Alas, I have just received a sad, sad message from WordPress.com.
They are insisting I have used my upload quota and cannot add any photographs to this blog.
HELP! Oh no!
I await, breathlessly, the verdict from the Support Fellas and Dames at this site.
The truth of the matter is that I paid them a whopping–OK, let me check in the files–$19.97 via VISA Credit Card–on August 1st for five delightful gigabytes of space. Enough to last about a year, depending on how carried away your blogger becomes with her photographic zeal.
Please, WordPress, answer me quickly and let us fix this Mess!
The photos are considering rebelling, sitting there so patiently in their folders.
I could paint many word-pictures for you instead, but never mind.
I am sure by tomorrow–at the latest–this little difficulty shall be mightily resolved and I’ll be writing the Tech guy a love note thanking him for his prompt and efficient service.
Since we have no photos to entertain us, let’s play a little game.
Here is your question: When was the last time you were dealt with one of life’s little challenges and you turned it around to your advantage, toward the positive, without wallowing in nervousness or suffering or grief?
C’mon, I know you do it all the time.
When were you able to view a pressing situation from a positive light?
I eagerly await your replies.
Lake Superior Spirit 
When I flew to San Diego they were over-booked, I volunteered to take the next flight and received a free ticket as a thank you. Proof positive that lemons make mighty tasty lemonade 🙂
You are a great lemonade maker, Laurie. Nice free ticket!
And by the way, what do you MEAN we have a photo upload quota?! I don’t post as many photographs as you, but I sure do post a lot. Who do I pay, and when do I pay it? No one from WordPress has ever even hinted to me about this quota stuff….
Laurie, you get 3 GB of space with WordPress blog. After you’ve used that, you buy 5 GB for $20. It’s a steal, I think. I would pay more than this to be able to post so many pics. 🙂
I don’t have an answer to your game question off the top of my head (I’ll think about it and get back to ya!) but for a temporary photo solution, that’s free, I have two answers for you. Picasa Web albums by Google has 1024 free MB of storage and Flickr.com allows 200 free photos. Both of them have HTML code you can paste into your blog, which takes up no storage space on WordPress. Email me if you’d like more detail of how to do it!
Karma, I’m going to continue buying my $20 worth of space per year. I don’t mind doing it all. I don’t know why there was this clerical glitch, but am sure it will be straightened out soon. Sounds like you’ve got something good working for you. I’ll let you know if I ever decide to change and need advice. You’re a sweetie!
You just paid them on August 1st of this year? What I have decided to do is get a pro Flickr account (for $25/year) – unlimited uploads, full resolution images. I have disabled downloading/saving of my images to discourage stealing (I know, if someone is determined, it’s impossible to stop them). Then, I just embed the HTML code into my post to link to my images so that I’m not uploading photos to WP anymore. Works beautifully!! Flickr also serves as my off-site image backup. My life challenges are usually pretty intense, too much to get into here. I just keep telling myself, “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger!”
Holly, I love how everyone has figured out this issue in their own way and come up with really good solutions. I really like just buying the $20 every year here at WordPress. Some day I might change…but not yet. Just waiting for the clerical mistake to be fixed. (P.S. like your attitude–whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Very cool.)
Kathy, although I always appreciated having the full size photos to peruse and sometimes even print to hang over my desk, you are the only person I follow that posts full size pictures. I can understand the ones that have universal artistic value, but how many people will want a full size picture of the dishes in your sink? Cut the picture size that you upload to 20 percent. They will look fine in your blog and if someone really wants a copy, let them contact you. Remember “Size counts”.
John, I love my full sized photos. I don’t mind paying $20 a year to buy more gigabytes. I make the photos that big because I’m visually challenged and don’t really appreciate photos unless they are big. (And I like being different from everybody else and following my own Drummer wherever she may lead.)
Kathy – It does sound like a great deal! Another question… will I receive some type of “notice” from WordPress BEFORE I run out of room? I’d rather not find out as I’m pushing the “publish” button.
