It’s been two days and already I’ve changed the look of my Cranky Pals site. This is because I am fickle, which rhymes with tickle, which rhymes with pickle. I’ve been calling my kid Ellison Pickle lately, just for that reason. Er.

The Cranky Pals site is much prettier now, and has the added bonus of its own URL (http://www.crankypals.com). So official! So pretty! I am feeling the love for Shopify, and Shopify? It is feeling the love for me. Aaaaw yeeeeah.

People have been responding to my posts and I have been woefully remiss in my replies. It is not because I don’t love you. (See? More love!) I’ve just been a bit distracted. The kid? He is distracting. Well, currently he is napping, but usually he’s distracting. Distracting, but incredibly cute and fun and fascinating. He makes the most entertaining noises. I can’t wait until he starts talking, but I’m so going to miss his little Ellison-babbles.

I’ve been all Zazzle-crazy the last few days. There are some fun new products in my gallery, and I’m working on figuring out how to bend the API to my will. This is difficult, since I don’t actually know how to use API stuff. That’s never stopped me before, though. Remind me sometime to tell you the story of how I convinced an employer I could create advanced spreadsheets back in 1997 when I’d never used Excel. Good fun.

Someday I’m going to sleep through the whole night. I mean it. And then, like Nately’s whore, I will wake up full of love and optimism. And perhaps chasing Yossarian with a knife. You will see.

technorati tags:shopify, cranky pals, zazzle

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My big news of the day: Cranky Pals is open for business! You can order now handmade sideshow freak dolls for your infant or toddler, and I will make them for you. I am kind like that. Also? I designed some shirts on Zazzle (because they print on creepers and infant tees as well as other stuff) so there is all sorts of cross-marketing potential. I am so crafty! I feel like I should start a scrapbook or something. Only not, since I don’t have the patience for scrapbooking.

By the time you’ve read this post I will probably have added all the relevant linkage to my “swag” section, but if you’re in a big hurry to spend your hard-earned dollars check it out, I’d encourage you to follow the links above. They will take you places, and you can click things. Click!

And if you visit the Zazzle store, you should join my fan club. I didn’t realize they had a fan club feature until just yesterday, but now that I know it’s there I have an insatiable need for validation. You want to validate me, don’t you? ::flutters eyelashes::

technorati tags:cranky pals, zazzle, storefront, shopify, shirts, stuffed toys, sideshow freaks, swag

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Guess where I’m posting? The office! We finally have internet access. You probably thought we had ironed that whole thing out a couple of months ago, and to that I can only say: so did we. Turns out, a roof mounted antenna? Doesn’t work so well when the building owners decide to redo the roof. But everything’s working gorgeously now, and I am a happy, happy girl. Our ISP, Stephouse Networks, has been just amazingly proactive and helpful during this whole process. I kind of want to bake them something. If you need DSL and you’re in the Portland area, that’s who I’d tell you to call.

Today was a fun, fun, exciting trip to the optometrist to make sure my contacts are working right (they are), followed by an impulse side-trip to Nordstrom to see if any of the bras that fit me were on sale (they weren’t). Wearing an enormous bra is not nearly as much fun as one might think. The styles available in a 38D can be described as “utilitarian” at best. Plus, almost all of them involve underwire. I used to wear underwire with no problem, but that was back when I was a B cup and could sashay into any lingerie section and choose my brassiere based on things like how cute it was and whether it gave me cleavage. Now, the massive weight of my breasts makes underwire press uncomfortably into my ribcage. Ah, lactating. How I do love it.

After that fortifying experience, Happy Fun Baby and I traipsed over to the office, where I spent the better part of two hours updating software. Now that everything is all current, I get the novel experience of being able to actually work. From work! It’s crazy, I know, but it just might catch on.

The next step in the evolution of the office: acquire seating, preferably of the “mod futon” variety. Right now Happy Fun Baby is crashed out on my lap, drooling gently onto my shirt. I’d like to be able to set him down every now and again. Just for kicks. You know.

