B-r-r-r.

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It is freezing in my little rat’s nest this morning. The first really noticeable snow of the season fell last night, and it looks pretty outside my back door.

Clicky:

Several schools in my area are already on a delay — there was lots of snow up Cleveland way, but it’s not too bad here at all. I don’t want a delay…middle school choirs need the rehearsal. Yikes.

It was so cold when I went to bed last night, I slept in a turtleneck, a sweatshirt, 2 pairs of socks, sweats and gloves. Yes, gloves. My little paws were freezin’. Must talk to the Thriller about this issue.

But, of course, there’s always this to calm my freezing, jittery carcass. Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, with just the right amount of vanilla DaVinci, and a double shot of whipped cream. Yummy.

Ok, back to reality. Hit the shower, then the street.

Aloha.

PS – Browns win! Browns win! (‘Bout time.)

Jing-a-ling jing

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I hear Christmas bells in my little pointy head. And not because I’ve been up to my beady eyeballs in Christmas music since mid-October (which I definitely have), but because I happened upon some fabulous toys yesterday while looking for potential prezzies for Jakey’s stocking.

But this isn’t just *any* group of toys; it’s the mother of all groups of toys. Toys we remember from our childhood, and from when our kids were little. Toys that bring back memories. Toys that are still completely boss.

Have a looksee at the following (this will probably bore the youngins, but the crusties will get all nostalgic for sure), and thank Santa for Hammacher Schlemmer (students, we are SO hitting that place in NYC next year) and Back to Basics Toys, who still see the kid under the graying or disappearing hair.

Bozo Bop Bag!

Or, if your tastes truly run to the high end…

So what were your favorite toys? I’ll bet we’ll have a lot of “Hey, I remember that one!” rejoinders.

============================

PS.

Dear Santa:

I really, really, really promise to be good, if only I could have this. And I promise to only use it at school, and never on Rousseau or Jakey or Helen or Lars. Promise. So please bring it to me, because I want it, and because I need it. And I want it.

Happy Monday.

How I Spent My Saturday

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Remember yesterday when I wrote about having a “lazy Saturday” and how life was “good” and I was looking forward to enjoying the day?

Well forget all that. Two hours after I posted, the world fell to crap and I hated everyone and everything — except you, of course.

I was really hating my web host. It started out as my fault. Well, I guess the whole thing was my fault, but that’s beside the point.

12 noon – I went into my domain’s control panel to enable an anti-hotlinking option. When I came out of it and went to the blog, everything except the homepage was gone. *poof* It was crazy. 404 errors all over the place. I went back in and disabled the anti-hotlinking script. No change. Everything was still bye-bye. I FTPd my week-old back-up. Nothin’ doin’. I just couldn’t figure out what was causing my categories, archives and posts to disappear all of a sudden. I spent the next hour scanning the WordPress forums for the answer that did not materialize.

1:30 p.m. – I thought I had it fixed, but as soon as I cleared my cache — curses! Feeling drained and like a failure after trying everything I knew six ways from Sunday, I broke down and submitted a help ticket to my web host (siteground.com — cool people). After going back and forth for an hour, the support rep, who was also stumped, offered the option of restoring my entire blog directory — 9 MB worth of posts, comments, themes, pictures, sounds, widgets and plugins — for $29.95.

So I parted with my $30 and they did the deed. Yay. I posted that everything was fixed. I went on a hunt for a good backup program.

Then, the apocalypse.

3:15 p.m. – I went into my WordPress dashboard and re-entered some information. There’s just one small detail: I entered one reference URL wrong. Ka-blam. Chaos. Locked out of the dashboard with no way back in to fix my stupid mistake. Curses! Back to the WordPress support forums. This time, I found an answer. I went into my PHP admin panel and rooted through the database until I found the wrong URL. I fixed it and saved it. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

5:30 p.m. – I tried logging back into the WordPress dashboard. My login link took me to some weird place, far, far away. Not to my dashboard panel. I sat in silence, jaw hanging open, staring at the screen. I could not believe it. What had I done? I couldn’t think of a single thing I could have ruined. I began a frantic search for a fix. In the meantime, code was broken and themes disappeared and there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. I finally got back to the login screen, but I couldn’t access it without doing a ceremonial rain dance first. The page I’d been using for nine months wasn’t logging me in correctly.

7:05 p.m. – I was just about ready to throw a tie rod. I couldn’t figure out why nothing was loading right; commands weren’t commanding.

And then I saw it.

I happened to compare my bookmark for the login site with the address in the location bar:

When Siteground did the restore, they changed the admin pages to load with the “www” intact — something I had never done since buying the domain back in February. Of course, they didn’t tell me this.

I changed my bookmark, and everything was fixed. Then I made some hot cocoa, sat downstairs with the Thriller, and thought homicidal thoughts.

And that, my fiends, was my relaxing Saturday.

Fink out.

RNF XIII

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Random Neuron Firing’s

It is both wonderful and weird to have a weekend “off.” I am a tired-but-happy rat indeed. It always feels this way after a show closes.

Therefore, it’s a lazy Saturday (at least during my “quiet time” in the early morning), which means I indulge myself in the geeky, guilty pleasure of research just for the heck, and random neuron firing’s. Life is good.

Did you know…

Forty years ago, we sent people to walk on the moon. But it took scientist’s until yesterday to find out why bleach kill’s germs.

I just happened to watch Britney Spears’s new “Womanizer” video. Dear God. It’s been a long, long time since I watched a music video. Had to crank my jaw shut. (I just deleted a honking huge rant from this space. I’ll save it for another time.) Strangely, after it finished, a Flash ad for the new Punisher movie appeared. It read: The corrupt will be punished. Heh. Actually, I was more offended by Brit’s android voice (an annoyingly overused effect that needs to die), and a range way too low. She will *never* be able to pull that off in live performance without mega-help. But hey, that’s just me with an opinion; nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

The best part about the video was the comment’s beneath it. Apparently, a guy posted a negative opinion about the song, and he was lambasted by other readers. His response:

Ok people, let’s come to an agreement. I promise to plead guilty as charged to being a loser with a very bad taste in music. I’ll accept that! I only ask that, when describing me, you use “you’re” instead of “your”. Please…I’m begging you, if you want to make a plausible argument (for anything) I ask only that you make it intelligible. In short, let’s at least sound smart. Thanks.

I don’t care if he does have lousy taste in music. I like him, even though his punctuation was outside the quote.

This is my one and only attempt at original art. Now you know why I am a musician. But I want this blown up poster-size so I can sell it and pay off my school loans. Ok, I know. Don’t get your hope’s up, right?

If any of my intentional mistakes in this post bothered you — welcome to my world. You know my suffering. If they didn’t bother you, or if (God forbid) you didn’t even notice them, then it’s time for you to go to school.

Happy Saturday. Heh.

PS an hour later — I was cleaning off my desk and found a receipt from a package the Thriller mailed for me the other day. At the bottom, it reads, “Tell us about your recent postal experience.” Well now…