My writing goes in cycles. I tend to pour it all out when I’m miserable, and am not too quiet when there are really interesting things going on, but the days in between? I get very lethargic about documenting contentment.

What am I going to write about? The excruciatingly slow progress on the yard? Sure, we’re doing things with it every weekend, but sometimes those things are just weeding, and there’s not a lot to show for it.

The nice weekend kept largely inside from the rain? Wow, did I ever need that, but it doesn’t make for good journal fodder. We did a little shopping, did a little shooting, and a fair amount of cooking and cleaning. None of that is earth-shattering.

The brutal weekend taking three-quarters of the kids camping to a trap shoot? Yeah, I was stressed to the max before we went; that trip didn’t help. Best if I don’t actually put what I was thinking to paper. I’d rather just forget about it.

The diet that continues to work, if slowly? Nah, not interesting to anyone but us. Although between us, we’ve lost almost sixty pounds. I’ve bought new pants; Junior prefers to just wear his really baggy.

Work that’s driving me crazy? We’re at another Monday, but this is the end of the project and it’s no longer quite so bad. Some customers love the meters and some hate them. I’m tired of dealing with the ones that are screaming because their water is no longer essentially free. They got away with it for a long time; what made them think it would be forever?

So I’ll just keep on living, and working, and weeding. When something interesting happens, I’m sure I’ll get back into it.

So I had a temporary post up while my site was crashed; the short version is that I was hacked and my host shut down my website and instructed me to upgrade to the current version of WordPress. Well, that jacked my site all to holy hell, and I freaked. I followed all of the instructions that I am capable of (which isn’t nearly enough) and just couldn’t get it to work. Even simple things, like logging into FTP, weren’t working for me.

So as the host told me to do, I went to the WordPress boards. I did all the reading that I could comprehend, but was still lost. After some nice people explained things to me in a language that I simply don’t understand, I was in tears. I threw up some pleas for help, on this site and on my favorite board.

The extremely generous Heidi offered to look through the site and see if she could help. She helped me a lot until we came to a brick wall – apparently my FTP password wasn’t right. So we knocked it off until I could get that reset in the morning.

In the meantime, the also generous Otto from the WP boards offered to take a look at it too. He got in behind the scenes and figured out that it was well and truly jacked, not just misdirected. I don’t know what magic he did, but it worked, and I’m back up now. Thank you, both Heidi and Otto! I was really upset about losing five years’ worth of work here.

So, as it sometimes happens, everything’s settled down at once. My website’s back up, my project at work is winding down and the next phase isn’t for another month yet, the antibiotics seem to be working, and we’re leaving for a quick honeymoon in Monterey this afternoon. Plus, there was chocolate cake for the office birthdays today. That’ll settle anyone’s mood.

Granted, a road trip by myself isn’t all that fun, but at least I get full control over the music.

I’m about ready to go, except for the packing. I’ve got the cat uncomfortably tucked in at the kennel (where there were way too many dog noises for his taste), I’ve got my clothes all washed and ironed, and I borrowed a soft case for my pistol so I could stick it under the seat.

What?

Oh, and I made provisions for y’all too. A couple of my favorite people (I have lots of favorite people, and these are two of them) have graciously agreed to write guest posts for me while I’m gone. I didn’t get into the whole notification list thing, but if you check in here once or twice, you might be pleasantly surprised. Be nice to them, I’d like to keep my friends!

So, since I’m totally the sort of person who gets way ahead of herself, here’s the new site, bugs and all.

Many thanks to Tami and Kelly for the help and advice. I got the archives moved over, but they’re obviously not quite right yet, so please ignore the construction debris!

So. The DJ thing. Yeah, that really, really sucked. Friday night, I went up to the casino with Big Jeff’s other trainee, and got the shortest lesson ever in putting all of the equipment together. I figured that I could handle that part. I was feeling shy about doing the talking bit on command, but I knew I’d be able to do it once I got started. I’m not so big on talking for the sake of talking, see. I like to have something to say before I open my yap. I left around ten and headed down the road to Eric’s.

