Billings...

So I got to thinking about how this year's billings compare with those of previous years, and in particular, about my "grades" for billings during any given month, which covered the gamut from "Outstanding" to "Below Dismal."

Without giving out numbers, if my "Good" corresponded to a score of 100, then my "Outstanding" scored 117, my "Mediocre" scored 78, and my "Dismal" scored 44.

The grades were based on the way things were going at the time, and the only thing I have to say today is: My, how things have changed! Using those grade names of yesteryear, my average so far for 2016 is not quite halfway between Dismal and Mediocre, and that's only because I'm fixing to put in a solid Mediocre month for April.

I don't know if I should "recalibrate" the names downward. The slowdown I've been experiencing does not seem willing to end, and it's not just affecting me That said, for the time being, I will keep these names. Maybe they will help me Try Harder™. Of maybe Trying Harder™ is not the solution, or only part of the solution.

We'll see.

For now, I need to finish off one more assignment for April and get some invoices out the door.

Then I can "turn to" on the remaining items on my plate.

Cheers...

Interlude...

Thunderbird upgraded itself to version 45.0 and therupon immediately stopped working.

More accurately, upon clicking on an item in the list of messages, the message failed to appear. Instead, the program informed me the message was "Loading...," and there matters would lie, past the point of reasonable patience.

After a few minutes of anguish with Google, I found the requisite information to restart Thunderbird in Safe Mode (i.e., with addons disabled) and proceeded to do so.

Thus started, T-bird worked.

Sometimes, a successful start clears away what might be called "cyber debris" that keeps an upgraded file from running properly, but this was not the case here with my newly upgraded T-bird. Closing the Safe Mode app and restarting T-bird put me right back where I had started from, but at least now I knew that the problem almost certainly lay with the operation of one of my addons.

Fortunately, I only have four addons, only one of which is "critical" to the way I do email, and I use the quotes because not using that particular addon is not, um, fatal to my use of T-bird, though it would send me scrambling for a way to duplicate the function it provides.

Fortunately again, the addon that, for some reason, keeps T-bird from working properly is one that frankly... I have forgotten why I installed it in the first place.

Still, those are ten minutes that won't come back.

Sigh.