Well… The last vision I had involving Dad took place on November 30th and he called today, within the usual four-day, ninety-six-hour period. He called around two this afternoon and I let it go to voicemail figuring he’d leave a message if there was something he really needed. Then he calls me at 9:23 PM and I picked up figuring it might be something really important. He called me to explain that his earlier call was because he was trying to place a classified ad to sell his Camaro, but he had forgotten the URL of his website. His solution for that, based on what he told me they ended up doing, should work easily enough.
I really wanted to get off the phone with him at 9:40 PM but didn’t actually hang up until around 10:20 PM despite multiple attempts to politely do so. I don’t think I’m answering my phone for anyone after 9:00 PM anymore; I am going back to scheduling Do Not Disturb or simply filtering calls after 8:00 PM again.
Of late, I’ve been modifying the Twenty Sixteen theme function file on Brian Schnabel’s Head Space to trigger the Classic Editor and Classic Widgets interface so I could manage things more easily with my screen reader. I was also using the theme’s function file to clean up the code WordPress outputs globally on all themes so the theme would actually validate correctly with the W3C Markup Validation Service. However, after WordPress updated to 6.9 and Twenty Sixteen updated to version 3.7, I decided to take a different tack and worked with Copilot 365 to create a plugin to do that.
What I have now is a plugin that permanently enables the Classic Editor and Classic Widgets interfaces in WordPress and cleans up W3C validation issues without breaking certain functionality in the WordPress Dashboard. It removes trailing slashes from void elements, strips unsupported CSS properties, and removes invalid script types for better HTML compliance. It doesn’t break the WordPress default site map or feed either.
While I was at it, I also fixed some discovered security vulnerabilities in two other plugins I’ve created in recent months: A clean category URLs plugin and an author archive redirect plugin. In addition to Copilot, I’ve been using the Plugin Check plugin for developing this stuff.
This WordPress plugin checks if a custom-developed plugin meets WordPress.org directory standards. It reviews new submissions for issues with best practices, including internationalization, accessibility, performance, and security.
That’s what alerted me to the vulnerabilities I fixed. “It’s handy!”
The only custom creation I didn’t have to do much with after the WordPress 6.9 update was my no page pagination plugin. It disables pagination on archive and homepage URLs by intercepting requests to URLs containing “page/2” or “page/3” and so on, redirecting them to the canonical root. I wanted to avoid duplicate content, reduce crawl depth, and keep the site structure lean. If you understand code and have the right tools to help with the things you don’t, “Who said you can’t always get what you want?”
I could have probably incorporated everything into one big, beautiful plugin. But I feel it’s smarter to keep the number of functions a plugin performs small. It’s just a lot easier to manage things that way; small and light weight plugins making it easy to isolate issues when they arise, if not preventing them all together.
In other news, I had a rather creepy vision yesterday morning about wanting a rather flirtatious and precocious 13-year-old. There was no nudity in the vision but just the idea of it…
Then, this morning there was the vision about a woman helping me load dirt with small slabs of rock into my laptop bag with my laptop. The dirt and rock was put in the bag in such a way as to protect the laptop when we used the bag with its newly acquired weight to force our way through something.
This vision took place outdoors on a rather overcast day. We seemed to be at some sort of outdoor fair or carnival with lots of other people around. I definitely saw bleachers nearby but noted that no one was paying any attention to what we were doing.
What it all means? Well… There’s the chance that the vision involving the 13-year-old girl was triggered by my reading the Mayfair Chronicles. However, too, is the fact that 13 is a violent or powerful storm warning of sorts.
As far as the vision with the dirt and laptop goes? It might just be a suggestion to incorporate more earth elements into my meditation practice, things like crystals and other stones along those lines. However, I’m really not sure.
What I am sure of is that it has been a rather productive day. Even talking with my Missouri client and friend John was cool, too. He suggested a book he thought I might be interested in considering my current situation. It’s called, it’s them, not you: how to break free from toxic parents and reclaim your story by Josh Connolly.
Apparently, this is a book that offers practical guidance for dealing with toxic family dynamics and seeking emotional freedom from your past. The information John emailed me after our call says Josh Connolly is a Resilience coach who seeks in his book to provide validation, boundary-setting tips, and a structured recovery process using methods like breathwork and inner child healing.
The book description says it includes exercises, journaling prompts, and video links to support healing and self-reflection, intended to help readers reclaim their independence regardless of how they choose to manage challenging family relationships. “It sounds like it could be an interesting read.”