In Response to faithful ☺ readers…

Thanks to all who commented on the ultimate blog. I will respond to all here on the blog platform, rather than respond individually. As for the happy face, I am just inserting it to see how or if it posts to the website.

First, thank you all for posting your comments. I did not expect to hear all of the kind words and the passion.

My response is tardy, having taken a step back for a day or two. In doing so, I learned a few more things about the blog platform, which has been confusing you and frustrating me.

Each time someone posts a comment, I receive an email. As these arrived with your comments, I read each. The tricky part is that at the bottom of the email is a block that sometimes says “View Comment” and sometimes says “Approve comment;” I overlooked the “approve” on five or six comments; hence you apparently could not see your post, and I received your emails for help.

I don’t comprehend that differentiation between view comment and approve comment. I think that some of you signed on to follow the blog and some did not. Whether that has anything to do with it, I can only speculate.

Another frustration for me is that the format changes from what I submit and how it looks when posted. Sometimes the font or font-size changes, the pictures move around, and the colors of the fonts are not stable. This has caused me to just click the final okay without devoting more time to making corrections.

Thank you for letting me vent a bit in the above paragraph.

Previously, I mentioned that the statistics from the blog indicated to me that readership is low. I have just poked around some more and discovered the following:

Thursday at 9PM is the most popular time to read my postings. The record shows 63 postings, (though I think it is 66). Over the three years since I began posting, there have been 1,021 visitors and 3,324 views. I don’t know how to interpret that, unless they track multiple views by one visitor. I discovered that there are 23 who follow by email, including Era Mae McFarland Scarborough, although she has been silent since our 2014 reunion. The blog most viewed is the one posting the comments from our speaker at the April luncheon. After sending out an email blast indicating the contents of the blog, it was viewed 134 times! Maybe I was wrong in my conclusion that only a few look at the blog.

Moving on

Now that last blog included a back door opportunity, starting with this sentence: “So this is the end of the road for my blog, at least for now.” The “at least for now” left the door ajar. So, I will rethink my position and probably try to post maybe monthly.

Since I am rambling…

Because our esteemed classmate and English professor emeritus, Priscilla Weston Tate, reads these efforts, I do find myself attempting to be a bit more correct and avoid the easy phrases, hoping that I will not be graded on both expression of thought as well as content. I have always enjoyed the nuance of words and in the business world, for documents presented to me for signature, I was a stickler for the document to be grammatically correct and cogent. Alas, I have become lazy and failing to hone the written words.

Favorite words…

Do any of you have a favorite word? If you do, post it here. My favorite is penultimate. For years, I wondered what it meant and finally, about thirty years ago looked it up. It means next to last. Does anyone know the word for next-to-next-to-last (third from last)? That work is ante-penultimate! Some years back, I had just listened to a talk by the San Antonio Symphony conductor at that time. He had used penultimate several times in his talk, and I commented on it after. He is the one who defined ante-penultimate
for me. Ante refers to before, as opposed to anti, or against. Now if you have a favorite work, post it, as long as it is relatively clean. Although this is not a family publication, it is probably best not submit four letter words. Okay, I already know Bob Blake will offer up a perfectly fine and unique four-letter word.

Beyond that…

I do have thoughts about San Antonio and the changes since our salad days, as well as clips from the newspapers that celebrated the recent 150 years of publication of the San Antonio Express-News, so I will delve into those in the coming weeks.

To close, here is a picture I came across of the committee planning our penultimate reunion held at Oak Hills Country. This was possibly our 50^th reunion. Names below the photo.

Left side: Laura More Brusenhan, Louise Dobbins Rawlings, Peggy Frazier Jones, Texas Myers, possibly Jim McNeel. Right side includes Warner Fassnidge, Carol Hanson Keeter, Jack Stutts, Don Martin, and ??. Identity at the end is too dark to see.