(Of course I immediately entered every contest I could think of, just in case I was temporarily, what do you call it, lucky.)

The iPod itself came all the way from Canada. Did you know that they put French directions in Canadian iPods?

I’m seriously in love with it. Seriously. And unlike the Android, there are TONS of great kid apps that Ellison has decided mean it should belong to him. Not a chance, kid. (Except that he’s so cute all curled up on the couch with his little tech gadget, just like mommy and daddy.)

So, yes. I am a winner. I win things.

*Not actually a fact.

So yes, there’s that. And also, I will.

So, whatev, apparently my big midlife crisis involves an appreciation for hops. This is encouraging, if only because it means I can go out to a bar and not end up either a) bored, b) trashed or c) spending the next 24 hours puking my guts out and swearing off all forms of alcohol including cough syrup and vanilla extract. IN FACT, the last time I had a drink that was not a beer I got such righteous alcohol poisoning that I had to cancel my flight home the next day. And you know how many drinks I had? ONE AND A HALF.

I do not make these things up.

*Seriously, she still looks exactly like she did in high school, and in high school she was what one would objectively call a knockout. Of course this does not make me feel like an elderly bag lady, why do you ask?

We’re dealing with the Terrible Threes, not only with the kid but also with the business. Both are growing at an alarming rate. Both demand huge amounts of time and attention. (Only one regularly elbows me in the sternum, however.)

I’m beginning to think that finding a balance is code for something else, like Discovering Valium or Hiring a Nanny. It doesn’t help that the last couple of months one or both of us has either been sick, out of town, or working through the night in order to catch up on the work that being sick or out of town interrupted. And since Not So’s job comes with more exciting deadlines than mine, guess who nobly “works” from home with the kid? Yes, because a clinging preschooler is an excellent business partner, let me tell you.

I’m behind. I’m stressed out. And it was 107 degrees in Portland today.

Oy.

Yeah, that’s about what I thought.

I’m debating making my graphics into PNGs, because GIFs are lame and full of lameness, but there’s the whole “IE can’t handle PNG transparency” thing* and it just makes me sad to think of poor backward IE people, looking at my site and going “Why did she put all her graphics in white boxes?”.

But who is thinking of me in this scenario? No one, that’s who.

I could check my stats, but that would be too easy. Plus it doesn’t involve ticky boxes.

Fill out a survey! You know you want to.

(If you can’t get the pop-up to load, click here.)

*Yes I know there are hacks, but I’m allergic to javascript & refuse to ask Not So for help. SUCH IS THE STORY OF MY LIFE. I do the same thing when I need to rearrange furniture.

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.

I did get Step 1 of the Great Blog Revamp finished, in the form of an illustration I actually like. Lookit, it’s me! Only, you know, illustrated, with Anime eyes and slightly better hair. (Aside: We took a “vacation” to Bellingham last weekend, or possibly the weekend before, and my hair looked like crap the entire trip. A sign? I say it was.) Oh, and I guess if I’m going for accuracy I ought to have a hole in the toe of one of my socks, because apparently I have a sock problem. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.

So I have this great illustration and a brain full of…well, mush is a good word, and a kid (have I mentioned the kid?) who is somewhat less willing to sit quietly while mommy works than one might expect, at least not after mommy has already spent the day working on things that actually pay, in theory.

I have ideas, though. Most of which seem to involve bending WordPress to my will and forcing it to dress up like a pimptastic version of Tumblr (or maybe Swurl – Swurl does all sorts of thrilling things with file types, which would fill me with joy if only I could customize it a little more)(and by “a little more” I obviously mean “rip its guts out and tie them into pretty bows and then reattach them in an entirely different configuration,” and if you aren’t craving some Burton* right now, I clearly haven’t done my job).

But I do have ideas, and that’s something. I also have dark chocolate gelato. So if you’ll excuse me.

*And I still haven’t seen Sweeney Todd, can you believe it? I mean ever, not just the Tim Burton version, which is obviously superior to all other versions, because hello, Tim Burton?

Among the excuses I could give (the business, the kid, the OMG SRSLY OUR BANK BALANCE IS WHAT?!?), the one that comes closest to explaining my inexplicable Lack of Post is completely superficial.

I mean that literally. Despite all my recent redesigns, my blog? Does not fill me with love.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. There are things I like about it. The video section, for example. I like that. Well – I don’t hate it, anyway, and that’s almost the same as like. But the handwriting is so played out, and I was never married to the color scheme to begin with, and the teal*** looks much, much different on, oh, 98.9% of monitors which are not mine (and different, in this case, is not better), and it’s just boring as fuck, and frankly I can barely stand to look at it.

There. Glad I got that out.

BUT I’m working on a sooper seekrit**** illustration/theme revamp thing which I might even finish sometime this century, assuming I don’t forget, lose interest, or die. So the blog love, it might come back. Maybe.

In the meantime I’m going to force myself to post, much in the way one forces small children to take a bite, JUST ONE BITE, OH MY GOD IT’S NOT MADE OF POISON and besides DON’T YOU LIKE CHICKEN?!?!!***** Because otherwise the not posting will turn into its own reason not to post, which will then compound my rabid dislike of my blog design, which will in turn develop feelers and teeth and wee little claws and eventually devour me in my sleep.

*I say ‘disappeared,’ but seriously, people, I am one of the most compulsively findable people I know.

**Other adjectives may apply.

***Yes, it’s supposed to be teal. Shut up.

****Not all that seekrit, apparently.

*****And the less said about that, the better.

Oh, I’ve been busy, and by “busy” I mean, of course, “compulsively signing up for every new service I run across like the addict I am.” It’s kind of funny, because in real life I’m not exactly a social butterfly, but online? Oh, online.

We’ve got, of course, the Facebook and the MySpace (which, despite its recent spate of updates, still makes me feel dirty), the Virb and the Plaxo and the Pownce. There’s the obligatory Tumblr, the lesser-known (but somewhat cooler) Swurl, Twitter and Jaiku for snippets of thought (updated, of course, through Ping.fm) and things like BrightKite, which I never use. But then there’s bookmarking (Ma.gnolia, and, coming in a distant second, the newly revamped Delicious) and event planning (Upcoming and Sonic Living to find stuff to do, Pingg for invites, because I hate evite with the heat of a thousand suns) and calendar syncing with the newly-free Calgoo. I keep my books on Shelfari and my crochet projects on Ravelry. There’s even a place called Mon.thly.info where you can chart your menstrual cycle online (…don’t worry, it’s not a “social” site & that link just brings you to the front page…although the idea with connecting with other women on my same cycle = SO VERY FUNNY TO ME).

And that’s just the online stuff. Don’t get me started – seriously, don’t – on the apps I’ve downloaded in the last week.

The point of this post is I’m back, people. Developers, lock up your betas: Cranky Mama is on the loose.

And hey, if any of you are on any of those, feel free to friend me.

Whatever. It’s redesigned. Took me all damn weekend, too.

I’ve also got video (whee!) down there in the lower right. Now you don’t just have to settle for me bitching and whining in print: you can also hear my dulcet voice! I know, you are overcome. Don’t speak.

There’s still some tweaking to do on the site design, so if you notice any particularly egregious errors please point them out in the comments. I apparently can’t be bothered to check the site on a PC, so IE people, I’m looking at you.