I spent the weekend in bed. Sounds delightful, but it wasn't. I was propped up with caffiene, pillows and snacks. I had the laptop on my lap and no less than four books on writing PHP code piled up next to me. I only got up to eat and empty.

What I have to show for it, besides a crater at the head of the bed where I was sitting for 36 hours, is a new shell for the EE site. I blew up the first one. By accident. I have ported all my entries from here and the photoblog over to EE and will probably have to do it again with different parameters set so that I don't have to reformat all the line breaks.

The photo entries don't port well at all.

The hack I found for the more jump (the one you just took) doesn't work. But it does show the entended entry... just all in the first window.

The photo gallery page hack may or may not work, since I can't seem to get my photos in it. I need to go back and try to redirect the program to correctly find my photo directory.

I'm beginning to think this might be easier on a (ick) PC than my mac, but that's just too bad for me. It's going to work on the mac or I'll die trying to make it work.

In the meantime, I'll just keep on writing here, because the anticipated switch is going to be a lot slower than I thought. Dammit.

I know that I said I was going to flip the switch over to Expression Engine, and really, I did install it and tried to customize it and everything, and really, the spam comments are driving me crazy on this platform, but Jeezus H. Christ, that is one tough program. Completely unintuitive, as far as I can tell. No manual to speak of, no third party books at all, at least not that I can find on Amazon.

Sure they have forums and tech support, but I'm a hands on kind of girl, and this is just blowing my circuits all to hell.

So. Anybody out there an EE guru who wants to have some long, meaningful e-mail exchanges with me this weekend, as I try to make the switch once and for all?

I'm cutting bias strips to make bias tape bindings on five quilts.

I totally hate bias strips. I hate cutting them, stitching them into ridiculous yards and yards and yards of bias tape. I hate pressing them, sewing them and finishing them by hand. And yet.

I only use bias bindings on my quilts. Why? Masochism? Devotion to a tradition I gleefully split from when I piece and quilt by machine? I really have no idea why I do it.

I just do. Two of the five are spoken for. The other three will be going up for sale, soon.

The first of my auctions are up on e-bay. Knitting patterns from the 40s for babies. Knit and crocheted hot pants patterns from the 70s. Emboridery kits in the original packaging from Germany, looking like the 60s...linen tea towels, no less.

There are only five up, so far, but feel free to look and even bid. You KNOW you want those hot pants.

I have this phrase running through my head, and I've been giving it a lot of thought. Turning it around, looking at it from all angles.

The phrase is "unconditional love".

I know that I loved my parents unconditionally, but to be quite honest, it took a long time to get there, and a lot of therapy to achieve a place in myself where I could do that. I think that to truly love unconditionally, one has to love oneself the same way, and first.
In the context of my current contemplation of the phrase, I wonder, however, about the difference between unconditional love and enabling. Is there a difference? Is it so easy to mistake the two?

What are the differences? Unconditional love means accepting the flaws of the other. Enabling means, maybe, ignoring them. Or... or what? Approving them?

Is youth a flaw? Is it possible to be young and not blame your inexperience on others? At what point does youth become adulthood? Is it age or knowledge or experience, or just a mental switch?

Are you an adult when you think you are? Or when others look at you and say you are? The late, great Satchel Paige said "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?" By that accounting, my own age is somewhere around the mid-twenties. But the calendar tells me otherwise. My bank accounts, my responsibilities, my life-style choices, the amount of time I have left in the workforce, all tell me that I am fast approaching senior citizen status. And yet, in my head? I still heart rock and roll. I still like to go out and shake my groove thang. I have no understanding of the fact that my knees won't let me ride my bike for 20 miles at a clip.

I graduated college on my 21st birthday, and had no doubt that I was an adult. I had a degree, I was of legal age in any country on the planet, and it was time to leap into the world and see how strong my wings were. In hindsight, of course, I was still green and in many ways still the child I had been when I entered school. But I didn't think so then.

In going through my parents house, I have found letters that I wrote them from that far away point in my life. I told them not to worry about me. I told them that I believed that my wings were fully fledged and that I would fly. I told them that I knew I was green, but I was hopeful. I believed in myself. (God only knows why. Maybe I was high when I wrote the letter.)

I still believe in myself. The world has never shaken that belief out of me. It has tried, it has shaken it to the core, but it never shook it out. I love myself unconditionally, which means that I know my flaws. I even try to improve them. But there are things about myself I cannot change. There are other things I could, but would not. The rest? It's all just smoke and mirrors.

Jeffrey-the-Pinheaded-Shmoo won.

To paraphrase him: This TOTALLY sucks.

Uli was robbed. Laura was robbed. Michael was mugged on his way to Bryant Park by some thugs frontin' Yo Hoochie Momma's House O' Bling.

He was an odious, mean-spirited hack and still, he won. Ugh. PR may have just jumped the shark. I knew I couldn't trust that whole redemption edit. And one final thought: what's the point of rehab if you are still a loathesome twat?

On the other hand, part of me rejoices in the thought that the too-cool-for-rules Jeffrey-the-Pinheaded-Shmoo will have to spend the next year being mentored by people he thinks are sell-outs and hacks, designing pret a porter for women who are shaped more like his baby mamma than the swizzle sticks in skinny pants he so clearly prefers.

Still and all, the fact is that he made an older woman cry, just because he didn't like her daughter, and I don't care how they paint Angela's mom as a whiny, passive-aggressive; the fact is that he gloated about it to the daughter and bragged about what an atrocity he made her mother wear; he heaped incessant hateful abuse on Laura (Why doesn't that woman have a stroke and die?; Moth balls and chicken soup, etc.); the constant "I'm a genius and the rest of these guys can't hold my crusty jock strap"... all of that makes me despise him.

I know a lot of folks out here in the blogosphere, especially on the Bravo site and on Blogging Project Runway think that the producers demanded he win for ratings. Maybe. Maybe not. But the editing surely didn't help the viewers believe that JTPS won for his show.

Uli and Laura were both praised for having 12 pieces that made a cohesive collection. Jeffrey-the-Pinheaded-Shmoo was criticized for not. He ran over budget and had to give up the blonde Barbie wigs. Michael Kors rolled eyes over that. Fern Malis pointedly told Uli not to leave Miami, that her work could go in stores tomorrow and race out the doors. Nina Garcia said that someone stopped her at the tents to ask where they could buy/contact Uli. Of all the interviews of celebs and fashionistas shown, only one preferred JTPS's collection.

And as for that collection, all I can say is sand-blasted, acid-washed denim is fashion-forward? Would you really trust a man who dresses himself in plaid cuffed manpris to dress you?

In the words of my beloved, departed grandfather (a tailor): Feh. Dun't vaste yer money.