I updated a WordPress theme, little knowing how completely it would lay waste to the appearance of my blog. Apparently, I need to employ child themes more effectively.
So the blog looks funkified. And I absolutely, positively do not have time to deal with it right now.
Avert your eyes, cover your face, whatever is necessary. I will deal with it.
Eventually… I swear.
I am easily annoyed. I’m also not particularly confrontational.
Put two-and-two together and it means any given day may find me teed-up and lacking an opportunity to vent. Especially if my husband’s at work and my mother isn’t available via phone.
I might write some relatively angry prose (which will probably never see the light of day) or even a tart tweet or two (out there for all to see), but I’m also finding a smidge of cathartic joy in dissing the foibles of my much-loved Pinterest.
I do adore Pinterest. But certain aspects of it, notably the idiosyncrasies of fellow Pinners, inspire my ridicule from time to time. Rather than suppressing, I find it healthy to offer up the infrequent DissPinterest image in order to lampoon a quirk or two.
Observe.
I’m sorry if that’s mean. I said I was easily annoyed. But I have to be real.
And really? “Lurve”?
You are killing the English language. Please stop.
Thank you.
Pinning has taken on a whole new meaning since my college days. (Okay, after my college days, which are waaaaay back when…)
Now that I spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing except providing my newborn daughter nutrition, comfort and maternal bonding, it’s nice to have something to do with my hands. I call it iNursing. (Thank you, Steve Jobs.)
But there are only so many times you can refresh Facebook within a given minute before you start to look bored. You might find yourself trying to telepathically urge your dearest friends to increase their social media presence: “Post something. Post now. Post something please. PLEASE.”
And you eventually realize your friends have jobs and families and other pursuits that preclude them serving as entertainment while you’re stuck on the couch for an hour twenty minutes forty-five minutes no thirty-minutes how ever long your baby chooses to keep you occupied.
Cue my new distraction.
So now I’m on Pinterest. Don’t ask me to try to explain it.
Okay, I’ll try.
Pinterest is sort of a virtual bulletin board for all the different things you’re interested in. Home decor, fashion, books, crafts and DIY, architecture, art, recipes, snarky humor — my personal favorite. It’s all up there, along with just about everything else. You create your own boards and follow your friends’ and/or strangers’ pins.
It is probably the best time suck on the internet to date. And I mean that in a good way. It’s a black hole. If I didn’t have three young children, I would sign on to Pinterest and stagger back into public view hungry and bleary-eyed about three days later. Maybe.
If you care to follow my boards, use the handy-dandy link in the right sidebar. (Disclosure: My boards are a mess, but it seems backward to reorganize my virtual house when the real one is still a disaster. Priorities.)
Ciao.
In more ways than one.
In addition to a rash of local earthquakes, I am dusting off the blog. A little brush up for the techy-parts — yikes, oodles to clean up — and then I plan to reintroduce myself and get back on speaking terms with the blogosphere.
Slowly, mind you. One little post at a time. Like adding carbs back into my diet.
If I was on a diet, that is.
Which I’m not.
At all.
Unless Oreos and Cheetos are part of some funky diet I’ve never heard of but which feeds the soul while slimming the waist and making one’s hair smooth and shiny.
And if there is such a diet, please let me know. Fast.
Until then, ciao.
I think almost any gal who’s started a blog over the last few years has flirted with the fantasy of becoming “The Next Pioneer Woman.”
I am under no such illusions.
There are some similarities between PW and me. When she refers to a trip into the “Big City,” she means the city where I live. Black Heels & Tractor Wheels reads a lot like my own (unwritten) love story — if you subtract cows, Chicago, Mike, linguini with clam sauce and pretty much everything else that makes it endearing and hilarious.
But that’s where the similarities end.
PW is, as we all know, very photogenic. She has a lovely, sweet voice that I’m sure is incapable of bellowing threats at her children or shrieking obscenities when she stubs her toe on a door jamb.
I, on the other hand? Surly. Lazy. Misanthropic. Crass.
Disturbed. Dark.
Sweetness and light? Not so much.
But on this fifth anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday, I am happy to report that I’ve forged a special, er… relationship with Pioneer Woman.
We have a great give-and-take. She gives me an Amazon Giftcard and I take a ridiculously giddy thrill in becoming a bonafide search term on her website.
(Please don’t tell me I’m pathetic. You already know how morose I was about my ill-fated brush with Joni Webb. And this actually came with money attached, so I think I have a right to be coasting on good-feelings for a couple days.)
In October 2010, I managed to eke out a “W” on PW’s Word Nerd Quiz. And got a massive hit of Amazon crack to feed my book/tech addiction.
Then last night, I happened upon PW’s Big Fat Movie Line Quiz. Although it had been open for more than an hour already (her quizzes are usually speed drills and I only won the Word Nerd because I knew every one of the answers without having to look up anything), I gave it a whirl. Because you know how much I adore movies.
And I’ll be darned. More Amazon crack.
Happy Birthday to me!
If I had a job, I’d probably be quitting to play blog sweeps full-time. But even if I never win another thing, I am now “immortalized” on the PW website.
Does it make me a creepy blog stalker if I think that’s kinda cool? As long as I don’t write her and ask for a lock of hair to weave into mine or a calf-nut to pray over or something else weird? Because I promise: I won’t do that.
PW, I swear my admiration is purely un-creepy and nonthreatening. I promise, I’m a very normal person.
Dark, yes. Disturbed, yes.