And I was on my own on Saturday night.

I got up there and puzzled out the rats’ nest of cables all right. I was a little concerned that there seemed to be two extra, but I figured those must be for the karaoke TV, which I wasn’t using (they were.)

I got the software rolling, and it started to hang. And then it got worse. It wouldn’t open at all, it was running late, and I was starting to sweat bullets. I had managers and waitresses all sticking their noses into it. They called up a cook, who’d sometimes filled in for Jeff. He’d never seen it do that before.

I tried repeatedly to call Jeff, who had said that he would be by his phone, but obviously wasn’t. We couldn’t get it working at all, so the cook set me up with the very basic Windows media player.

This meant that I had no playlists to work from. I had to drag and drop new ones, and Jeff doesn’t exactly have the music arranged well. It’s on the laptop hard drive and two external drives. The catch here was that the management didn’t want me to play country music—it’s not really a country sort of place.

But country’s all I know. I didn’t know how to wing it with other stuff—I didn’t know if the lyrics were suitable, or even if the songs were upbeat or slow. I ended up with a lot of classic old bar songs that I could remember, but I sure didn’t have enough for seven hours of play time.

I was really starting to stress. I was near tears, and had it been anyone else, I would have walked right off the job. I had a couple of hours of music, no more. I couldnt take requests because half the time, I couldn’t find what they wanted and the other half of the time, I didn’t know if the song was clean or not.

Finally, Jeff showed up with a replacement laptop at about 10 PM. If he’d showed up by himself, I totally would have walked, but he had his son, some girl, and her son. So he left me with the new computer. It at least had the DJ software working on it, but I couldn’t access one of the drives, so requests were still out for the most part. I was never so glad to see 1 AM approach as last night.

The hours though, they killed me too, and I’m really not fond of driving home with the drunks on that twisty mountain road. Not getting enough sleep on my only weekends that are free to do my backflow tests would ruin my business too.

I think that if I hadn’t had a catastrophic failure, I probably would have stuck with the job a little longer, but it would have been harder to find an excuse to quit. I feel bad enough for letting my friend down, but at least this way, he still has the summer to find someone else to work for him. I’ll still manage it for him, and I’ll run his water business, but this was too much, and I’m clearly not the right person for the job. So, I quit.

If there’s nothing else that I’ve learned in the past week, it’s that I’m not smart enough to do web design. Well, I might be, but with three jobs and two kids, I don’t have the time to mess with it.

So, if any of you have recommendations for web designers that can work with WordPress, please email me. I really, really need one! I’ve got a few quote requests out with people I found online, but they all seem swamped.

Thanks!

So, my self-publishing friends, if I were to switch over to maintaining my own domain, do y’all have any recommendations on hosts and publishing software? What about image hosting? It all needs to be fairly user-friendly, since I can barely struggle my way through HTML. I’d like the ability to have multiple posters too, since some girlfriends and I are contemplating starting a group blog.

What have you guys used, and what should I stay away from? What else do I need to know?

This might be my project over the next few weeks.

Thanks!

I found a fun new thingy today that totally feeds my nosy curiosity about where readers are from. Well, it could if y’all aren’t shy about pinpointing yourselves on a map.

Frappr is a Google Maps deal. To put yourself on it, you just put a name and a zip code in. I think you might have to leave a comment to get it to show up; I had to on the big map of one of my message boards, and I can’t figure out how to turn that off.

So I guess I’ve busted myself regarding location, but I don’t care all that much anyway.

Anybody care to join me?

•••••

I need a new bio page; I realized that the old one was pretty out of date today. A lot has changed in the last year.

I’m still sort of a cowgirl by inclination, but I seem to be missing horses, cattle, and a cowboy to go along with it. Eh, it’s all in the attitude anyway. I’m still a mid-thirties woman living in the middle of California. I live in town, but I wish I didn’t.

