Newfound respect for mothers and wayward parishioners

As you may or may not know, Matt’s sister gave birth to a healthy baby boy over a month ago. Since then, there have been trials, but she & her hubby have pulled through by the grace of God and the wonderful family members they have been blessed with. As Matt’s dad & I have become accustomed to doing, we went to see little B and his parents. Her husband was exhausted from pulling night duty while his wife caught a few winks. We helped her with grocery shopping and I got to take care of little B for a little bit. Man, I tell you, carrying a 11lb baby is no joke and trying to burp a baby isn’t a walk in the park either. When I think of J carrying the little one in her arms, I mentally doff my hat to her. As she always does, she hooked us (her dad and I) with fresh farm produce which, in this case, were tomatoes. After we were done visiting, we went to church and had our seats in the worst place possible. We were running late and thus ended up with the worst pick of seats. Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t hear much of the service, but sitting at the back did allow me to see some of the unseemly behavior that people tend to reserve for the back of ‘the bus’. The case in point: a woman’s cell phone rang loudly twice and she answered the phone both times. Everyone around her turned and she kept on the phone, rather oblivious to her surroundings. A parishioner actually called her on her misbehavior and it felt like she was being a bit combative towards the elderly man who reminded her of her surroundings. It was rather sad. Thankfully, her phone didn’t ring again. I would hate for her to be have been publicly embarrassed. Continue reading Newfound respect for mothers and wayward parishioners

Bzzzz

lol. I’m feeling a little too upbeat. I woke up a little too early for a Saturday and spent about 30 mins at working doing some routine work. Then, M & I went to do some personal/family business. We finally mailed off the form 8453-OL that is needed to make filing your tax return legal in the eyes of the IRS. I had been meaning to get stamps to get it mailed out before the week was up, but then I got up this morning and realized that TaxACT had told us to file in 3 business days! Well, they apparently send you a warning letter and if you still don’t send them the needed form, you may be barred from e-filing. Oh, the horror. Needless to say, that was on the to-do list today. Also cashed a check I had held on for to for awhile. I was nervous this time around because of the bad experience I had with a check (from a bank, nonetheless. The evil Bank of America) that bounced. So, I’m hoping to high heavens that this check is good because I really don’t feel like spending hours n the phone with customer service reps. Haven’t gone grocery shopping yet. If there’s anything that M hates, that’s it. I work like a dog all week and my weekends are essentially my downtime or break (most of the time). He gets his breaks during the week days. However, he stayed up super late last night and I knew I’d have a rebellion on my hands. I didn’t want to push my luck. πŸ˜€ Aaand, I generally vegged out in front of my computer. Sorry M. lol. I was supposed to go for a walk because the temp was gorgeous. However, the lazy side of me won out.  My time in front of the computer was rather productive though! I found out that our Georgia state refund had hit already! That was pretty damned quick. I wish our federal would be that quick, but I can wait another week or so. We’ve got big and responsible plans for that. It’s not a whole lot, but it’ll take care of our super-secret project for one. And it’ll take a bite out of credit card #2. Oh, did I mention I requested for an increase and got it? I did that mostly to look good and now, I’m tempted to do another increase just to see if I can. I’m getting greedy. Again, just want to stress the obvious that you do not get the increase in order to up your spending. I’m doing that to present the appearance to those who pull my credit that I’ve got a low debt to credit ratio. πŸ™‚

I’m getting antsy about my site again. I love WordPress because it’s simple, but I’m bored. I tried my hand at Drupal, but quickly got tired of needing a damned module for almost everything even though the modules that could be found were super-cool. If there is a way to port (smoothly) from WordPress to Drupal, I’ll do it as a test and if I like it enough, I’ll switch back to drupal.

Getting hits

Well, it hasn’t been two days since I put my poems and other stuff up. I’m already getting some hits and I hope they keep coming in to fill my adsense coffers! πŸ˜€ I used to be on the first page (1st or 2nd link actually) of Google SERPs (search engine results pages) for a good bit of search terms like “figurative poems”. Hell, I’m still on the damned first page (about 5 results down)!!  Anyhow, after my site went down, my page ranks went down with them too. I didn’t put much up while I pondered on what to do with my site and the best way to display my content. Well, as you may know, I tried Drupal and got tired of having to need a module to do one thing or the other. The process of installing and working with modules is not very smooth either so I have returned back to my WordPress roots. WordPress isn’t perfect either as evinced with the trouble I had when I merely had a page with really long content. The only reason I’m keeping WordPress is because of its popularity ergo I’ll definitely find a way to retrieve my data from this site when/if it goes down or if I get sick of using WordPress.

In other news, I’ve been on pins and needles for the past week. It doesn’t seem to be letting up. I’ve found a couple of interesting jobs that come Monday, I will be applying for.  This month is almost at the halfway point and I’ve got so much to be thankful for. Labor Day is coming up soon and we’ll be doing some cool things (hopefully and if everyone can coordinate their schedules). We’re also planning on getting the heck out of Athens next week and just being around family. I am definitely not in the mood to hang out at the house if I can help it. lol.

Comparison of WordPress and Drupal

I cannot say how good it feels to be back in “old” waters i.e. with WordPress. I dabbled in Drupal for awhile but I didn’t dare mess with the actual php files because it was a bit more than I could handle. Granted, I switched from WordPress for a reason, but right now, just being able to add more than 1 goddamned music or video file to one post is a blessing. I thank Heavens for the podpress plugin which made this possible. I think it’s a fact that WordPress has more plugins donated by the community than Drupal. I mean, Drupal has some neat plugins, but I was really disappointed that I had to have more than 1 plugin to essentially do something that should have been inbuilt into the system. I’m just glad that I didn’t have that many posts there because it would have been a major pain to try and figure out how to import my posts into WordPress. There is a great need for documentation when it comes to plugins. For instance, the first plugin I installed and activated was the WPG2 plugin. I mean, I have Gallery2 on a different subdomain and a different database. On the plugin page, it says this plugin has support for different databases. However, there’s no mention whatsoever of how to configure the darned plugin to realize that Gallery and WordPress aren’t sharing the same database. Short of altering the wp-gallery2.php file to read from a different wp-config.php file, I don’t know what to do.

Some videos are up!

Finally, my Gallery is accepting my video files! Head on over there and sign in to view the precious footage of my family.lol. I caught Daddy in the act of corrupting his mind with American TV (Judge Judy et. al) . Well, wish me luck. Life’s been more or less the same with my husband and I. It feels slightly surreal to think I’m married now, but I know that I’ve got a good man who respects my wishes just as I respect his. I don’t have a clue what to do about my website and right now, you could say I’m burned out w.r.t. to website building, etc. I want something manageable like Drupal or WordPress as well as flexible. For now, I’ll tinker with Drupal and Gallery and try to make both of them play nice. πŸ™‚