Indeed, you shall. You can also determine how much space you have left as you’re uploading a pic. When you press the upload photo button it will say something like “You’ve used 2 MB of your 3 GB’s” or something like that. Unfortunately, I have no clue what a MB or GB is, but I do keep track. A few weeks before you run out, they start sending love notes to renew. 🙂
Kathy – that’s fantastic to know, thank you. And the next time I upload a photo I’ll be on the lookout 🙂
hmmm…well. Back to the ‘what do you do when life hands you a challenge’ question, as I don’t fully understand all the gigabytes stuff… So my thinking is that when you can’t upload a photo, for whatever reason, correct or incorrect, that’s a chance to sharpen your word power…and though I would miss the photos…a lot…I would be just as pleased to read an essay by you…
Of course a written essay is not always what’s ready to be posted…but then again…knowing you, if you dug around a little you’d find something! Just like you did! 🙂
You got it, Dawn! I actually felt secret delight being able to write an essay without photos! (The writing part did anyway. The photographer part was slighted. LOL.) I really didn’t have time before dinner to plot a grand essay, though, so decided a “slice of life” must be enough for this evening. Glad you don’t understand the gigabyte stuff either.
Two years ago when I retired, my daughter moved back home from England and brought her English Staffordshire Terrier cross dog with her. I lived in Ontario. Ontario has legislation banning any “pit bull” type dogs. Apparently her dog was a pit bull type dog. So we picked up and moved to a province that judges dogs based on individual behaviour rather than “racial profiling”. I now live in Nova Scotia and love it here. I love being near the ocean. I love the slower pace of life. I’m so glad we moved here.
Sybil, did you ever read my blog about my experience with racial profiling of pit bulls? https://upwoods.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/kissed-by-a-pit-bull/
so glad you love Nova Scotia. I would like to visit there some day. Sounds like you created a very positive situation out of something very challenging.
Wellllll – here’s what I’m going to do. I’m behind on blog reading, so I’ll just read the former blog post (which I notice has photos). How’s that for making lemonade? Good Luck with the problem, Kathy – hope they fix it soon. (Wow – that’s a lot of money!!!)
I would like to have a glass of lemonade right now, Barb. Preferably with you. **smile** P.S. do you really think $20 per year is a lot of money? I feel like it’s very little to have such a blast day after day.
Oh no! Hope they fix it asap! Surely there’s no way you’ve uploaded 5GB of pictures since August?!
I resize my pictures before uploading, and they’re really small, so I’m hoping I won’t have to deal with this anytime soon!
Ms Click! You are famous! I just saw your Italian car blog on Freshly Pressed! Way to go, girlfriend. There is no way I uploaded 5 GB of pics since August. After I paid, they never adjusted the GB–they stayed the same as before. Alas. Sounds like you’ve got a good system working, so you probably won’t have to deal with this.
Discovered something after having just talked with you about being a “words” person and kind of skipping over the pictures at first blush; then going back to look at them after reading the blog. I MISS the pictures … or, at least, YOUR pictures! And you can post tons more of things like a messing kitchen sink …. I’m in love with “homey” photos, apparently. Hope things are being resolved in Upload Land 🙂
Can’t see to get the “Reply” to work … ummm, that would be “messy” kitchen sink, although there’s nothing better than a kitchen sink that messes around … Lol
Susan D, ha ha, funny that you should say that about the pics. I am missing the photos, too! And I love pics of messy sinks just because the eye sometimes wants to skip over it and admire hillsides and red leaves and nature’s beauty. But the little things of life–a sinkful of messy dishes–can be an incredible gift if we truly, truly look at it and be present with it.
As for things being resolved in Upload Land–I have not heard a reply back to my two emails to the support team. Am just going to take a break and not worry about it. Lots of other things to do–and maybe the Universe is nudging and saying, “Perfect time for a blogging break.”
See ya soon, dear lady.
Hey Kathy. Life just keeps on throwing stuff at us all. At this moment I must keep the Fn button depressed otherwise the keyboard misbehaves and I could scream but I don’t because it ain’t worth it. I can see why my poem helped this morn. Oh and I love your photos $x is definitely worth it ! Claire
sorry to hear about your keyboard problem, Claire. Hope it is fixed soon. I am actually enjoying this mini-break from blogging, but already looking forward to posting pictures again. Thank you.
