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There was an unexpected hiccup on the Trail Baboon blog luxury cruise today as I headed off on Saturday morning errands confident that I had arranged everything to post perfectly without further attention or involvement from me. This was the first time in 19 months of this journey that I had proceeded with such reckless faith in technology and human attention-to-detail.

It should come as no surprise that one of the aforementioned elements suffered a catastrophic letdown, and our Trail Baboon Industries failsafe systems failed to catch the failure for 10 long hours. The blog drifted aimlessly, at the mercy of digital weather and electronic tides.

As a result, un-engaged internet eyeballs were left to accumulate on an already-perused page. It was the Trail Baboon equivalent of eating nothing but Saltines and wall paste. Hours of quality baboon attention piled up and then spilled over into other, possibly less savory areas of the Internet.

Who knows where people wound up? I’m concerned, because it is very dangerous out there.

Today’s planned post, an entertaining and thoughtful guest blog by Sherrilee, will be held because it deserves to receive your full attention on Monday morning.

In the meantime, describe a time when your mistake went undetected for too long, resulting in a much larger mess to clean up.

40 thoughts on “This Page Left (Un)Intentionally Blank”

  1. Sorry, but I feel compelled to write about Carnival’s small-scale “disaster” and, since you brought it up, want to clear the air a bit. Having so recently cruised with them two times, I’ve found myself hotly defending the cruise line. Some are talking about it literally in terms of being like Katrina or the Titanic, much to my amusement. Some are lawyering up already, determined to turn their few days of boredom & discomfort into cash. I find this reprehensible, whiny, and mean-spirited, partly because Carnival has a 95% “satisfaction” rating and serves 4 million people each year, and partly because I truly appreciate my own two experiences aboard the Liberty and the Destiny. I’m quite grateful and do not want to see this line go down.

    Imagining what I’d do with this five days of drifting, I’d dance my way through it and make it my mission to engage, humor, and lift up the human spirits surrounding me. My mother’s lesson -“There are no problems, only challenges” – would translate into making positive meaning out of being in the situation. Many of those got off the ship exclaiming how they grew closer to one another, including strangers, than they thought possible. Imagine the stories these folks have to tell for years to come? Parts of these stories will be creepy, funny, and bizarre, but all of them will be potent to retell over time. I almost wish I’d been there.

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    1. CB – I’ve been wondering how your cruise went, and if you made all your (logistical nightmare) connections.

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      1. It was great!! Didn’t miss the ship, had mostly sunshine, and watching my daughter delight in every aspect of the adventure was wonderful. She’s now hooked on cruising and already talking about one next winter. Carnival even 🙂 Thanks for asking!

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      2. i believe this could be modified to accomadate the use of a wheel in drive vs a corvette engine and thius be the next great baboon item ont he agenda. travail mugs never wnet anywhere as the renewal of the travailmug.com name is going to go unrenewed but i can see a place for the baboon bloody mary mixer becoming a tailgate favorite at all minnesota sporting events an possibly we could figure out a way to incorporate it into literary and classical events as well with a different recipe than the meat and tomato based recipe used herewithin.
        bottom line good inclusion pj thanks

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  3. Sorry…I was out ice skating. Did I miss something?…

    My messes are mostly stinky: think leaving scenic paint for too long and it “turns” (think spoiled milk and rotten eggs), leftovers that stay in the fridge too long, that sort of thing. The funnier mistake was my big brother’s: he was working at a nursing home as a dishwasher. Early on in his dishwashing career he ran out of the automatic dishwashing liquid he was supposed to use, so being an inventive sort, he decided maybe the regular dishwashing soap (the kind you use to hand wash) would be fine. Now think what bubbling agents do when they are “overexcited”…yeah. His pals called him Mr. Bubble for years.

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  4. Since we have moved most of our furniture across the hall, all but the big heavy pieces, we are discovering how we had not cleaned behind and under things. But who does?
    And all kitchen cabinets should have soffits above them. The greasy dirt that collects up there! I always put wax paper down, which helps in the cleaning, but I should clean more often than every two years.

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    1. Clyde – we have been in our house almost 11 years now and I shudder when I think about some of the places that haven’t been properly cleaned or vacuumed since we moved in (like that spot that’s impossible to get to between Husband’s desk, the book shelf and the radiator…). Moving things around every couple of years seems a reasonable way to be sure everything gets a scrub now and again, though I can also understand why it’s not a pain-free process.

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  6. My wife and I were in a meeting with our lawyer and while I meant to say I had spoken to our tax adviser, instead I misspoke and said we had talked with our financial adviser. The lawyer was surprised at the advice the Financial adviser, a person he knows well, had given us and kept harping back to ‘He really said that??’
    I tried to bluff my way through it for a good 5 or 10 minutes and eventually had to cave and confess everything.

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    1. if your lawyer and your financial adviser have such different advice than your tax adviser maybe you should have realizied that your tax adviser was the wrong guy for you.