Our office kind of rocks, even if there’s not really anything in it except a desk and a bunch of books. What more do you need, really?

technorati tags:bra, 38d, isp, stephouse, dsl, baby, office

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It’s 4pm and I just got out of bed. I wish I could say I spent the day lazing around with a book or having a lot of kinky sex. Actually I could say that; it would just be a big fat lie.

I started getting migraines when I was about 20. I’m now 32. That’s twelve years of migraines. Twelve years, people. For a while I was getting them reliably every month (yay, hormones!) and occasinally in-between; I barely had any at all while I was pregnant (the ONE side-effect that was actually good!) and I’ve had maybe 3 since Happy Fun Baby’s birth.

This one kicked my ass, though. Sleep didn’t help. A hot bath didn’t help. Pulling my hair and crying? Surprisingly ineffectual. It wasn’t the worst I’ve ever had because I didn’t actively vomit. I did stagger shakily to the bathroom and hover over the toilet, gagging, until I got so dizzy that I actually considered laying my face on the toilet seat so I could rest. I’m not suggesting we don’t clean our toilets (I cleaned that very toilet the day before yesterday, in fact) but when snuggling with the toilet seems like a good idea, we have a problem.

And, see, I have a terrible feeling I know what triggered the migraine. Yesterday I ate three squares of very dark chocolate. The same very dark chocolate that I ate before my last migraine, although surely, surely the two cannot be related because I love dark chocolate. The darker the better. Bring on the cacao! Only don’t, because apparently I will spend several subsequent hours writhing in pain and wishing I were dead.

Now that I’m feeling well enough to be upright, I’m doing a little half-hearted checking to see if there are any new migraine meds on the market. I tried Imitrex about…what, eight years ago?…and it was pretty useless. It got rid of the pain, but all the secondary symptoms – including nausea, vomiting, auras, sensitivity to light and sound, numbness, difficulty in speech – remained. Want to know how much work I can get done while not being able to look at the computer screen? Not a lot.

Controllable triggers [...] include bright light, chemical smells, second-hand smoke, particular alcohols such as red wine and some hard alcohols such as scotch, foods that are known vasodilator such as fish, some chocolate, aged cheese, and foods which contain nitrates and/or the radical vasodilator MSG.

Migraines: Myth Vs. Reality

Migraine.org (and why is it that migraine sites are so headache-inducing? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it?) has an exhaustive list of medications used for preventing and treating migraines. The most promising are the attack-aborting meds, because seriously, I can seldom tell I’m getting a migraine until it’s well underway. Which means I need to send an e-mail to my doctor. Because, dude, if this hadn’t been a weekend and Not So hadn’t been able to wrangle the baby? I’d have been screwed.

technorati tags:migraine, headache, pain

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A while back we got sick of our blank bedroom walls and printed out a bunch of pictures on Post-it photo paper. All the pictures heavily featured the color yellow, and I arranged them to have the most visual impact, because I watch too many design shows. This lasted approximately a day, and then the stickum stopped sticking and the pictures began fluttering, leaf-like, to the ground. It was all very autumnal.

This morning Happy Fun Baby found one of the pictures. This isn’t unusual (paper is, in his opinion, the best thing EVER for chewing and I’m constantly pulling paper pulp out of his mouth, even though it’s not like we leave paper out where he can get it, and OMG why would you want to eat paper anyway) but what happened next is: he held the picture out, studied it, and then said “Da!”

I looked, and the picture he’d found was of him and Not So at the playground. “Yes,” I said, “That’s a picture of you and daddy.” He bounced and giggled and kicked his legs so hard he almost fell over.

He’s never really identified a photograph before (and especially not one of these). I tend to take “artistic” photos. It’s all fine and good to look at extreme close-ups or skewed perspectives as an adult, I can only imagine that they’re nonsense to an 11 month old. Except, Da! Da da da da da. Kick.

He held on to the picture for a while longer, staring at it (and kicking) and touching the surface, and then he forcefully handed it to me and watched while I put it back on the wall.

