My portfolio site: updated! Is muchly prettified. See!
I did the sidebar thinger with my beta version of Adobe Spry, which is pretty spiff. I tried to make it work for the links at the bottom, but for some reason it was all wonkeriffic. I have no idea why, because I don’t understand all that newfangled code.
Do please mention if it breaks in your browser or is unappetizing in some vital way.
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I stumbled downstairs this morning, my head full of ache and my arms full of disproportionately cheerful baby. The headache was probably a result of last night’s chocolate-chip cookie extravaganza. Yes, I made cookies. From scratch. And they were good! (I’m always mildly surprised to find that I’m a decent cook.) I did slice my finger open while trying to open the chips, but a little bloodshed in the kitchen is a small price to pay for fresh-baked cookies, am I right?
When I got downstairs I was surprised and pleased to find that Not So had rearranged the living room while we were asleep. It seems so big now! And free of clutter! Happy Fun Baby gave it his seal of approval by actually consenting to play in his play yard, which apparently is not a horrible baby torture device when located in the middle of the room. Although currently he is sitting in it saying “Nin, nin, nin,” which I’m pretty sure is Ellison for “No,” over and over in a mournful voice, so perhaps he has tired of the new location. Or maybe he’s just mad that there’s no dancing on the TV. My kid, he loves the musical interludes.
I’m convinced he’s going to be in a boy band. Not So and I the other day were discussing which role Happy Fun Baby would play in said boy band (i.e. The Cute One, The Tough One, The One With The Hair) and we both decided he would be The Tough One on account of his extreme boy-being. Although we are talking boy bands, so it should probably be “Tuff” instead of “Tough.” Me: “Nick Lachey!” Not So: “Donny Wahlburg!” Which just goes to show that I am hip to the lingo, yo, while Not So is clearly stuck in the late 80s. Or possibly that I need to wash my brain out with soap. One or the other.
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I’d been wondering what happened to Melanie (aka Ellison’s girlfriend – he perks right up the second she comes on the screen) from The Goodnight Show. The last few days there’s just been a voiceover instead of a host. I thought maybe she’d gone on vacation.
Silly me! No, she’s been fired. Apparently several years ago (long before the PBS gig) she did a couple of PSA spoofs called “technical virgin.” Which are…funny. Really funny. And god forbid the host of a children’s show have a sense of humor, right? It’s not like George Carlin ever hosted a PBS kid’s show. Oh wait, he did.
So what are the PBS people worried about? Preschoolers logging in to YouTube, searching for their beloved Melanie, and discovering a PSA about anal sex? Because last time I checked, the under 5 set wasn’t terribly active on the internet. Parents might find Melanie’s video, but even if something she did years ago offends a few parents, how does that make her unfit to host a children’s show?
Melanie was the best thing about The Goodnight Show. Happy Fun Baby loved her. As far as he was concerned, the cartoons were just long commercials in between Melanie spots. And, let’s face it, the cartoons on The Goodnight Show are twee at best, dated and uninteresting at worst (with the exception of Pingu, which is kind of fab). I’m certainly not going to put them on if I know I’m not going to eventually be relieved by Melanie singing one of her stupid songs or doing a silly little dance.
So I guess the moral of this story is: don’t have a sense of humor! You might warp our youth. ::eyeroll::
technorati tags:goodnight show, melanie martinez, technical virgin, pbs
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The heat wave continues. I’m wearing sweats today, since I was sufficiently mortified by the pictures of me taken over the weekend. Now that I am shaped like a turnip, wispy scraps of fabric are not my friend.
Poor Happy Fun Baby doesn’t know what to think about all this heat. It upsets him, so he wants to be held, but when he’s being held he’s too hot. There’s been a lot of crying in the last couple of days. Some of it even by the baby! (Ha! I kid. I’m sweating too much to spare any liquid for tears.)
I’d say something witty, but my brain is fried. It’s sweltering in here – too hot to sleep, even – and I’ve got a bunch of housework to do before it gets really, seriously hot at about 5pm. The heat wave is supposed to be ramping down, and temperatures should be back to normal by Friday. We’ll see if I last that long.
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I signed up to beta test the new Yahoo! mail. Apparently the word “beta” is like crack to me. I had no problem with the old Yahoo! mail, aside from the fact that it was ugly and clunky and, you know, not in beta.
Staying in-touch is faster and simpler with the Yahoo! Mail Beta.
It took a long time for the new interface to load (which originally I attributed to newness, although it’s happened every time since). And then it took a long time for my messages to load. I’m not sure why they used the word “faster,” since that is clearly a lie. Perhaps by “faster” they meant “prettier.” It certainly is pretty. Even the ads that threaten to overpower the message viewing area seem more attractive than before.
It still does the thing I hate most about Yahoo! Mail, which you can see on the screenshot: the landing page. I click “My Mail,” and what do I see? A greeting (“Welcome, Jessica!”) and a note telling me how many messages I have. You know what? I could probably figure out how many messages I have by looking at them. I don’t need advance warning. It’s only one click, but that extra click causes me no end of annoyance.