Hi Kathy. What a great question! Since we are new “blog friends” you may not know this, but I am an artist. Until last spring, I had my painting studio in the basement of my mother’s house, across the street from me. Perfect arrangement. Well, due to health and memory issues I had to move my mother in with me and we no longer have the house across the street. Which means I no longer have a place to paint.
I can’t really afford to rent a studio space elsewhere and my house is pretty small. And painting is really very messy (at least when I am doing it…flinging paint everywhere). For the first few months I did nothing creative (and yes, there was some woe-is-me going on, too), but eventually I started feeling like I was losing my mind. I HAD to do something. So I started writing and illustrating a story. (I’ve always loved writing, too.) Writing takes no space, really. And drawing is not like painting; I can do it at my drafting table in the corner of my home office. It’s also not messy (which makes the other members of my household happy). And after I draw the illustrations, I scan them and then paint them digitally, on my computer.
Problem solved. I am sure I will have a painting studio again someday, but in the meantime, I can’t believe how much fun this new project is.
p.s. looking forward to your photos again!
Sean, that is a very cool story. You took a “negative” situation and turned it around into something really “positive”. AND you’re having fun! Thank you for sharing this. I will remember your story. (And also thinking about painting and flinging paint around.) Photos are coming again–see yesterday’s post for some of our autumn colors.
Well, that’s a conscious effort for me. I call it alchemy. When a serious injury prevented me from playing in the orchestra any longer, I took up drawing, painting and sculpting. I did, and still do, consider it a playful rebellion, lol, that I am going to create (music or art or writing) one way or another! Can’t keep a good Irish-woman down, heh!
Glad to hear you can’t keep an Irishwoman down. **smile** I have some Irish blood in me, so I’m counting on that. P.S. Love that you were able to turn things around. It’s a gift. I sometimes think of Christopher Reeve paralyzed and inspiring half the world.
The thing that popped up from my memory happened on a gloomy murky day several years ago, when I was checking out a few books from the library. I’ve always been highly sensitive to bright light. When the librarian started grumbling about the weather, I could only say that I loved the weather because I could be outside and drive around doing errands without squinting. She said she had never heard someone make lemonade out of lemons quite that way before. 🙂
I can relate to the Universe nudging you. Whenever our internet service is down I take it as a message to get a few chores done…
Nope, I’ve never heard that “lemonade” story before, Barbara. That’s wonderful! We should all remember–hey, we can be outside and not squint. **lol** It was actually times on Gaia that began to teach me to just relax when the computer went down. The Universe is simply nudging us elsewhere. Harder said than done, sometimes.
I wish I could come up with such a story. I’m not finding one now. There are challenges, to be sure, but it’s the nature of the challenges that brings forth my response to them, and they are challenges that keep me on a path–a place of balance–a middle ground. My response is to withstand tension and maintain the balance–not to give in to belief, despair, or cocooning in self-rightness. It keeps me quiet, and I guess I watch a lot of what happens in the world and just watch. I was reading a book review by Austin Carty of a new book by Peter Rollins, called “Insurrection: To Believe is Human, To Doubt Divine.” In the review, Carty evokes a quote from Emmerson that puts into words what a lot of my life has been about lately:
“This all reminds me of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Intellect”:
“God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, – you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, — most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.”
I think from now on I’ll blog once a week. That’s my new goal. Kathy, thank you for being such a support friend.
Martha, I like how you described this: My response is to withstand tension and maintain the balance. That sounds like a good response. It actually feels like a real nitty-gritty response that doesn’t turn too quickly away from what is arising. So glad that you’ll be blogging once a week. (And I think you’ve been a supportive friend, too. Look how long you’ve been reading the blog. At least since Juicing Days began!)
Oops! I mean, Kathy, thank you for being such a supportive friend! I misspelled it on the first try, and it is an important sentence. I want to make it a high-quality statement! 🙂
When I didn’t kick my husband in the shins last night for a passing remark he made. I surprised myself by laughing instead. Surprised a few other people too. lol!
Excellent, Robin. There you had the perfect opportunity to aim low and really hurt those shins–and instead–you aimed high and laughed. I salute you!