Category Archives: Funny

live from a new web host

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In case you missed the drama about my website last week, here’s the short version: my website went down for 3 days, and when it finally came back online, all of my data was gone. Every last entry since I started this blog 6 years ago? Gone. So I was a tiny bit distraught, as you might imagine.

While I was freaking out, I wrote about it on Twitter, and within a few minutes, I got a response from a web hosting company called PinchHost offering to help me. They’re a new company, and didn’t have much of a proven track record that I could find online, but I appreciated how fast they responded. Especially considering that the customer service at my old (then-current) web hosting company, Globat, was always somewhat lacking. It’s basically impossible to get anyone on the phone, they take an extremely long time to respond to email support tickets, and while yes, they do have support via live chat, the techs aren’t exactly helpful. Usually the only response I get is, “We’re so sorry for your inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.” Not exactly top-notch problem-solving.

But really, my main problem with Globat is the availability. They were fine when I first signed up a few years ago, but over the past year or so, my website crashed a lot, because I seemed to always be under Denial of Service attacks by spammers. So that’s my main beef with them – if you can’t keep my website running, I’ll go host it elsewhere.

Meanwhile, during that whole incident where I had no blog entries at all? I threw a temporary WordPress blog here that you might’ve seen if you happened to click over here. On it, I mentioned that my last manual backup of my website was from May 2008, hence my panic. (So all the entries about selling our house, moving to North Carolina, the holidays, Catie’s 2nd birthday? GONE.) Then the tech from PinchHost – the same guy who responded to me on Twitter – left me a comment telling me that he had gone through Google’s cache of my archives and found about 100 entries from May 2008 to now, and saved them to a zip file for me to download.

Which, DUDE. I wasn’t even a customer of his, and he did all that legwork for me? Yeah ok, they’re a new company, but with that type of customer service, I’ll take a chance on them. So I switched over yesterday, and it was basically seamless. I might be imagining it, but my website even seems to load faster now. Obviously, I am very happy with them so far.

Of course, the hard part now is cancelling my account with Globat. They’re notorious for having a crappy billing department, so I know I’m in for a fight. Example: over the past few years I’ve gotten over 100 emails from them telling me about new offers, and unless I clicked the link to opt out, they automatically charged my credit card for the upgrade, regardless of whether or not I wanted it. If I called afterward to say, “hey, you billed me for this, and I don’t want it, so give me my money back,” they’d try to hem & haw and squirm their way out of refunding me the money for a service I’m not using. So, yeah. I’ve gotta get my Don’t You Dare Try to Eff With Me, Buddy hat on and let them have it.

But the fact that I’m now basically done with them and have a cool new hosting company that actually responds to my problems promptly and seems to give a damn about my user experience? It kind of makes me feel like one of these dancers.

(If you haven’t seen that yet, you’re welcome. I’ve watched it about four times already and I smile like a moron at my computer and get all misty-eyed every time. What can I say, I’m a sucker for “The Sound of Music.”)

bye-bye, boon

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Random blog note: Since I always type Cate’s name on this blog as Cate, but I almost never actually call her that in real life, henceforth I’ll be typing her name as Catie, since that’s the name she responds to, and how she refers to herself. Really, the only time I ever call her Cate is when it’s prefaced by Baby – because Baby Cate sounds like “babycakes,” and I think that’s sort of a cute nickname.
[/end random blog note]

Today, Catie and I went to the grocery store to get a few things. This particular store has free balloons for kids in the floral department, and they are a huge hit with my child. And you know, anything that makes shopping with a toddler easier is just fine with me. So we grab a balloon – or as Catie calls it, “a boon!” – and happily went about our grocery shopping.

We head out to the parking lot, and I held onto the balloon because it was windy outside. They typically anchor the balloons by tying them to a lollipop, but whoever was working there today must’ve been a moron who thought that a tiny piece of scotch tape would be enough to secure the balloon’s string to the lollipop. Bet you can tell where this story is going, huh?