Once I’ve gotten to my messages, the interface is much more like a desktop e-mail client than it was before. There’s a preview screen below the message list, just like in Mail. It does speed up the process of determining which messages are spam – no longer do I have to wait for the message to open in order to see if it’s something I want to keep. The folders are all listed in the sidebar, as are links to the calendar, notepad, and RSS feeds. People who use Yahoo as their primary portal will appreciate the integration.
All in all, the new interface seems much more modern and slick than the old one. If Yahoo! would get rid of the landing screen and find a way to decrease loading time, I might be persuaded to love my Yahoo! mail account the way I love my dot mac account.
technorati tags:yahoo mail, beta
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I hate doing dishes. It’s not the garden-variety hate visited on chores like laundry, or even the ick-factor hate of cleaning the toilet (although there are spouses in the world, and I’m not mentioning any names, who would do well to take toilet brush in hand, like, ever). My hatred of dish-doing is bone-deep and burns with the heat of a thousand suns.
Which is why it was with heavy heart that I realized today I will have to take over dish duty at Casa Cranky.
Not So makes a good showing – he’s willing to wash the stuff in the sink more often than not, and he’s much, much less likely than I am to put non-dishwashable things in the dishwasher just to get out of a little scrubbing. But he’s also washing the dishes at 2 or 3 in the morning, when he’s so tired he can’t see straight, and that tends to cause a few problems. Problem the first: not-quite-clean pans and bakeware reclining, diva-like, in the dish drainer, waiting for the moment when I pick one up to put it away and find that there is a fine layer of grease on the bottom (or a film of unclean on the surface which no doubt was mostly invisible when the pan was wet). Problem the second: waterlogged scrubby sponges happily collecting bacteria and stench on the edge of the sink. Problem the third: the sink! Because it is stainless steel, and prone to rust spots when, for example, a not-squeezed-out sponge is left on the edge of it.
Less easy to quantify is the “reminding” aspect, which is entirely the product of my deformed psyche. If I have to instruct my beloved every time I wish for a dish to be cleaned, it feels like the dishes are my responsibility. If my beloved stumbles to bed at 3am without taking care of them, I am somewhat annoyed. On the other hand, if I assume that I’m the only one who’s going to do the dishes, there’s no one to be annoyed with. I can add dish-doing to my mental schedule and not feel like I’m having to do “extra” work.
I’ve been delegating dish duty more often than I probably should, just because I loathe it so completely. No more. Dishes, I will have the best of you. Yes. Fear me.
My inner feminist is cringing right now, but that’s mostly because I’m making her wear a 50′s housedress and an apron. Also, I have her hair in a beehive. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep your hair in a beehive? Marge Simpson has nothing on me.
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It’s beastly hot here today. The high is 99, and already it’s dangerously warm in our little condo. Our house is reasonably well insulated so it’s never unbearable like it was at the old place, but it’s still quite toasty on days when the temperature approaches 100.
My sister (who doesn’t have a fun nickname – perhaps Auntie Pep? She was a cheerleader in high school, after all) is flying in for the weekend. She is a pale, blonde health nut; I suspect the sheer amount of solar energy in the air will cause her to burst into flames the minute she steps outside. And stepping outside is inevitable – we will go on walks, and play at the park, and generally do things that healthy people do. Also, she eats things like flax. I am mildly terrified.
The combination of beastly heat, cranky baby and brain-scrambling math homework made it all but impossible for me to get much housework done yesterday. You try scrubbing countertops while trying to wrangle a grabby baby. Forget about putting him down: if I’m not in the same room he is, Happy Fun Baby assumes I’ve left him for the gypsies and reacts accordingly. I’ve tried explaining that the kitchen is right there and he can see me if he looks, but he’s not buying it. Yesterday I had to put him in the sling just so I could finish making my lunch. It’s a good thing he’s so cute:
Anyway, I am cleanliness-challenged at the moment. The timing couldn’t be worse, since I have what practically amounts to a phobia about a messy house and guests. I want to foster the illusion that I am a competent housekeeper. Is that so wrong?
Not So said he’d take care of cleaning up downstairs last night, but apparently we have different definitions of “downstairs.” When I think of the downstairs area, it includes areas like the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. Considering that’s pretty much all that comprises our first floor, I feel pretty justified. Not So swept the hallway and started the dishwasher, and this morning he took out the trash, which just leaves me with…the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. Oh and the downstairs bathroom. In addition to the upstairs, which isn’t too bad but still involves bathroom-scrubbing, carpet-vacuuming and laundry-doing. In the sweltering heat, with a cranky baby. But at least today I don’t have math homework! (Not much, anyway.)
I’m very excited about seeing my sister, though. Happy Fun Baby is going to be in baby heaven. Auntie Pep is a party, even if she does have funny ideas about what food is made of.
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