Happy NaNoWriMo, everyone! Yes, I’m doing it again this year. This is because I am a crazy person.

I’m ridiculously excited. I’ve got all my notes bookmarked, copied into Scrivener, or saved. I’ve got a reference book lurking just to the right of my bed (it’s a psychological thriller, this year’s novel, which is an entirely new genre for me) and a bunch of back episodes of Cold Case Files at the ready. (Funny story: I realized before we decided to get rid of our cable that I had seen every single episode of Cold Case Files at least once, and could tell which case it was just by seeing the opening teaser. This cannot have done good things to my psyche.)

Want to know what else I use to squeeze 50,000 words out of my head in 30 days? I broke it down on Buzzverb for those following along at home. Whee.

Just got Who Put the B in Ballyhoo from Amazon. I was making an order and thought I’d get something for the kid, and this has been on his wishlist ever since I saw it recced on (the sadly now defunct) Lucky Oliver.

Oh my god, this book rocks. It’s got circus freaks! Sideshows! The Hilton sisters! (Not those Hilton sisters. The other ones.) It’s like they wrote it just for me!

Er, and the kid likes it, too.

I’m late to the House…party? Boat? Anything I say here will be punny. Whatev, I started watching House because it was on Hulu and I require constant entertainment from my interwebs. And it’s crazy good, so now I’m all crack-addict about it. I downloaded the pilot from iTunes and watched it last night, in between Ellison’s patented Night Terrors of the Almost 3 ™.

The pilot was good. Sort of cliche, sort of overacted (I’ve been watching eps from season 5, so obviously the cast and the writing is tighter), an annoying amount of soft-focus. Seriously, people: backlighting and a little Vaseline on the lens is not going to make your cast more likable. It will, however, make me want to punch you in the face. Funny how that works.

If I’d tuned in for the first episode, I might not have been impressed enough to watch it again, save for one thing: at the end, House is explaining to one of his underlings that he hired her because she’s pretty, and that pretty girls who go into a demanding field like medicine are interesting because something’s wrong with them. He starts asking all these inappropriate questions about whether she was abused or molested as a child, and she replies with an ever-escalating series of indignant denials. House just looks at her and says, quietly, “But you are damaged, aren’t you.”

The girl flees. I’m hooked.

Apparently that’s what it takes to get me into a show: a deeply messed up protagonist with a thing for damaged goods. I’m so predictable.

Oh hey, look at that: the site, she has been prettified. I finally got the new template looking the way I want (which isn’t the way I thought I wanted it to look, but isn’t that just the way?).

This is the comp I did when I was messing around with ideas (and was testing out background textures – basically, this all started with a yummy leather texture I found on iStockPhoto). The original iteration had each feed item making a stripe across the entire screen, with the main content in a nice container on top of that. Which is one of those things that looks lovely and simple on paper, but turns out to be the world’s biggest pain in the ass in practice. Yes, I know, it’s all about z-index and what have you, but there were floats, and they were actively campaigning against me, and…wait, you totally don’t care about any of this, do you? Especially because, once I finally got it to work, I decided it looked ghetto and nixed the stripe idea.

This marks my first foray into Yahoo! Pipes, as well…and it was, surprisingly, much less painful than I’d thought it would be. Sure, it’s ugly, and I could probably have done it more efficiently if I had any bloody clue what I was doing…but it works, and isn’t that really the point? I’m pulling in feeds from all sorts of different places, and spitting them into my sidebar all neatly styled and prettily updating, and I’m quite pleased with the result. Especially since I used PHP to handle the feed. Which I totally don’t know! But I managed to hack my way through it without asking Not So for help, even once.*

Let me know if it looks funny to you. I mean, weird-funny, not funny-funny. Or maybe I don’t.

*Full disclosure: I did ask Not So for help, but not about the feed/PHP thing. And I ended up not needing his help anyway, so it’s totally like I did it by myself. Right? Right.

So I suddenly and unexpectedly found myself with the afternoon off. Hooray, I said (I’m pretty sure all-caps were employed as well), I totally needed an afternoon off, if by “off” you mean “doing laundry, replying to work emails, cleaning the house and dealing with a two and a half year old who refuses to eat.” Because, yes!

And the kid, he’s such the icing on the proverbial two year old cake. He wanted a granola bar. I suggested that mac and cheese might be more appropriate for lunch. He SCREAMED NONSTOP FOR 38 MINUTES. (Yes, I timed it.) Then took a break. Then saw me eating my mac and cheese and screamed some more. Then – finally – agreed to a pb&j…of which he consumed three bites. And then asked for a granola bar.

This is comedy gold, people.

I had grandiose dreams of taking the kid to the park, having one of those idyllic mom and baby experiences that one sees in magazines and commercials for Happy Meals, but now I’m exhausted, and cranky, and full of angst, and any park-going experience would resemble one of those other commercials, the ones involving Calgon and pleas to be taken away.

So instead I’m going to fold laundry and wish I had some vodka in the freezer while the kid (apparently) empties out every single bloody toy bin in the living room.

(Oh, what, you were expecting something funnier than this? Pfft.)