Well shut my mouf and stuff it with hush puppies. My purple boxes quilt has shown up today on the front page of Etsy as a hand-picked favorite.

And yesterday I went to temple and said kadish and heard the shofar and said my prayers and didn’t cry. In fact, it made me feel good to be back at services and I realized how much I miss the community of my temple. Next week is Kol Nidre, and I can’t wait.

I believe that this is going to be a good year.

Lord knows that I am the first to point fingers and laugh at the misfortunes of others, but not today. Today I am going to tell you something: I fear for Britney Spears. I have put her on my personal suicide/early death watch.

I saw her performance at the VMAs and it was so pitiful and sad that I could barely laugh at Sara Silverman’s routine. I did laugh, though. Inappropriate or not, cheap shots or not, the woman was funny. But Britney wasn’t funny. Nor was she there. She looked lost. She couldn’t walk in those heels, either because she was somehow impaired (drunk, high, downed out, a and b only, a and c only, all of the above) or because she somehow didn’t practice enough in them. Her movements weren’t the crisp dance movements of just a couple years ago, they were flacid and half-hearted. She didn’t seem to know the routine. Poor thing looked like a deer caught in the headlights.

And while personally, I could just kill for that body (not, you know, actually work out for it though), it wasn’t a body that should have been on display in that costume. Take a tip from her royal highness, Miss Cher, and if you want to expose yourself, do it through sheer mesh and under a shit load of sequins. Nobody will ever notice anything, and you will look Fabulous.

But poor Miss Spears. If, as the tabloids say, she is insecure about herself, this fire storm of “Fatty, Fat, Fat” and “She Can’t Dance” could put her over the edge. She has displayed enough self-destructive habits, displayed enough bad judgement, that one has to wonder (well, this one has to wonder) if she could totally self-destruct. Suicide? Overdose? A simple slip behind the wheel and over the high side of the PCH?

I hope someone gets her help. I doubt it will happen. But I think I’ve finally seen my fill of this particular train wreck. I’ll just turn the page.

It is no shock to constant readers of this blog that I am a gear head. A gear head from the first. And an aberration in my family, where nobody knows anything about cars. Well, there is a legendary uncle on my father’s side who used to come to Florida for the horses, arriving in some flash convertible with golf clubs in the back and leaving by hopping the train… but I digress.

Anyway. Cars. Love them. Love to drive them. Love to look at them. Loved this article about them.

The 50 Worst Cars of All Time

I actually had some sewing room time this weekend, and some lolling about in the pool with the dogs. I started another tallis, and it should be ready for the holiday later this week. Tomorrow night I have to bake a honey cake. The RLA asked if I would be so kind as to make the traditional, dense, brick-like version this year, and I will happily oblige.

Later dollinks.

The first line of Girlyshoes t-shirts is now for sale at my Cafe Press shop. The earlier version of the “I’d Rather Be Widowed” shirt was recalled, and all my shirts are now 100% image-free. Slogan shirts with the best snark from yours truly. Do you wonder about people’s taste level? Let them know with the “Got Taste?” shirt. Tired of hearing those random cell phone conversations? We have the shirt for that, too.

The Girlyshoes T-shirt Shop

And by the way, The Insufferable Mr. Pimple took my e-mail to the Human Resources office to complain about me. They told him it wasn’t an HR issue, and if he had a problem to talk to me directly. That’s three for three: his boss, my boss and the employee rights person. Has he spoken to me? No.

I spent the day so far searching in my files for more pictures, scanning pictures, cropping and editing pictures and finally, uploading pictures. There are lots more quilts and a knit bag over there in the Tante Leah section.

This is how it works: from the Tante Leah home page, linked over there on the right, the photos become only the Tante Leah photos. They are divided by category into Quilts, Knits, Tallitsim, and Beading. Clicking on the home page link from any Tante Leah page will take you to the Tante Leah home page. There are overview pages about the quilts, etc.

Happy browsing.

I did it. The Tante Leah pages are all up. The links all work. The categories work. The Photoblog is working.

Tomorrow?

A dip in the pool, and a little sewing.

And lots, lots, lots more photos in the Tante Leah section and the Photoblog.

Tonight? Martinis all around.

In this case, and believe me, I am as sick of these entries about the trials and tribulations of code writing as you all are, I have achieved a small break through in the photo pages, i.e.: the formatting is displaying more or less correctly, and the categories are right, even though the photos themselves don’t actually display… yet…but now I’ve lost the customization of my technorati tag cloud.

I’m sick of this code war. I’m sick of not sewing.

The RLA is facing losing his two classes this semester because the full-time faculty’s classes didn’t fill, so they have the right to usurp his. Of course, his classes fill because they are advertised as being his classes, and students line up to study under him. Duh. That’s why his classes are full and the full-timers aren’t.

I went to visit my mother this weekend, and she was…not alert, to say the least. But the aides laughed and told me that she’s a good eater, and she’s gaining a little weight.

At work, there is a storm on the horizon and change in the air, and none of it is good.

But tomorrow? Tomorrow is another day, and Star and the Surrogate Daughters and I are going to go to a Marlins game after work. They are playing (in the miserable cement heat sink of Dolphins’ Stadium) the Atlanta Braves. It is one of those amusing quirks of baseball that no matter how deep in the cellar the Fish are, nor how high in the standings the Braves are, that more times than not, the Marlins will beat the Braves. And that, gentle readers, is Why I Love Baseball.

