All hell has indeed broken loose on this page…
Sorry. I’m working on it.
So I’ve done a little switcheroo with the publishing of this blog…
Hopefully all has gone well and I won’t have to re-create the site, links, C/A Names and all the archives…
**crosses fingers**
j.s.
Things haven’t quite settled down yet, but I really didn’t want to put off posting any longer.
So hi there.
Let’s see… I think we can safely skip the whole “moving sucks” post that graces every blog in the world once someone deems their current living space lacking and shuffles off to find a new one.
Suffice to say, they’re right. Moving does indeed suck.
As does wrenching your back out of place whilst trying to lift a 150 lb. chair.
That really sucks.
You end up flat on your ass on your brand new wooden floor screaming in pain and having it echo through an empty house.
Another fun fact, screwing your back up makes breathing an interesting game of “how much oxygen can I take in before it feels like my ribs have burst through my shoulder blade?”
Yes…I fucked up my back. It’s mostly better now. Let’s move on.
Four days after I screwed my back up, I was getting out of the shower and preparing to go to work when I hear a dog whining from the living room. I walk around the corner to find Jib looking up at me with panic in his eyes, and his left rear paw leaving full bloody paw prints all over the floor.
I’m not positive of what happened, but my best guess is that he was running around the backyard and he accidentally stomped on the metal dividers used to separate rocks from grass. These are old in places, and rather sharp. And yes, I should’ve covered them up but we’ve been in this house for less than 4 weeks and there’s a lot that I’m still getting to.
So, off we go to the vet!
He takes 5 stitches on the webbing of his paw (in between the pads), and I’m told to give him Rimadyl and antibiotics twice a day. Which I do, until he ceases eating. And after looking up Rimadyl’s side effects, it seems it’s been known to cause liver failure in dogs…particularly in Labs. The first sign of which is loss of appetite. Furious, I put a bit of sugar in his water bowl to get him flooding his body with water and stop giving him the Rimadyl.
I plan on questioning the vet about it this Friday, when he goes to get his stitches out.
So that’s Jib…
What else?
Ah, Alex.
Alex would be Sobriquet’s little white, fluffy dog. And Alex and I have had some minor disagreements over exactly who it is that runs Bartertown.
Ahem…
Bit after several bouts of flipping the little dog upside-down and pinning him to the floor amidst his snapping and growling, he eventually acquiesced to my leadership. Alas, he was unsure of exactly how to communicate this new “non-alpha” status to me, his new pack leader, so he’d simply urinate in submission every time I came near him/called his name/looked at him/sneezed, for about a week.
Good times.
I’m happy to report that we’re much better now, and Alex seems to be settling into his role quite nicely.
He’s stashing toys under the bed like he’s the next addict on Intervention (which is a horrid show by the way), but otherwise he’s doing just fine.
And with the puppy updates out of the way, I’d like to end this post with an advertising pitch…and no, no one is paying me for this.
Friends, it’s time to drop Comcast as if they were coiled, had a pair of fangs, and were rattling.
I say this, because AT&T U-Verse is the best thing to happen to cable/Internet in Houston since Comcast dropped the city into their Community Chest and told us to go straight to hell (without passing Go or collecting $200), if we didn’t like their outages/bandwidth throttling/sucky customer service/broken On-Demand software…because they were the only gig in town.
No, it’s too late for the blitz of marketing mailers and “special deals” you’re touting, Comcast. It’s over. Fuck you.
At least until AT&T oozes into the mold you’ve created and becomes the Cable/ISP Milkhog of Houston… At which point, I’ll start looking for someone else.
j.s.
A ton is going on, some good, some bad. And I’ll update you all on it as soon as I possibly can.
In the interim, here’s a new OKGO video that made me pee a little. Not sure if you knew this, but I <3 Rube Goldberg machines...
j.s.
Good Lord…the walls are coming down around here.
A scant 24 hours after upgrading my comment system, I received an email from Blogger stating that they are “no longer going to support publishing via FTP.”
Which, of course, is the way I’ve been publishing since I bought the www.meatyefreeti.com domain forever ago…
It seems that less than 1% of active blogs are published the way that I do it, which I find to be both interesting and a little disheartening.
Interesting because FTP used to be the ONLY way you could host a blog on your own site and still use Blogger’s software. This would be back in the days of yore, when having a web presence meant you had to know at least a little HTML. (Read as: before MySpace began hosting the most horrific webpages ever created.)
I learned a lot about directory pathing, file naming, and lots of other technical gobbledygook, simply from tweaking the template in this very blog.
And while we’re zooming along in the Wayback Machine, I was one of the few who actually paid Blogger a long time ago for the privilege of using their “Blogger Pro” service.
Just so no one who came to my site would have to suffer the hideous ad banner that used to reside at the top of the screen.
Yes, I was Blogger before Blogger was Google.
It’s disheartening because I certainly don’t want to allow Google to pepper my site with AdSense banners. And I’m quite happy hosting my own files on my own site. Alas, February 22nd will be the final day they’ll allow this to happen.
So I’m a little torn here.
They claim that there will be a way to convert things over to their new publishing system…but I’m not so sure I want to give them that ability. (Perhaps I’m being a control freak, but it’s my blog, on my site, that I pay for. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want it set up MY way.)
So…I’m faced with another dilemma.
The last time this happened, I migrated from www.meatyefreeti.com over to www.frqnc.com.
Perhaps it’s time for another move. A whole new design. All new stuff. (Although to be honest, I still like the simplicity of black text on a white background, so I doubt a lot will change in that regard.)
I already own jeremiahshaw.com, as well as smokinggnu.com. (I set up my annual Christmas scavenger hunt list on that last one…although it seems the jigsaw puzzle applet has been removed. When it rains it pours.)
Hell, I even own jeremiahandSobriquet.com. But I was in the midst of putting a simple wedding site together there…the last thing I want to do is migrate my blog to a new site and to new blogging software.
*sigh*
Guess I’ll figure something out…
j.s.