Kids are neat.

technorati tags:post-it, picture, photograph, baby, neat

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At 11 months (well, almost), Happy Fun Baby’s vocabulary is at a whopping four words: “ghee” for “kitty,” “luh” for “love,” “ba” for “ball” and “da” for “yeah.” “Do you want to go downstairs?” I ask. “Da,” says the baby. It’s like living with a little Russian diplomat.

I’m pretty sure yesterday (and today)’s crying jags are tooth-related. A couple of times today the baby has, apropos of nothing, put his hands to his mouth and wailed. I feel so bad for him, but I don’t know what I can do aside from offering snuggles and the occasional dose of Tylenol, which he sucks down like a little addict. Do you remember when medicine tasted bad? This cherry-flavored baby crack is not exactly off-putting. On the other hand, do I want to wrestle with my child before he will take his painkillers? No I do not.

The Code Fairy (aka my inimitable husband, who loves it when I call him a fairy) performed some sort of magic on my Buzzverb site and now it works gorgeously. I’ve posted the second of my 30 Days of Writing Links: if you’re doing NaNoWriMo (or even if you’re not) you should check it out. I’m not collecting all these links for my health, people.

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year (seriously, where would I find the time?) but I am all enamoured of a new manuscripting application. I downloaded the Scrivener beta yesterday, and it is, in fact, all that and a bag of chips. If you write novels, you know that Word is somewhat lacking in its outlining capabilities; I’ve always needed to either print out my notes and ideas so that I can refer to them while writing or have lots of windows open, neither of which is an optimal solution. And changing the order of chapters? Not exactly painless. Scrivener addresses these concerns and more. I’m digging the hell out of it. I may even do some work on the novel I started a couple of years ago and then abandoned in favor of sleep deprivation and mood swings. Er, I mean, parenthood. Stranger things have happened, you know.

technorati tags:scrivener, manuscript, writing, buzzverb, teething, tylenol, baby, nanowrimo, code fairy

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The baby woke up at 8am and spent the morning in a series of meltdowns. He’s begun stomping his feet when he’s angry or frustrated. It’s incredibly cute and incredibly endearing and doesn’t he need to be a little older before temper tantrums come into play?

About an hour ago he stopped crying long enough to nurse and then fell fast asleep. It’s no wonder he’s tired; he was up all last night doing the back-arch crying routine. I’d guess what was bothering him (teeth? sinuses? dreams?) but at this point it seems almost silly, like when I talk for my cat. “I hate it when you talk for me,” says Nick. See?

If I were clever I’d take this scream-free moment to do some housework, but I am not clever. I am also not fed. My fortifying lunch of chips and salsa did not completely fortify me. I know, I’m shocked too.

Apparently Last.fm introduced a bunch of new features today, not that I’d know from the lack of announcement. You’d think that announcing things would be important, wouldn’t you? There’s a space for events now, which I guess is exciting, but the thing that made me squee was the Taste-o-meter, which measures your “musical compatibility” with your friends. Kitschy? Yes. But so widget-tastic!

I checked my MySpace account today (yes, I know, I don’t know why either) and found the most unexpected message ever in my inbox:

I went to high school with you, and I always thought you were a great girl. Sorry if I didn’t say that to you back then. You have a gorgeous family, and I hope you are as happy as you look in your pictures!

Wow. She was one of the popular kids, too. Neat!

Speaking of neat: my pet project, Buzzverb, launched today. There was about as much fanfare as you’d expect for something no one’s heard of. Excitingly, once the site went live I discovered a fun little quirk wherein the first entry on the front page is posted with the formatting stripped. Which…doesn’t so much work for me, seeing as formatting is sort of important. There is a place to tell the theme not to do that, but it is feeling peevish and refuses to play. I went to the theme’s forums to see if I could find help, but – wouldn’t you know it? – the forums are down today. So, bah. But hey, if you or anyone you know needs a copywriter, check out Buzzverb. And pretend it works.

technorati tags:buzzverb, last.fm, myspace, sleep, baby, high school

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