Surly, lazy, misanthropic, and crass? Okay, fine.
But mostly normal other than those completely harmless flaws.
Normal. I swear.
P.S. Okay, who am I really kidding here anyway?
Mother trucker. Spit. Son of a pitcher.
Stupid comment function. Or unfunction, as the case may be.
Thanks to my ongoing and seemingly insoluble troubles with the comment function of this blog — which I have still failed to replicate, despite hundreds of attempts — I missed a comment today that I will never get back.
A comment from one Joni Webb.
That’s right.
Joni.
Webb.
Joni Webb of Cote de Texas.
Cote de Texas: Joni's gorgeous design for her daughter's bedroom
Cote de Texas was probably the first design blog I ever read and — probably the reason I’m still reading design blogs with a dedication tantamount to obsession. Joni “introduced” me to Layla Palmer and Brooke Gianetti. Her Top Ten Design Elements series is responsible for my conversion to curtains. Her posts on Belgian design are the reason my keyboard has drool-stains on it. Oh, and then there’s the Sally Wheat kitchen phenomenon. Don’t even get me started.
Yes, Joni Webb.
You see, yesterday I left a comment to her post about a reader’s renovation on a foreclosed home in Houston.
She tried to leave a comment on my blog. My blog.
Tried.
And the mother trucking blog failed to accept her comment.
I don’t have a lot of brushes with celebrities — I met Amy Grant buying donuts in a Florida grocery store at 7 AM one summer — so this kind of thing cuts me to the quick.
I could have had a bonafide Joni Webb comment on my blog. Alas, ’twas not to be.
Instead, she sent me an email — I’m thinking about framing it — responding to my comment and (gulp!) complimenting me on my destination blinds.
Of course, the magic was tempered by the knowledge that I have no clue how I’m going to resolve my Bermuda Triangle issue with comments on this blog. WordPress is a free blogging platform (God bless ‘em!) but I keep hoping to find someone to whom I can pay actual cash money to find and fix the problem. Hello? Anyone? Please, exploit me. I’m getting desperate.
In the meantime, I’ve removed “email required” from the comment form, just in case it’s the culprit, which will probably mean lots and lots of
but better that than zero comments. It’s awful lonely out here in Blogland. I need the feedback.
On that note, please take this as my personal invitation to comment early and often. Your comment doesn’t even have to be relevant. Favorite song lyrics? Sure. Next week’s grocery list? Why not?
If, in the course of posting your preparation method for Blowfish Sashimi, you should have trouble in leaving your comment, please take a mo’ to email me and let me know. There’s also a hefty bounty on any screenshots that help me identify the problem.
Until then, I will try to tantalize you with frequent and compelling posts that will leave you powerless to avoid commenting. (Or at least emailing me if your comments fail. Which they seem almost sure to do.)
Dang it.
While I’m sure no one’s world has stopped turning because I’ve haven’t posted, I don’t want anyone to think I don’t appreciate you. Or that I’m not wracked with guilt.
Because I am. And I do.
But until Holiday Market is over, the time to post anything intelligible — or even profanity-free — is going to be scarce. Nevertheless, exciting things are being made as we speak.
As you can see from the (admittedly crappy) photo above, I’ve been designing and painting up a storm and I can’t wait to share the fun! If you’ll be in or around Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the weekend of November 4th through 7th, I hope you’ll come on by. Find event details and purchase tickets here. I am by no means the only merchant at Holiday Market, so it’s well worth a trip.
In the meantime, you can follow more timely posts with the inside scoop on my Facebook page. I’ll be posting updates about new items, plus a series of TICKET GIVEAWAYS, so stay tuned.
Until we meet again “or the case is solv-ed,”
As you may (or may not) have noticed, I finally delved deep enough into the coding of my blog to figure out how I screwed up my Google Friends Connect widget — and fixed it.
And now I’ve finally managed to remember to point it out to you. That’s it over there to the right. → → →
Consider this one of those times it’s okay to be a follower. Just click “Join This Site” and follow the prompts.
If you’re on the fence, you have no idea how ridiculously happy I’ll be to get followers who aren’t related to me. (Not that family member followers aren’t appreciated. But they kinda have to follow me — if for no other reason than to safeguard the rest of society.)
Disclaimer: There are no actual benefits associated with becoming a follower of my blog, at least as far as I know. On the plus side, there is also no prerequisite of any kind, such as signing over to me all your worldly possessions, getting audited, or drinking any Kool-aid you didn’t mix for yourself.
I run a very low-commitment cult.
With virtually no information to go on and no idea what I’m doing, I am, nevertheless, wading in to try and solve the comment mystery.
As such, parts of the blog may come and go, for which I apologize in advance. ‘Tis but, I hope, a temporary pain.
If I’m lucky, I may be able to get comments functioning properly again. In the meantime, please send me an email if you encounter an error while trying to make a comment.
Wish me luck!
I got an email from a very kind visitor to the blog who let me know she was having trouble commenting on a recent post.
I’ve gone over everything I know to do on WordPress — which would fill a thimble (with room for a shot of tequila) — and haven’t identified anything that looks fishy. Equally strange, although I haven’t been getting many comments lately, I had no trouble leaving my own random “testing” comments.
So, if you are of a helpful frame of mind and can spare the time, please leave a comment or two on this post or any other. (If you don’t have a comment on anything in particular, feel free to use “testing,” or something equally droll.) If, for whatever reason, the system doesn’t allow you to leave a comment, click here to shoot me an email.
Thank you, your help is greatly appreciated!
