walloped by the storm

Have I mentioned yet how grateful I am that I no longer commute to the East Side?

Dinner with friends last night was cancelled, and my dentist’s office called this morning to reschedule today’s appointment, so I’m enjoying another day of not having to leave the house. I have my turtleneck, my chunky British wool sweater, a fuzzy blanket, unlimited tea, soup for lunch, a great view of the crazy snowdrifts outside, and plenty of projects to keep me busy. Sounds like a good day to me.

owl invasion

I haven’t paid much attention to owls since the Great Owl Incident of 2004, but today they are everywhere: the Smithsonian Store spam, a post on design*sponge, a random Etsy page . . . I only hope that whatever the noise was that woke us up at 3:30 this morning wasn’t owl-related. Once in a lifetime is enough.

see? see?

The next time someone expresses skepticism when I share my story of being attacked by a centipede, I’m going to direct them to this You Tube video. Assuming the centipede I bludgeoned to death in my yard with a garden trowel mere days after the incident was the same one or its brother, my attacker was only an inch or two shorter than the star of this film.

(I think the answer to the untranslatable archive dilemma is to simply repost the “best of” here a little at a time with the appropriate retro timestamp and let the rest retire quietly to CD to play shuffleboard and bore each other to death. I’ll lose the few comments I have, but so be it.)

happiness is . . .

sparkly things

My Etsy shop is now up and running! Look for new items every couple of days — there’s a queue of fun stuff waiting to be photographed and posted, and I’m working on some cool new ideas. Feedback is always appreciated.

still testing

Still trying to figure out this template. A few annoying problems remain: the sidebar is pushed down on permalink pages without comments; I can’t figure out how to get margin around my posted photos without throwing the little icon next to the comment line way out of whack; and for some reason the text is starting at the bottom of the photo instead of wrapping (I do have the text alignment set to “left”). But I’m sick of messing with it for now, so we’ll all just have to live with it until I have time and energy to tackle it again. If you have a suggestion for any of those problems, or any other comments to make, please let me know. For now, I’m just going to bed.

RSS change

If you had bookmarked the RSS feed of the non-WordPress virtuallori site, please change your RSS bookmark to feed://www.virtuallori.com/feed/. Thanks!

catching up

[Exhale.] I’m back to full-time freelancing, and wow, does it feel good. Even though I was aware of the massive stress I was under at my recent staff job, it wasn’t until I left it that I realized just how much it was affecting every last fiber of my being. Freelancing has its own stresses, but they’re stresses I’m more willing to live with. The flexibility is allowing me to branch out and pursue some tech writing in addition to my established editorial services, and also to spend more time with my jewelry and other art.

Flexibility has also been a necessity in catching up on wedding plans. We’re just over four months away, and there’s still more left to do than I would like, but over the past two weeks I’ve been able to get a lot accomplished. Mom and I spent some time last Tuesday and again today doing the legwork on cakes and invitations so J and I could make our decisions. We settled on a photographer last week and figured out what we’re doing for favors. The next major obstacle is finalizing the guest list, probably the most difficult thing we have to do and something almost all couples struggle with.

My plate still overfloweth, but in a good way. It’s good to be back.

double pfffft

I *knew* I should have migrated to WordPress long before now. Seems there is no easy way to migrate posts from new Blogger to WordPress, and the one set of (many-stepped, convoluted) instructions I found online won’t work with the current iteration of new Blogger settings. Oh well. I was tempted to burn the existing archives to a CD and start fresh anyway. Looks like my decision is made for me.

migrating…

Patience, please, while I figure out how to migrate six years’ worth of posts to WordPress.