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  7. Good morning. I’m back from the seed swap and ready to swap tall tails on the Trail. I think there have been a lot of messes that came from my errors which I have trouble recalling or don’t want to recall.

    I believe that many people tend to put off doing things that should be done in a more timely fashion resulting in some messy situations. Getting ready to move to a new home will bring many of these things that you have put off doing to your attention as Clyde has already touched on in his comment. I am getting ready move from a house I have lived in for close to 30 years. All of those put off tasks accumulated for 30 years are now being revealed resulting a very major accumulation of messes of that need to be put in order, thrown out, cleaned up, repaired, etc., etc., etc.

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  8. Morning all. Sorry I missed yesterday – although I was on early in the morning to catch the last of Near Miss. Wonderful songs all — thanks again.

    I can’t think of any complete societal meltdowns that I have caused, although I certainly have my share of errors as I go along. Of course, I think the Teenager probably thinks I’ve caused meltdowns in her society. Just last night I made her put her phone away when we had our neighbors over for dinner.

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  9. Dale, you have written some classy sentences here, but this has to be right up at the top:
    “As a result, un-engaged internet eyeballs were left to accumulate on an already-perused page.”

    So far, my recollections are of delicacies created – and forgotten – that were left in the fridge too long. Not always my mistake – Husband tends to find room for food on a middle shelf by just pushing other things back to make room… think of lovely basil tomato soup with pretty greenish islands growing on the top – that sort of thing.
    Will think on this for others…

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  10. OT: Our TV (such as it is – very old, with black box for digital) in the basement isn’t getting visual reception – big black vertical wavy lines and no color. I can hear CBS Sunday morning, but that’s it. Husband heard on the radio (MPR?) about something new happening with digital transmission. Any clues, Baboons? Or is this TV just dying?

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    1. I got a letter a couples of weeks back from Comcast talking about tv going digital — unfortunately I don’t remember exactly what it said — the faq said that since I have boxes on my tvs, I don’t have to do anything. So something is up.

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    3. comcast is going totally digital and the existance of the dinosaur of a tv you have in you basement is bund for the “you may be a redneck if you tv sits on top of your old tv ” dom. if you need a new one i for the very reason you mentioned have many many extict worthless tvs that can be transormed into soory recepticles of tv wavelengths for another year or two until you decide to cough up the 200 bucks to get a tv the size of you couch to make you life current and up to date.

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  11. I’m having trouble remembering any mistakes like that but I’m certain they’ve happened. I think I’m making a big mistake right now in not cleaning that sticky orange stuff off of the bottom of my refrigerator. It’s still orange though, not green, so it can’t be too big a mistake.

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  12. Basically, this is the “stitch in time saves nine” concept – if you ignore that little hole in your sock or sweater, it gets bigger and bigger; but if you fix the hole when it’s tiny, you may save the garment. Works on lots of things mechanical too – rattly noise in sewing machine or carburetor (do carburetors get noises?): fix it soon and it’s probably cheaper than letting it go for a long time.

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    1. My first car had a rattle that I was pretty sure I needed to fix. Had arranged with my big brother for him to take a look (I couldn’t afford a “real” mechanic), but the noise went away before he could check. A couple of days later, was driving home in the dark – thankfully with a friend. Lights kept getting dimmer and dimmer and the car slowed down…pretty soon it just stopped. Would go no further and would not restart. I had totally drained the battery. That rattle turned out to be a pretty important bolt that had gotten loose and fallen off – a bolt that connected an arm to something on the alternator, which in turn charges the battery and…yeah, without it you wind up in the dark by Minnehaha Creek in the wee hours giggling with a friend and a bit perplexed about your car. (Side note: we discovered in the couple mile walk along Minnehaha Creek that the park board does not provide porta-potties anywhere between Nicollet Ave and Minnehaha and roughly Bryant Ave…not good during the “wee” hours as it were…)

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  13. I recall one time when I put some laundry in the washer, turned it one and left the room for an hour or so. When I came back, the laundry tub had filled to capacity and overflowed. There was something blocking the drain – I think it was a slipper or something like that – that had fallen into the laundry tub.

    I keep two litterboxes under the laundry tub, side by side, so that they project out a few inches farther than the laundry tub, leaving them in perfect position to catch the overflow. I buy the clumping clay litter. So there was a soupy sludge in each litterbox that had to be emptied. I recall that the litterboxes weighed about 60 pounds apiece with all that water and an underlayer of litter. Plus there was water all over the floor to be mopped up.

    Sure wished I had been paying attention sooner.

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    1. in my story the litter would be sitting on top of a couple bags of redi mix that turned to cement and completely blocked the plumbing to the house for the foreseeable future. necessitating the plumber to bring explosives and carbide tipped drills to open the system for normal use.

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  14. i tend to have the most rube goldberg type of situations pop up that instead of telling the story i will just show the picture and you can fill in the details

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