Friday 14 February 2025: Valentine’s Day!

It’s Valentine’s Day today and we have roses and cards in the house. We don’t have red (Lancaster) roses in our house, we have white, Yorkshire roses. (I’m married to a Yorkshireman…) And this year we bought each other a bunch. Aww. I did take a picture, but it’s not a patch on this one I’ve used. The picture, not the flowers. The roses are lovely.

The plan yesterday was to get up, put real clothes on, run an errand, then come home, get changed, and start my day. I’ve been getting far too idle lately and it’s too easy to say I can’t be bothered. But another thing I decided to stop doing was playing games or surfing the internet first thing. So I got up, fed the garden birds, made myself my dirty cuppa, and read a daily newspaper instead.

What a mistake that was. I was still reading it at 11:30am. And there was me thinking it would save time normally wasted by doomscrolling Facebook for news stories (which is the main reason I use FB these days anyway). So I put it to one side and went to get dressed… (at 11:30am). But the poet was already on his way home for an afternoon of home-working, so I waited for him and we ran the errand together in his lunch break.  

When we got back I logged on to find that I’d been refused admission to 2 Facebook groups for failing to answer their questions.

Eh? I hadn’t even heard of either, let alone applied to join. In fact, I haven’t asked to join a group in ages. 

So I fired off messages to the 2 admins, one of whom seemed a bit sniffy that I hadn’t actually asked to join her group in the first place, and another message to FB reporting the issue. I was only letting the admins know in case they were inundated with other so-called applications to join their group. 

But apparently the sniffy one receives 25 – 30 requests every day to join. All genuine authors too. Well, good for them. I wonder how many have been genuine authors since 1985…

And what, pray, were these 2 groups? 

One was AI for writers and the other was for mothers (moms) who write.

Now, hands up anyone who can see me even searching for such groups…

Something was clearly amiss. So I changed my password then went to see what other groups I’d apparently applied to join. And I’d been accepted into one, been asked the questions in another, and a third was still pending. I promptly removed each and every request, and in the one I’d already been added to, I left and chose not to let anyone add me to the group again in the future.

Then it dawned on me: someone else was adding me to these groups that hold no interest for me whatsoever. How rude. And Facebook was letting them! There’s now no way to stop people adding you to groups unbidden. 

Yet another reason to wind down usage of said platform. I might ramp up the writing page but completely slow down the personal profile page, and lock it up as tightly as I can. And it’s already pretty tight. 

Once I’d fumed over and sorted that out, I finally settled down to work. I wrote and posted yesterday’s blog post, late, and I started today’s blog post. I did some Monkey Dust admin and some gig list admin. And I did some more editing.

And then the day was over again! Time’s flying far too quickly these days. And look, it’s Friday again already. Again. 

Today I must get some writing done, on The Haunted House Hotel and on The Ace of Swords, and I want to do more editing. 

We have a gig at the weekend. Have a good one, my friends.