To my blog.

I did something to something at some time on Saturday and blew up my site. A mere $15 and desperate e-mail to tech support later, and my site is back…to where it was a week ago before I got the comments working right.

Sigh.

But here I am, back on the dining room table, banging out code and loving it. Sort of like loving getting tattoos. You know? When you’re done, it’s a beautiful thing and you forget the pain. Sort of. Until you get the urge to do it again.

On another, yet just as typical note, the wonderful Paul Gallo of the house of Gallofornia was here visiting over the weekend. Yesterday, I skipped work and the master made a muslin for me. Yesh! I have my own, personal, hand-made original Gallo fitting muslin. I can’t wait to get into the sewing room with that bad boy and some of the yummy nummy knits I’ve been buying lately from Gorgeous Things and Emma One-Sock.

But enough about joy, it’s back to code and pain. Oh. Yeah. Pain. By request, the Number Two Surrogate Daughter’s finished tat:

Well, gentle readers. The headlines now link correctly to the perma-links for each entry.

The comments link to comments and allow you to enter same.

The categories link to categories.

And here are a couple of shots from yesterday’s excursion to Altered States:

Number two daughter’s new tat.

And my new gloriosa lily, at just over life size. It’s on my left wrist.

Well, more like pulling hen’s teeth. I have taken several days off of code writing since getting this back on line. Now I have to tweak and tease and make it pretty. Add some non-breaking spaces here and there. Get more links to work, because I don’t know about you, but I’m already tired of looking at my Dread 404 error page.

This weekend I have to go to Stuart, retrieve the Number 2 Surrogate Daughter from her summer of indentured servitude and bring her back to Miami. As a reward for packing up my parents’ home, and in addition to her pay, I’m taking her to my favorite tattoo parlor for some ink work. She’s getting a molecule, and I’m thinking about a wrist piece featuring this flower.

Star knows this and in fact is coming along for the ride. Whether I can talk her into some ink is unlikely. Unlikely like me voting Republican kind of unlikely, which is to say when ice skating is Hell’s favorite sport.

Well, sweetiedarlings, was it worth the wait? There are still a number of elements that I haven’t gotten working smoothly, yet, specifically, my photo blog is still down, and comments can be a little wonky*, but here it is.

The new site, on a new server, using a new CMS. I only had to call tech support once, and if I’d been keeping a notebook of all the things I’d tried that failed (which I started doing after talking to tech support) I wouldn’t have had to call. It was a matter of variables, and I thought I’d tried every possible string, but I hadn’t. Once I started keeping notes, things went a little faster.

Anyway, the extended link isn’t up and working, so for now, all entries will be in the main window, but still and all. People, I have been pounding code since I crawled out of bed from the bronchial infection. I’ve been sitting at my keyboard from the moment I get home until I get to bed, and that time has been pushed back to 2 a.m. and beyond on the weekends. Tonight, the RLA and I went to the grocery store after work, bought something to eat, and then it was on to the code war.

And at 11:19 p.m. on July 30, 2007, I moved all the files, reset the path and sent this bad puppy out into the interwebs.

Did you miss me while I was gone?

* Hint for the comments. Try clicking on the title of the entry. Now that the main push is over, I can fine tune the code. Any help is welcome.

It’s not like I’m not trying. And it’s not like I haven’t been saving and notating and blah blah blah. For hours and hours and hours on end. Till 2 in the morning. Before breakfast. After work. But still, this new site isn’t pulling from its data base. Isn’t dynamic. Isn’t worth the pixels its printed on.

The other night, I woke up at midnight (gone to bed at 8 with this stupid lung infection) and couldn’t go back to sleep. The RLA was in the living room, watching “Meat Loaf: To Hell & Back” on VH1. While it wasn’t dreadful, it wasn’t good, per se. The guy who played Jim Steinman  reminded me a lot of the actor who plays Lucious Malfoy in the Potter series*, and one thing leading, as it so often does with me, to another, I ended up on the IMDB looking for both.

Which, of course, this being the web, led me happily from site to site until I ended up at Jim Steinman’s blog. YESH! He has a blog.

Which led to another half an hour of poking into various links and sub-sites and sub-sub-sites.

(Fade to Black)

VOICE OVER:

It was long ago and it was far away, and I was living in New York City. I had a friend, of sorts, an actor by the name of Richard Dunne, who had starred in the Miami road production of EQUUS. I went to see his band play at some dive in the Village and he was all excited because he had auditioned for something exciting…a musical based on Peter Pan.

(Dissolve to present)

I never really saw Richard after that, and never heard what happened with that play. Over the years, whenever Meat Loaf made yet another return to the music scene, there would be a story about Jim Steinman, and maybe 10-12 years ago I think I heard something about a musical he had done back in the 70s about Peter Pan. I remember thinking then that that had probably been what Richard had been so worked up about.

Today, in all the digging, somewhere in the Steinman site, is a scan of the original program from the Kennedy Center production of “Neverland” and starring in the role of Baal (the Peter Pan character) was Richard Dunne. And there are even photos.

Huh. Sometimes these interwebs are amazing things, are they not?

* Zachary Throne is definitely hotter than Jason Isaacs, though when placed side by side.