Tangled in the web

I wish I were, I wish I were, I wish I were an intuitive tecchie. I'm not. I spent far too much time solving problems on the web today. Somehow when I go to a site, having carefully checked to see what my password is, it still doesn't work. That was the case with PayPal this morning. I signed up for PayPal reluctantly. It was forbidden at TCU, and I'm leery of it. But I had no choice--it's required by my publisher. I never use it except to transfer royalty checks, but today I wanted to pay for a couple of guest blogs--long story, but it was a modest amount. PayPal was the only choice, so I tried to sign in. PayPal didn't recognize me, then it couldn't verify my information, then I had to figure out how to send them proof of my social security number--and the best I got was the resolution was "in progress." Meanwhile, I had spent far too much of the morning in the bowels of their system.
Then I discovered Pay Ahead or whatever it is--I could pay instantly and they'd bill me for reimbursement. That actually went pretty well and by then the system recognized me. If they want to be reimbursed, I do hope they'll continue to recognize me. I was able to put that matter aside, complete my tasks for the Long and Short Reviews 5th anniversary celebration, and move on to writing.
But first I tried to put a logo on my blog--ended up with it in the header, which is not at all where I wanted it. That took 20-30 minutes to figure out how to delete it from the header, add it to the sidebar, and move it around. But I'm proud to say it's accomplished--see if you can spot the new logo.
Then I went to fix lunch and found the kitchen TV had no signal. Called AT&T--15 minute wait time to talk to a support person, so I reluctantly went to the online support system and signed in for a live chat. Actually those are a big improvement for me, because I'm sure if I'd been talking to Piranti--wherever he was in India or whatever--I wouldn't have been able to understand him because of the combination of my hearing and his accented English. As it was, we got along quite well, but the whole problem-solving adventure took 20 or 30 minutes and involved many trips between the computer and the kitchen for me. Thanks, but I'd already had my exercise for the day. Piranti was helpful, courteous--agreed willingly to a break to let me bring the dogs in out of the heat and said how lucky the dogs are that I take care of them. Finally, with a suggestion from me, we solved the problem and voila! a picture on the TV!
Through all this, I didn't write the 2000 words I meant to this morning--only 758. So I figure I have to write 250 tonight to reach my minimum goal. But, yeah! I passed the 40,000 words point on my work-in-progress. It would be nice if I had a better idea of what was going to happen in the next 30,000 words, but I'm feeling a great sense of accomplishment. One reason that I didn't move the word count ahead that much this morning is that I had to do a lot of cleaning up--I'd said one thing and done another, and I had to fix that.
Dogs are in, sky is cloudy (pray for rain) and it's nap time. I'm feeling good enough about the day that I can take a nap with a clear conscience.