Today is the birthday of my latest ex-friend, who recently joined the legions of those who will never speak to me again. We had a six-line argument on Twitter and five minutes later she’d unfriended and banned me everywhere on the ‘Net (I’m probably on the Do Not Fly list by now). Making people hate me forever is my most outstanding talent, but I’ve clearly improved, since I can now do it in less than 840 characters. *sigh* I hope she has a nice birthday, anyway.
Whining in public seems to stimulate resolution of technical problems, because right after I made my last post, most of what I complained about unsnarled itself. BLU’s GoDaddy hosting predated the other domains by a couple of years, and I needed to update a couple of its features (no charge). Once I did that, I was able to install WordPress and set up the new, hosted, BLU~Blooded Blog. When I went to import the old blog from Blogger, it turned out that I would have had to “upgrade” its template in order to import it, so it was just as well that I’d already done that. Now I just need to finish coding and uploading the new site design and match the blog to it. I’m having to resist the strong urge to do a massive rewrite of my articles, which I really don’t have time for right now.
I’m still stuck with MySpace, but I’m actually kind of liking it. I’ve set Tweetdeck to post my Twitter feed to Facebook and MySpace automatically and now those appear right at the top of the MySpace page and look rather attractive. I think I’ll leave it as is, especially since the fate of MySpace is in considerable doubt.
Rewriting the Rules blog simply reappeared, having been “updating its database” apparently. No problems there that I can see. I even resolved a problem I didn’t write about, and got my netbook, Pig, which runs Windows XP, to find the big workstation, Sil, running Windows 7, on the network. They needed to be set to the same “workgroup.” Now Pig can log into Sil over the network and get into her files, which is very cool and kind of freaky. And I thought I was already spoiled just having a home wireless network to the Internet! Now I can curl up in a corner with Pig and edit files on Sil! 0_0
The Honking Huge Snow Storm provided some distraction this week. I guess we reaped our karma for being in the “snow void” on December 26, because the “official” snow amount in Pepperell, according to the National Weather Service, was 15.2 inches (38.6 cm), and I measured 15.5 inches in my back yard. On Tuesday, before the storm started, I rather impulsively decided to take in all the outside holiday lights and get all the windows and outside porch lights put back to normal (one set of lights came in through a window and and connected to an inside plug). That ended up being easy to do and now I’m SO glad I got it done! I’m so glad I did all that yard work and cutting during the spring, summer and fall, too. I think the birds are unhappy about losing so much habitat, though. My bird feeders aren’t getting much traffic at all.
My dramatically de-cluttered house is not only much easier to clean, it doesn’t get as dirty to begin with, and it still feels SO good to have gotten rid of all that crap, even in the attic and crawl space where I don’t see it all the time. I hung up white twinkly lights around the darker end of the living room just to cheer things up a bit after I’d taken down all the Solstice decorations, and it really works. The bathroom renovation project is in a holding pattern at the moment, though, as I had to break off and get back to publishing work. I’m getting a bit tired of stepping around all the tools and stuff, but I retain this firm belief, in defiance of all historical evidence to the contrary, that if I leave all the tools underfoot they’ll motivate me to finish the job. What they actually do is keep me very light on my feet. *wry smile*
The ARCs of Applewood have gone out to reviewers. I still have a couple left if anyone would like to get an early look and do a review! I’ve been clearing out my backlogged queries, and I’m almost done with those. Three people who got rejection notes replied immediately; the two people of whom I requested the full manuscript have not replied at all. A couple of queries I just filed because when I checked–and I always check out both author and title online, be aware of this!–the author had gotten tired of waiting and self-published the story. That’s happening more and more, I’m finding.
Seems like the ‘Net gets deader every day. I’m not sure where everyone is disappearing to, but even my Twitter feed is dying. I’m looking around for the light switch because I feel like I’m going to be the last one to leave!