Celebrating Recovery

A small but happy occurrence invited me to feel celebratory this morning. Husband Walter suggested we go out for breakfast at McElroy’s, recently rebuilt and back in operation after Hurricane Katrina obliterated it from its Biloxi Harbor location in 2005.

We first started going to McElroy’s, called Harbor House then, when our oldest son was small. Saturday morning breakfast at Harbor House became a solid family tradition. The family-owned operation had already expanded to a beautiful hillside location on the bayou in our town before Katrina. Katrina’s tidal surge pushed about six feet of water into the restaurant, but the structure stood. When it was back in operation fairly quickly, we continued a modified family tradition.

But we are happy to have two McElroy’s to visit now. The new Biloxi version is one-story, but elevated well beyond a two-story height in accord with new post-Katrina building codes. At that height we can no longer see the boats in the harbor unless we are sitting outside, but the big windows still offer a beautiful view of the channel, Deer Island and the water beyond. 

It seems that recovery from a disaster of Katrina's magnitude is similar to my stroke recovery. Some initial recovery was rapid, but continuing recovery requires determination to keep at it for the long haul. And both quick and slower-arriving increments in recovery are cause for celebration.

Update on my word verification experiment

I moaned in Friday’s post about a spam attack. I also activated word verification Friday. Since I did that, the barrage of automated hits and comments has stopped. Saturday at 7:55 p.m., I took word verification off.

It is now Monday morning, and there is still no evidence of the nonstop repetitive hits from the same source that led to my experimentation with word verification. The same ads for drugs started showing up again late Saturday. There were about 17 of them again on Sunday, and five so far today.

But the Blogger spam filter has been totally effective in keeping software-generated advertising and other comments from appearing on my blog. I hope that all those repetitive, unrelenting hits from a single IP address don’t start again. It really did feel like an attack.

Upon my post about my defensive maneuver, I was surprised and impressed with Arkansas Patti’s take on word verification, which I regard as an onerous process even though I had activated it as a last resort.

Patti commented that it has almost become enjoyable to her, a game to guess the letters. Her approach shouldn’t have surprised me. Her blog posts at The New Sixty often include humorous chronicles of her coping with life’s aggravations and challenges minor and major.

One day her writing may engage me in celebration of the heroic or generous about fellow human beings and the next in unrestrained laughter. Thanks, Patti, for good medicine. And thanks to the other fellow bloggers who shared their own experiences, advice and opinions about spam and word verification with me.

Enough of this attention to word verification. I am going to work on a different experience with words for a bit before I continue catching up on my fellow bloggers’ posts.

P.S. Just read that Arkansas Patti is hanging up her keyboard. A bunch of people are going to miss her.