Wasting Away Again

I missed several days of writing--one expected because of very early morning travel, and one because I had to reset passwords after Chrome updated.  Google wanted to do additional identity establishing, and the phone number that I used long ago when I set up my Google account was attached to a land line phone that we no longer have.  Happily, I was able to establish my identity by using my phone to go to the Google site to say, "Hi, it's really me!"  I'm happy that it was a relatively easy fix, but it still consumed my one window of time that I might have spent writing.

I was sad to hear of the death of Bill Richardson, who has done more than most of us will ever know about to free US citizens detained illegally.  I understand all the reasons why people might say that he intervened in areas where he didn't belong, but this article in The Washington Post said it best:  “'There was no person that Governor Richardson would not speak with if it held the promise of returning a person to freedom," Mickey Bergman, vice president of the Richardson Center and Richardson’s longtime collaborator on hostage cases, said in a statement Saturday. 'The world has lost a champion for those held unjustly abroad."”

I was also sad to hear about the death of Jimmy Buffet at age 76 (Richardson was 75; the mid-70's seems a really young age for white men of means to die).  While Buffet's music was not the first choice for me, through the years, I've had lots of family and friends choose his music to play when we gathered together, and his music and lyrics were so vast and varied and skilled.  He also seemed like a decent human, even as he made gobs and gobs of money.  As others have said, I never came across anyone who had a bad word to say about the man.  And that's rare, especially for people with such a public presence across the decades.

I'm not going to write a longer post today.  I'm getting error messages about Blogger being unable to save this writing and then it seems to have success.  I'm worried that I'll write something that will be lost forever.  Let me send some student e-mails about work due this week instead.