I’ve got two boys; John is twelve this year and Seamus is eight, and they’re in a combined elementary/junior high school. I only have custody every other week, which means that on each Friday, I’m either glad to see them or glad to have some time to myself. I try to do something interesting with them every weekend, but life doesn’t always work out that way. There are weekends when laundry is more pressing than interesting, but I try to do the best I can in raising them.

Since I seem to be single again, I’m dipping my toe into the dating pool. Well, it’s more like being unwillingly plunged into it, and not being sure if I remember how to swim. I spent all summer listening to my friends tell me that I needed to get out and get over him, and I think I finally am starting to. We’ll see about that though.

Well, I guess I’m ready to go.

I’ve had my mail held, and I left the dog at Cowboy’s. I installed his satellite radio into my truck so I won’t be creeping over the Grapevine in silence. Laundry’s going, but I’m not leaving until noon or so tomorrow, so there’s no rush there.

So I’m having a shamefully comfortable day all to myself today. Cowboy’s working overtime on an emergency ditch repair, so there wasn’t any point in my staying over there. I did a little grocery shopping, bought some comfort food to see me over the day, and I’m lounging around in sweats playing the kids’ video games.

No kids, no spouse, no dog to worry about, and if I want to take a three hour nap, by god, I’m going to! It’s really quite nice.

I could have had the kids for the day today, but they have a Cub Scout snow trip, so they weren’t too interested in spending the day with ol’ Mom. John is going to be quite put out that I’ve passed him in the video game, but he’ll get over that. Since I’ve hogged it for the last couple of days, he can play until he catches up with me, as long as he shares with his brother.

What a nice day; if it weren’t for the lingering asthma symptoms and the sinus headache, I’d go to the gym. There’s always an excuse though!

It looks like the Diaryland server burp of ought five has been taken care of—Nanamama, I got your comment in triplicate! Thanks though, I forgot to test it after I uploaded the test entry. I hope you’re doing well—I miss talking to you. When are you going to start up a journal so we can keep up? I’ll help you if you need simple tech questions answered, but if it gets too complicated, we might have to run to Nance’s husband or Fred.

So I’ll be out next week. I’m sure I’ll be having major internet withdrawals; last time I could at least get my email on Grampa’s computer. I guess I should have tried a little harder to get my old laptop fixed, but at the time I deemed it not worth the money. And I guess I should make it for a week. If I were in the mountains, I wouldn’t miss it, but stuck in a hotel room with nothing but homework to do is going to get boring.

Someone online suggested I try Dim Sum while I’m down near a good Chinatown, and I think I will. Anyone have any suggestions on particularly good ones?

I’m feeling just a wee bit nervous right now.

You see, I’ve kept this journal quiet from all but my closest friends, and two of those three don’t ever use the internet. So I’ve been writing for strangers, for the most part, which is easier. I like the anonymity; if someone doesn’t like what I say or my writing style, they’re free to stop clicking on me. Won’t hurt my feelings a bit.

But I’ve been thinking about sharing this link with another of my longtime friends. He could have stumbled on it anyway, and I’d rather give it to him up front. I cleaned my archives up a little, because you don’t want friends coming around with dishes in the sink. Mostly, I just locked down a couple of uncomplimentary entries regarding other people in our social circle. I didn’t want those ones googled anyway, but I also don’t want to erase them, as they do truly reflect what I was feeling at the time.

I don’t doubt that I’ll be doing a little self-censoring for a while. This is someone whose opinion matters to me. Instead of pissing off some random stranger, I could alienate one of my very favorite friends. I hope not though, and I haven’t written anything to wad his shorts before. And this is someone that I’ve shared major life events with, so there really isn’t a need to feel so self-conscious. I do feel that though. It’s like standing before someone you’ve always seen in topcoat and tails, and whipping off all of your clothes. Except *ahem*, that analogy doesn’t quite work, after those topless days at the lake, now does it, Big Jeff?