Apparently, stackable washer and dryer sets aren’t made with short people in mind. I was trying to help Emily with the dryer, only to discover I can’t properly operate it without getting on my tiptoes. I felt a little twinge in the left side of my neck yesterday… It felt a little off all afternoon until I passed out with fatigue around 2:30pm. 

When I woke up it wasn’t bothering me, but when we went to bed I couldn’t get comfortable, and my left leg wouldn’t stop spasming. I woke up around 11:30 in a world of pain and took Aleve. But the resulting headache and pissed off nerves made me have to walk around dead tired for 20 minutes… I’m still waiting for the pain to die down so I can try to get some actual sleep. 

I figured I’d write about it just because I haven’t experienced a neck problem this bad in about 8 years. I really need to be more aware of my literal shortcomings. This means I need a stepstool just to operate the dryer… we don’t really have the right space for the washer & dryer to be side by side. It also doesn’t help that it’s the coldest night in weeks, and I’m still having digestive issues from eating potato chips that were clearly cross-contaminated with something from a week ago. Not a good way to start a Monday. 

Besides a post I already have set up and outlined roughly to go, my only other task I have for myself is reevaluate several dozen posts that Google has for whatever reason decided not to index on The Phoenix Desertsong site. Several of these are old articles that were once posted elsewhere… for whatever reason, they just don’t have the link juice to stay in Google… probably just too buried being from 2020. This means they haven’t gotten any views at all at their present location… so, all of them will end up archived or recycled into new posts…

I’m a bit surprised that my SEO-focused mind didn’t bother to wonder about them. But it’s quite possible these particular ones were written when I relied mostly on social media shares to carry the bulk of promoting my posts. There was a time I pretty much abandoned SEO, simply because I barely had time to write, let alone structure and keyword research them properly.

Begging Google to request these posts be indexed is probably not a worthwhile exercise, especially when they’ve been neglected for at least 18 months. I just feel dumb being that SEO has been my primary job for years… Clients always got my best, so my personal work was pretty much cut and paste [straight from my notes], make it read okay, then just blast it out on every social network and reshare it every so often if it flounders… Yet another sign that social media made me lazy and allowed me tons of slack when it comes to actually writing top-end searchable content. 

After over two years, the glaring holes in my consistency are showing… Google is making it plain that at least 40 posts on my site aren’t cutting the mustard any more. It’s a bit embarrassing and humbling… but at least now I have content that needs to be entirely recycled if it’s to ever be visible to search engine users. I don’t have the excuse of simply blasting it out to Facebook and Twitter anymore.

This rant is now complete. I probably need to dial back a bit on the Content Production train. I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I planned for. Since I’m already reshuffling things to make others fit, I accidentally scheduled out something that was not just recently updated, but a post that recently started ranking well. I have so many posts scheduled that I can’t even keep them straight! 

Now that my neck finally is settling down, as well as my stupid gut, I’m going to get what sleep I can. Then I’ll hammer out a Potent Quotables post and probably give myself the rest of the day off. Apparently I need it, even if I don’t want it.