I opened the driver’s side car door and pushed the balloon through to put it in the back seat, so Catie could play with it when I put her in the car. (She was still sitting in the shopping cart while I did this.) I accidentally left my (front seat! driver’s side! NOT rear passenger!) car door open, and went to start putting groceries in the trunk.

Catie suddenly started screaming and crying, “Boon! A boon!! MY BOOOOONN!!!!” She just went totally apesh*t shrieking about her balloon. I was like, what the hell, child, you just saw me put it in the car, you know it’ll be there when you get in the back seat, just like it always is, every time we get a balloon from the store. Then I finally turned around to look at her and I realized she was pointing up, and… yeah. Her pretty purple balloon was floating away into the clear blue autumn sky.

Apparently a gust of wind came through that was strong enough to rip off the Scotch tape, because the lollipop was still in the back seat, and the balloon went floating away through my open car door. By the time I saw it, it was higher than the grocery store’s rooftop and halfway across the parking lot, so there was no way I could catch it.

I calmed her down, and told her I was sorry, but that balloon had to go bye-bye, but we’d go get her another one that could come home with us. I told her to wave goodbye to the balloon, and she very sadly waved and said, “bye-bye, boon.” It was quite possibly the most pitifully sad, mournful “bye-bye” you have ever heard in your life.

As soon as I got the groceries loaded into the car, we went straight back in and got her another balloon, exactly the same color as the previous one. She was happy, and held a death grip on her balloon’s string the whole way home.

The whole incident reminded me of the comedian Brian Regan – and of course I can’t find a clip of this on YouTube. He has a joke about how kids lose their minds when they lose a balloon, and adults can’t understand their distress because there’s nothing comparable for an adult. He said to imagine if you took out your wallet and it started to float away. “Calm down, it’s just a wallet, we’ll get you another one.” “I don’t want another one, I want that one! That one was mine!” Yeah. It’s sorta just like that.

lazy Friday blog entry

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* Linda’s getting married tomorrow! And can I just say, I am so glad she’s a July bride and not August, because this is going to be one of the last times I get to see most of my favorite Seattle people in one place.

* Guess who’s pregnant? Woo-hoo, more baby cousins!

* Lizardbreath’s baby girl won’t sleep. Moms of toddlers (or former toddlers): head over and give whatever advice you’ve got.

Oh, and thank you Angie for telling me about FailBlog. This made me laugh so hard last night that I snarfed milk out of my nose while I was eating a bowl of cereal.

fail owned pwnd pictures
see more pwn and owned pictures

(Apparently my blog columns are too narrow because the whole picture won’t fit there – same problem I have with embedded YouTube videos. Oh well, you get the idea.)

Happy weekend, everybody.

dull dream post

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I try not to write about my dreams too often, because I figure it’s probably really boring for other people to read. And honestly, I have no idea if anyone is going to think that this is funny other than me. But here goes.

Sunday afternoon, Cate and I took a nap together in my bed. (Dave is totally going to call me out for saying “my bed” instead of “our bed,” because I say “my” in reference to lots of things that technically belong to both of us. But he wasn’t there, so in this case, use of the word “our” makes it sound like the bed belongs to Cate and me, and it’s just confusing. Whatever. We were in the king-size bed in the master bedroom. Sufficiently overexplained? I thought so.)

In the dream, we lived in this enormous old mansion. It was at least four stories tall, and had all sorts of weird hidden staircases and rooms in strange places. Sort of like the Winchester Mystery House, I guess. I knew it was haunted, but I knew where the haunted areas were, so we just stayed out of those parts of the house, and figured we were ok.

Oh, random aside: Dave wasn’t Dave in the dream. The guy playing the role of my husband looked familiar, and I knew his voice, but I couldn’t place him. Finally it clicked and I said (in the dream), “Oh hey, look, I’m married to movie star Keanu Reeves!” Not just Keanu Reeves, but Movie Star Keanu Reeves. Like his middle name is Keanu. It was just kinda funny, is all I’m saying.

