we could recover it. Alas, the automatic backups I thought I had in place were only on my business site (my primary site), not on the blog (a secondary site included in my hosting package.) So it wasn’t as easy as rolling in a backup. Instead, my webhost had to contract the work out to some WordPress developers to see if they could get it back. Four days and $80 later, we’re finally up and running.
Lesson learned; I will be making regular backups from now on! Kimberly at Caffeinated Book Reviewer recommended I try VaultPress, a subscription service/plugin that will automatically backup a site. It looks good, so I plan to subscribe immediately. Meanwhile, I apologize to everyone who tried to visit the blog while it was down.
OK, my time is tight today and all week, so here’s the TL:DR rundown of the rest of last week and the coming week: indexing, rehearsals, and stealing an hour here and there to read, spin, knit, and/or watch Eureka. Other than the blog crash, it was a good but busy week.
I hope you all have a wonderful week. Back up those blogs!!!
Last Week on the Blog
- Sunday Post –3/03/2019
- #6degrees: from The Arsonist to His Burial Too
- WIP Wednesday – 3/06/15
- The Blog is Back! (belated Sunday Post –3/10/2019) – this post
Upcoming on the Blog
- Top Ten Tuesday – very tentative (and will be late even if I have time to do one)
- WIP Wednesday – very tentative
- reviews to be determined
- News & Notes – 3/16/2019
- Sunday Post –3/17/2019
What I’m Reading/Watching
Reading: I finished Thornbound, A Stash of Her Own edited by knitter Clara Parkes, and an overdue ARC, Death and Daisies (Amanda Flower), which I started a month or more ago, but was then distracted by other books. I also read Born in Shame, which apparently I had read before but completely forgotten.
I’ve been really craving fantasy recently, so I decided to go back and reread the first two Green Rider books before reading the next four in the series (assuming I don’t get distracted again. I like them, but they’re long and getting longer.) I finished Green Rider on Sunday and started First Rider’s Call on Monday.
Listening to: Something Wonderful, a history of Rodgers and Hammerstein and their musicals. I’m past the first section on their lives pre-collaboration. I thoroughly enjoyed the chapter on Oklahoma!, and realized that I really need to see Carousel, because I’ve never seen it, although I’m familiar with and have even sung some of the music. I’ve never seen Allegro, either. They wrote it after Carousel, and it didn’t do as well as either of the previous shows. Since this is the audiobook version, it would have been a natural fit to include at least snippets of all the e songs discussed in the book, but I assume that copyright made that too expensive. So Mr. Bookwyrm ripped all the shows we have recordings of; I’ve put them in my iTunes so I can stop and listen to the music as I go along.
Watching: We also watched several more episodes of Eureka, Season 2. I’m really hooked on this show! It’s fun, quirky, mostly light (but there are serious moments that can wrench your heart), and the advanced science is endearingly unlikely. Plus, you can be sure that most of the time, things will work out all right. Well, for the series regulars, anyway. Guest stars have a 50/50 chance of being redshirted in one way or another. Actually, 50/50 might be generous; I think their chances of surviving more than a few episodes are pretty low.
New Additions to the Hoard (past 2 weeks)
Cover links take you to Goodreads.
Purchased in Print
A Study in Honor is the first book in a series of genderbent Sherlock Holmes-inspired novels set in a near-future America in the midst of the New Civil War. Janet Watson, an Army surgeon discharged and jobless after losing her right forearm in the war, ends up rooming with Sara Holmes, an enigmatic government agent. Both are queer women of color (who are not together in a romantic sense); when you add in Janet’s disability and PTSD, the book gains a lot of points for diverse representation. On the other hand, the fact that it’s written by a white woman concerns me: I hope she had plenty of sensitivity readers, and I wish the book had been written by an #ownvoices writer. But one of the reviews mentions that the editor is a black woman, and the writer thanks Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl for their workshop on Writing the Other, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that the author has at least done her best to be sensitive in her portrayals of the characters.
Purchased in Audible or Audiobook CD
Purchased for Kindle
All of these were on sale except First Rider’s Call. I own the hardcover, but wanted a copy of the Kindle for reading in the dark. As for A Wrinkle in Time, of course I have read it (10 or 15 times at least!), but I like having Kindle versions of my favorite books.
Lark
So glad your blog is fixed and back up and running!!! I missed it. 🙂
Lark_Bookwyrm
Thank you! That’s nice to hear. I missed it, too. And missed visiting everyone, as I was either working or rehearsing all weekend…
Katherine @ I Wish I Lived in a Library
So glad to see you back! I wondered where you were Sunday at first until I remembered seeing your post. Glad you were able to get everything back but how stressful!
Lark_Bookwyrm
I tried to get the word out via Instagram and Facebook, once I knew it might be down for days. I was so upset, I think I forgot Twitter. But yay! They were able to restore it.
Angela
So glad you were able to get it all figured out!
Lark_Bookwyrm
Whew, me too!
Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer
*happy dance* I am so happy you are up and running with nothing lost. Those dang plugins! Always do a backup before updating.
Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer recently posted…A Dangerous Collaboration by Deanna Raybourn
Lark_Bookwyrm
Yup! Lesson learned. And I’ll be adding VaultPress. Sounds like it’s well worth the expense, and cheaper than my webhost charges for adding auto-backups to my blog site. (Because my business site is primary, the free auto-backup is on it.)
Anne - Books of My Heart
Wow glad you got it sorted. That is so frustrating when something happens. I hope the rest of the week goes well with things more normal after this.
Anne – Books of My Heart recently posted…Alien Mischief by Cara Bristol
Lark_Bookwyrm
Thank you, Anne! It was such a relief. I had a manual backup from 2017, but was worried I was going to lose everything from the last 2 years.
RO
My goodness, that had to have been super stressful, and thank goodness everything in back and functional. I watched the movie a Wrinkle in Time, and it wasn’t one of my faves, but hopefully the book is much better. Hope you get a chance to relax this weekend! Hugs…RO
Lark_Bookwyrm
It was… nervewracking. I’m so glad it worked out all right in the end.
A Wrinkle in Time was one of my favorite books in from about 5th grade right through high school. I still reread it every four or five years. Yes, it’s good!