It looks like Blogger has fixed its posting tool...

"White Noise" was published at 7 o'clock this morning. It is logging quite a lot of "Did Not Find"s, and no one has found it yet. My instinct is to post hints, but Phillip wants to watch the DNFs. As I recall, this is how "Get Christie, Love" started out.

Yoga class yesterday was excellent. Lisa started off with a pop quiz: "What are the three A's of Anusara Yoga?" I got two of them: "Attitude" and "Alignment." I couldn't remember "Action."

I read an interesting piece in the latest issue of The Sun. It was about a man who climbs steep mountains by walking backwards. That way, he focuses on how far he's come, rather than how far he has to go. I was thinking about that in yoga class yesterday. I've come a long way.

Phillip came up with the location for our latest cache hide. It's a spot we're both familiar with. Our first and second caches - "1st Hill, First Cache" and "Get Christie, Love" - have frequently gotten comments in finders' logs about being less than pristine city locations. Phillip and I joke about "Sugar Glider Sweathop's 'Meet The Homeless' tour." Mostly, though, all five of our caches have gotten good comments. ("The Girls" still has only one finder, due to its remote location.)

This latest cache was chosen specifically because it is such an ugly location. Phillip came up with the name "White Noise," because of the constant noise of the freeway overhead. We scouted out a suitable hiding spot long ago - weeks before our trip to the ocean. The problem, though, was that Phillip wanted to make it a puzzle cache and neither one of us could come up with a suitable puzzle for it. The idea died out.

Then Phillip revived the idea this week. He suggested that we come up with some sort of puzzle that could be solved without researching anything. I had another suggestion, though. I've been feeling that all of the caches that have been hidden in our area lately have been puzzle caches, and I've been feeling the need for a new, traditional geocache hide - what if we made "White Noise" a traditional cache? Phillip agreed, and we started to work on the cache container, log sheet, and "First To Find" certificate.

I came up with another suggestion yesterday afternoon: That we dedicate this cache to The Osaka Monorail - the longest monorail in the world - without explaining the reference to the ugliness of the freeway overhead. Phillip agreed to that, too.

We both had today off, for Veterans' Day, so we went out this morning and hid "White Noise." We posted it at 10:44 this morning, and are awaiting its approval.

I remember a time when I could go club-hopping two or three times a week, and keep going. Yesterday evening, it was two black russians, an after-breakfast playtime with Gladden, and I was sound asleep before nine.

Phillip and I had a good time yesterday evening. The music wasn't a style I normally like, but it was performed well, and I enjoyed it. Light jazz piano with vocals - Broadway and Tin Pan Alley standards. For some reason, it put me in the mood for some Tom Waits. (Too bad I was too out of it when we got home to put a Tom Waits CD on the stereo.)

As I write this, the election results are being announced on Northwest Cable News. After being approved four times, the Seattle Monorail Project has been rejected. It's the way I voted, but it still makes me very sad.

The song stuck in my head this morning, for no apparent reason, is "Baby, Stop Crying" by Bob Dylan.

Meanwhile, as I was waiting for the bus in front of Hot Topic, I suddenly remembered a dream I had earlier this morning. There's a t-shirt on display at Hot Topic (this isn't the dream yet) that I like a lot. (Never mind that it's a girl's t-shirt.) It's bright red and on it, Emily the Strange is aiming a slingshot directly at the viewer. I like Emily the Strange. So, in the dream, Phillip came home with an Emily the Strange t-shirt that he bought for himself. He was very proud of his purchase, so I took him up to Hot Topic and showed him the slingshot Emily t-shirt, and he reluctantly agreed that it was much better than the design he'd bought. That's all I remember of the dream.

What I wanted to write about, before I got detoured by the posting problem with Blogger, was the election.

Sunday afternoon, after some geocaching, Phillip and I completed our absentee ballots. There were a couple of easy answer initiatives on the ballot: yes on the public smoking ban, no on repealing the gasoline tax. The toughest one for me was the Seattle monorail - probably the toughest political decision I've faced in years.

I still think a cross-city monorail is the best traffic solution for Seattle. I voted no on this truncated, one-lane, bare station design that's still going to take 50 years to pay for. I still support a monorail, but I'm not supporting this monorail. I'm still not sure if I made the right decision.

Here are the results of my Blog This! experiments. Blog This!, which is a Blogger tool designed to capture the URL of the web page you're visiting, and then write a post to go along with it, no longer captures the URL. (It's been a while since I've used it, so I don't know exactly when it stopped doing what it's intended to do.) It does, however, allow me to write a post, publish it, and have it actually show up on this blog.

Then, after that post has been published, I can go into the Blogger web site and see the post. I can go into the post editor and edit my post - but - as soon as I click the Publish button, all the text disappears, and nothing gets published. The text I wrote and published with Blog This! remains, without the editing.

I can tell that Blogger has done some system improvements this weekend, because now it no longer works correctly with Opera. It happens every time Blogger improves its system. To their credit, however, they usually do fix the problem eventually - after telling me that they don't support Opera because few people use it. (Chicken-and-egg thing, I say.)

This time, it's a pretty major problem. When I click the Publish Post button, all the text in my post disappears and I end up with a blank post in my blog - a date and a time, and nothing between them.

Until Blogger fixes the problem, I have a few ways to work around the issue. 1) I could use Internet Explorer at home, like I did with the previous post. I did that, however, just to see if it would work. It is the least desirable option. I always feel like I'm risking the security of our computer with IE. (As a side note, I was reminded of how much faster Opera is than IE.) 2) I could write the posts here at work, as I am doing with this post. 3) I could write the posts at home in Wordpad, email them to myself at work, and paste them into a post here at work. 4) This is something I thought of on my ride into work, so I don't know if it would work - I wonder if the problem exists with the "Blog This" tool.