Anyway, at some point I had to go into one of the haunted parts of the house. No reason why, just dream logic, I guess. I left Cate with my brother and sister because my husband Keanu was off doing lord-knows-what. I walked into the haunted room, and suddenly I felt something pressing against my back and I felt a hand grab ahold of my hair. I had a split-second of absolute terror, where I was convinced that the ghosts had gotten me…

Then I woke up. And I realized that what I felt in my back were Cate’s feet, and she was the one pulling my hair, trying to wake me up. Yeah, it’s weird, I know. It was just funny/strange to go from feeling completely petrified to waking up and realizing that, in fact, the “ghost” is your 11 month-old child who has declared that naptime is officially over.

Oh, and while we’re talking about dreams, I also keep having lots of childbirth dreams lately, but I think that’s because Cate’s first birthday is coming up later this month. You know, big milestone thing, the brain starts thinking about what was going on this time last year, etc. Still, I wish that my subconscious would knock it off, because they’re kinda freaking me out.

her taste in music clearly comes from Dave's side

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The other night, I was watching a “Will & Grace” rerun on Lifetime (they apparently don’t use that Television for Women tagline anymore, which makes me a little sad because it was totally appropriate). I wasn’t really watching it, it was more just background noise while I was playing with Cate. During one of the commercial breaks, an ad for those ugly old-lady bras came on. You know, the 18-hour things that are 100% functional, 0% sexy? Yeah, those.

So, the ad is on, and I start singing along with it, because I’m stupid like that. Cate laughs and laughs. I try singing it again a few minutes later, and again she thinks it’s funny. Three days later, every time I sing the song, she thinks it’s an absolute riot.

Want to try to guess the song?

You’ll never guess.

“I’m Every Woman.”

I kid you not. Apparently Baby Girl likes her Chaka Khan. Who’da thunk it?

And because I’m a huge dork and all I know is the chorus, I’m actually downloading the song on iTunes right now so I can sing the whole thing for her.

Multimedia Christmas

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I really had to give up on the idea of having my house in perfect condition before my family arrived. Let’s face it, there isn’t much you can do when you have no electricity for nine days. I couldn’t vacuum, couldn’t do laundry, I had to wash dishes by hand… hell, I couldn’t even charge up the drill so I could hang the curtains in the guest room. (Although technically that would’ve been Dave’s job, because I don’t drill.)

So I thought to myself: you know, my parents’ house is often cluttered (not dirty, they just have lots of stuff), my brother probably wouldn’t notice any degree of messiness, and the only reason my sister would ever go nine days without power in Manhattan would be in the event of some sort of nuclear disaster, so she couldn’t really judge me either. (Not that she would.) So what the hell. I did what I could with the house, and let the rest of it go. It wasn’t easy for me, since I tend to be a little OCD-ish about those types of things, but I tried to just relax and be happy that they were all able to fly here for the holidays.

Once I got to that point, I had a pretty awesome time.

You can see the rest of the photos from Christmas here.

Oh, and speaking of photos, since I’m able to use the scanner now (ah, the simple joys of electricity!), here’s my favorite photo from the ultrasound last week.

Have you ever seen such a perfect little profile? I think not. And those lips! I cannot wait to meet this kid in person.

Oh, and just to complete this very visually-oriented post, here’s my first experience at uploading a video on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRX0rt49reU

(If that embedding trick doesn’t work, you can see it here.) Some background: we were cooking Christmas Eve dinner, and my sister and I were trying to find some uptempo, dance-y music to keep us energized while we were working. So yes, that is in fact “Bootylicious” and the N’Trance remix of “Stayin’ Alive” that you hear. Our iPods might be a bit dated, but they’re fun. And it’s proof that at any of our family gatherings, all of the action really does happen in the kitchen.

And if nothing else, when Baby Girl decides in fifteen years or so that she wants to sue her parents for emancipation because we are certifiably insane, this ought to help her case in court. I mean for heaven’s sake, just look at how her parents were behaving only weeks before her birth. Atrocious.