I am happy to report that my wife, Cheryl's, surgeries both went well this week. Monday was cardiovascular in preparation for yesterday's removal of a spinal tumor--reportedly, thank God, benign. I must also thank my niece Misty Faircloth for her heartfelt support and all the additional prayers during this grueling week. I never spent so many hours in a wheelchair. My heart goes out to all those who suffer so much more than I. I certainly reached my mobility limit this week. I was also happy to learn that while Memorial Hermann's IT department claims to not have Wi-Fi (they say they are working on it), it is there. That helped a lot with the waiting time. Cheryl's family has been very supportive in keeping me supplied with food and water, but I've been unable to find anyone to help change my bandage. I've tried every so-called charity organization and several churches. They always wished me the best of luck.

Though I've fallen behind in what I'd hoped to be a blogging discussion of things philosophical and controversial, I have found a new avenue of pursuit using Blogger's setup. It sounds simple to begin with; I wanted to get more of a Website experience from the available formats, and I seem to have found one. It began with my desire to publish an old sci-fi story of mine, but I figured I'd need a genuine Website to host the text and link to that. That ain't necessarily so. Blogger isn't designed to publish books, but there is a way. The initial instructions seem simple enough (there is even a sample template), but it is much, much more complicated than it first appears. I've invested about 20 hours this week exploring the potential and have suffered lots of frustration. Sometimes you just have to improvise, and sometimes you have to take leaps of faith in tinkering with the provided HTML. Fortunately I have 15 chapters to work with. I have 3 down and 12 to go. Each chapter is a post, so by project's end I'll have the basics figured out. Getting rid of the timestamps was tricky. Then there's the cross-links between chapters and the table of contents. The author of the how-to article makes a big deal about permalinks. Permalinks are written about everywhere, but I still don't grok 'em. I get the eebie-geebies every time I delete a line of code, and totally don't get it when I do that and nothing changes. Sometimes you get lucky. I got lucky tonight. I'm excited about the possibility of linking several Blogger modifications into a true Website. Btw, the novella I'm attempting to publish is no great shakes, but it's a good chunk of material to practice with. Oh, and one more thing about HTML, in case you didn't know, or are just curious. Right click on any Website and go down to and select "View Source" That is the raw data version of what the page looks like. Tim Berners-Lee, take a bow.