Well, the University of Miami has decided, after a long, hard look at the money, to abandon the historic Orange Bowl and move to Dolphin Stadium. While this sucks and is typical of the wanton disregard for history and tradition that is traditional in the Magic City (Miami), there is a silver lining here, maybe, and that is this: since the OB is certain to be fodder for redevelopment, maybe, just maybe, this centrally located space can be turned into a baseball stadium for my sorta-beloved Florida Marlins.

The Marlins are stuck playing in the nasty cement heat sink that is Dolphin Stadium, and while being a cement heat sink isn’t so bad if you are playing football in what passes for the winter, it is absolute death in August for baseball. Not to mention the fact that the stadium does not convert well, with wonky corners in left field.

A few years ago I had figured out the perfect place for the baseball stadium, but nobody would listen to me and today that spot is occupied by something called “Jungle Island”, but which used to be Parrot Jungle. Of course, and again, this being Miami, the original Parrot Jungle was located in a tropical paradise of banyan trees, lagoons and 50-year old native plantings, but the neighbors complained about the free range Macaws and the riff-raff who came from out of the neighborhood to have breakfast with the flamingos and cockatiels, so the Parrot Jungle moved to a barren fill island in Biscayne Bay and had to build a tropical jungle from scratch. And that caused a drop off in attendance (well, the heat, the lack of shade and foliage and the rise in entrance fee from $10 to $35) and so now the newly-renamed Jungle Island is sort of struggling, when it could have been a beautiful baseball stadium with boat dockage for the sky boxes, and a view of the downtown skyline, and the wet dream of the tourist industry: an aerial view of the turquoise waters of Biscayne Bay surrounding the lush green of a real grass diamond, with the white cruise ships in the channel… telecast during a spring training day game while the snow is six feet deep in the rust belt.

Hey, I’m not bitter. Nobody listens to the prophet in his own time. Anyway. Now there is the very real possibility of a domed stadium in (almost) downtown. Will it happen? Not bloody likely, this IS Miami after all, and what better use for an obsolete (but not really) sports facility than overpriced housing in an over-saturated market?

I’ll give you odds that the Orange Bowl does not become the Marlins’ state of the art, retro-but-domed palace of play, but instead becomes Orange Bowl Towers, a state of the art condo tower with studios starting at $200,000.

The comments work. The links work. The search works. The archives work. Every entry has at least one category assigned to it. Whew. That was a lot of code and cigarettes, but it’s all up and running.

Now for the next part: the static pages, where I’ll put all Tante Leah’s Handmades, at least those which are part of the portfolio and already sold. This means going back into the Expression Engine dark forest. I’ll be searching for clues and pre-written code. I’ll be reading every page ever written about Expression Engine (all ten of them). I’ll be going back and forth between print outs of code that looks like it should work and the pages I’ve built from that code that don’t work. I’ll be editing code and I’ll be tearing my hair out. I’ll be cursing and testing and testing and cursing. And cursing and drinking and smoking and testing. It’s not really live, but you can take a peek at the first couple of pages by clicking on the link over there on your right. (Tante Leah’s Handmades)

And then, when that’s all working, it’ll be on to the re-imagined Cafe Press shop. I have t-shirts ready, and photos to go on notebooks, and all of that.

And then, it’ll be time to open the studio door and start sewing.

Sometimes I think it would be better to listen a little less closely to lyrics to the songs I love. For instance, the title of this post comes from one of Springsteen’s early, early show-stoppers, “Thundercrack”. Which, for reasons that just became a little clearer to me, never made it on any of his albums, except Tracks or Before the Fame or one of the other compilations from deep in the darkest part of the vaults.

Anyway, that doesn’t matter because in today’s in box was no less than three notes from Bob, Bruce and Sony Music, telling me about the latest offerings that I simply must have. Bob is releasing a box set of old stuff, including never before seen (except by lunatics like me who obsessively collect every scrap of tape/video/kinescope) footage of his early, early Newport Folk Festival stuff and another box set of best of the best of the best of the best. What ever. I’ll take a pass on that.

The Boss is releasing a new E Street Band album, with all new music, that drops on October 2. SQUEEEE. And the Coolest Person In The World didn’t give me a heads up on this? She is so getting a beat down from me. Except not, because this means there’ll be a tour and that means I’ll be backstage with her somewhere or another. Madison Square Garden? Somewhere else? Somewhere, for sure. Because that’s what we do.

The third e-mail was from Sony to tell me that Mrs. Springsteen, the formerly cute Pati Scialfa is also releasing a new CD. To which I say, who cares?

In other, even duller news, I have tweaked the technorati tag cloud into looking like it’s part of my blog, I have gotten the comments working correctly, and about a third of my posts are correctly assigned categories. The search works fine, but not the actual link from found item to page. There are comments tucked away in a data base that I have yet to pull out and get displaying again. But mostly and over all, I think this is shaping up nicely. Prepare for the return of the Cafe Press shop, with half a dozen t-shirt designs, and some of the RLA & my artwork for sale as mousepads and notebooks. (At least the cover art)

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.