I know, I’m basically useless as a blogger, and this is just a quick catch-up. I returned last weekend from a Viking River cruise in Russia. As usual, an amazing, eye-opening experience. As always, it wasn’t amazing at all — people are people everywhere you go. Preconceived notions and prejudices can’t help but melt away. If only we could all have the experience.
A few negatives to report
My trusty little old camera froze into deadly paralysis and ended in the wastebasket. My classy new camera was happy to oblige, but I must have done the settings all wrong, ’cause there wasn’t a good photo in the bunch.
My health held up until “the travel cold” hit on the flight home from Amsterdam and emerged full blown the next day to turn me into a hacking, somewhat aching, useless mess this past week.
Now I’m pulling out of it with enough energy to get back to the formatting problem that prevailed before I left for the journey and continues to prevail. I haven’t checked the dates, but I believe I’ve worked on “My Father’s House” for at least five years, reaching the end of the first draft and eagerly beginning the huge (but fun) editing job. That’s when I found problems with the formatting. If I inserted pages. there were crazy empty spaces in the content. Content held stable as long as I didn’t insert pages. I will say, Microsoft did it’s best to help. I think I got bumped — helpfully — all the way to the top. One tech helper had me remove all formatting and start over. That turned out to make a mess — mostly of my own making, I suppose.
So anyway, here I am, working on a manuscript that can’t be submitted to a potential publisher even after I will have done massive editing, unless the problem gets solved.
Read on if you find formatting of interest. On the trip, I found that if I showed the formatting symbols, it revealed that section breaks had been introduced into strange places. Yay! All i had to do was remove them. Nope!. They wouldn’t go away. I could click “continuous” so the lines came fairly close together, but then other strange markings showed up in different places.
Tomorrow I’ll get back to Microsoft to seek more help. Truth be told, I’m hoping some formatting genius is reading this and can help me. But I fear technical support is right and my document has been corrupted.
So there you have it, my excuse for being a faithless blogger.
monagustafsonaffinito 
Your trip to Russia sounds wonderful. Too bad about the camera. It would have been fun to see photos of your trip. I hate formatting issues. It can be so challenging. Best wishes on getting them resolved without too much difficulty.
You are a helpful and put together blogger. Remember that, Mona
You are such a blessing, Sheila. Thanks for this.