Today:

• Beignets from Violetta
• Mallhopping with the kid, who insisted on getting a plush Koopa Troopa (he’s been on a Super Mario kick)
• Ice cream using the gift certificate I won in the Metro Parent drawing
• Dangling our feet in the fountain at Director Park

It was a pretty good day.

You know what I’ve been doing lately? Listening to music. I know, right?

Apparently, left to my own devices and devoid of outside influences, the stuff I choose to listen to is…pretty goddamn emo. Not that I’m downloading emo crap from iTunes or anything, it’s just that apparently the songs I like are all full of hopelessness and despair. And occasionally elephants.

(more…)

SO I KNOW you have been ON THE EDGE OF YOUR SEAT to hear how I resolved the Sidebar Issue, and I am here to report: the Tumblr idea has paid off. I now have a streaming sidebar again, yay! Plus this time it doesn’t just disappear into the ether after it leaves my site, which: bonus.

I haven’t gotten the little icons back up (and I don’t even know if I’m going to bother with them, except that I love my lovely icons and will miss them if they are not there) and I may still re-code the site because I’m like that. But at least my sidebar isn’t sad anymore.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Here’s what I told Twitter:

Apparently my problem isn’t depression, it’s the fact that every 6mos or so I have a good day. The day after that? SUCKS.

Which pretty much sums it up, so I’ll just move on to the related subject of my sidebar, and how it doesn’t so much have anything in it anymore. Like my head. But unlike my head, the problem lies entirely at the feet of Yahoo! Pipes. You know, a service wherein I painstakingly set up a series of feeds and did magical linking things to make them output a certain way, and then even more painstakingly hacked my way through several PHP tutorials in order to display that output on my site? Yes, those pipes. The ones that are now outputting nothing.

I know, I know, it’s my fault for relying on a third-party service. And clearly I’ve learned my lesson and have not spent the entire night trying to bend Tumblr to my will in order to maybe use it to display my feeds in my sidebar (which…just in case anyone is deeply curious, does not work).

SO NOW I am going to need to re-code my entire fecking theme since I no longer have a lovely and clever lifestream-y sidebar. I WILL GET RIGHT ON THAT.

Not So got me a set of knitting needles for Christmas, which of course meant that I rewarded him with crochet. Hey, knitting is hard.

Anyway I crocheted this great neck warmer using the Unisex Neck Sock pattern by Wendy C. Brown (add it to your Ravelry queue, for serious). I used Cascade- hey, y’all, if you’re not into this sort of thing, for the love of god, stop reading now. I’m not going to talk about anything else in this post. Anyway: Cascade 220 Superwash in this fabulous slate heather that’s almost black & is just crazy cute. As is my husband, amirite?

Anyway he loves it, and can often be seen wearing it on his head. Because he’s a maverick, see? (Also it keeps his ears warm.) I’m really happy with the way this came out and am totally going to make one for myself. Except with buttons. Because how cute would that be?

OK, so, I got a new domain name. I’m sure I’ll have something adequately witty and enchanting to say about that at some point in the near future, but for now I just wanted to reassure my viewing public that yes, you’ve got the right site, and no, I didn’t bother to change the theme yet, okay?

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

So you’re all on the edge of your seats wondering how the birthday thing went, right? I kept you waiting out of sheer wickedness. Wickedness, and the fact that I am both lazy and sick with a cold. What’s up with all these damned colds? They’ve been rotating through our house like some sort of white elephant gift, passing from one person to another and, frankly, making me rather pissed off. I AM THROUGH BEING SICK, DO YOU HEAR ME? Also, I am running out of tissues.

Anyway: the party was a success, if a little under-attended (one group of guests had apparently been sure it was the next weekend, at which point they e-mailed me going “Um, did you know that your party was a week ago? You probably did.” Which was funny, and I may have LOLed, but only very quietly and to myself). The kid had a fabulous time. He helped me decorate the littlest cupcakes (which he decided were meteors). No one else had any idea what the cake/cupcake spread was supposed to be, which was fine. I guess.

Also a (qualified) success: the rocket softie. I made some modifications to a pattern I found in One Yard Wonders (which is a pretty fabulous book, if you’re into that sort of thing) and it turned out kind of awesome. The kid likes it, which was the important part.

In other crafty news, I finally slipcovered the Fabulous!Rocking!Glider! (the exclamation points are to emphasize the fact that I love the lovely glider and am not going to get rid of it despite the increasing impracticality of having it in our house). A favorite snuggling spot for both kid and cats, the F!R!G! was sort of disgustingly stained and matted with cat hair, and since the cushions were both a) cream-colored and b) upholstered, cleaning it was a pain. ENTER CRAFTY MAMA, with her IKEA fabric and her barely-passable sewing machine skills! Given that I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing, I think it turned out pretty well.

All those other grand ideas I had? Not going to happen. I was totally going to make garland, and ornaments, and stuff. But what did I do instead? I caught a cold. (I did make gingerbread men. I’m not dead.)