sueeeus

Yes, it’s time consuming, but I love categories!  I’m going through my imported blogger posts and categorizing them, bit by bit.  I have finished two months worth (the first and the last).  I am liking WordPress more and more.  I like the free part, and I like the ability to categorize posts and manage the blog details.  Initial setup was a bit of a struggle, though.

It’s been forever since I’ve participated in SPT, but since today is my birthday, I thought I’d post my 41 year old mug.  That is, before my fabulous sister’s makeover.  This is pre-color and cut, sans makeup, bedhead, first thing in the morning.  Itchy scratcy hayfever eyes.  Moderately chapped lips.  Greasy hair.  What can I say.  I’m low maintenance when it comes to things like grooming.  I do brush my teeth.  (Most of the time.)

Lo and behold, the wonders that can be wrought.  My sister is an Artiste!  The new me, in my fun and funky new do.  (The new me, wearing my classic 20 year old black sweater which I’ve worn once a week every week for the last twenty years, no exaggeration, and how will I ever replace it when it’s gone )  It’s especially great for me to have fun and whimsical hair because it balances out the rest of me that is all business, seriousness, and responsibility (translation: stressed out).  She’s an amazing hair stylist, and I have the benefit of being her sister.  It’s a sweet deal.  Plus, it’s totally low maintenance.  The messier, the better.  I’m loving it!  She also gave me a bag full of goodies that I tend not to get for myself.  Things like mascara (L’Oreal Volume Shocking, and let me say, this stuff works magic on nearly nonexistent lashes like mine), lotions, lip gloss and balms, a compact eyelash curler, and a super light and fresh foundation lotion.  She knows me well; that I can’t stand the feel of gunk on my skin, and that I’m sensitive to and intolerant of many scented things.  All these finds are things I will actually use.   A treat! And then!  Then she took me to lunch and we dined on the most scrumptious and decadent dungeness crab and avocado sandwiches, topped with caramelized onions and melted cheddar.  Divine!  I had only been to that restaurant once before, years ago.  She, me, and P, we three.  Before things went awry, before he left this world.  A few tears were shed.  But we rejoiced in the life we have remaining, in the part of him that lives on in his children.  They are beautiful children, full of love and light.  Sigh…  I miss those kids.  They live far far away.

  Now isn’t this the creme de la creme!  My other fabulous sister, who was just visiting, has bestowed on me this most extravagant and delicious gift.  I feel a bit guilty about my post earlier this month, in which I lamented over the beauty of the outrageously expensive porcelain pot.

Oh the color!  Oh the shape!  My, oh my. . .  And it’s mine!  Sigh.  Ahhhhhh.  I am having the most fabulous of birthdays.  So much beauty and color. 

Speaking of color.  How gorgeous are these   Orchids from a good friend and orchids from Mr. Gadget.  I love orchids!  Such a fabulous birthday.  So much to take in.  So much to be thankful for.  Seeing my sisters.  Now that’s the best thing.  I’m all smiles because of them.  No, seeing my Boo.  Now that’s the best thing.  I’m all smiles because of him.  I know what it is.  It’s love.  Love is the best thing.  I’m all smiles because of love.  Love with a capital L.

(still procrastinating)

La vie en Rose wants a crowned bird tattoo, so I thought I’d try a sketch.  This is based on a stained glass suncatcher mobile thing that I have.  Sketching is much more interesting that itemizing tax deductions.

I’m very good at it.  Today, at this moment, I ought to be working on my taxes.  But I’m not.   My love bug is napping, and it’s my window of opportunity.  He likes to help me type, and sometimes his key strokes close my windows and applications.  He’s a very helpful young man.  Mr. Gadget is off gallivanting with his siblings.  He left early this morning and claimed he’d be back early.  He planned to fix his sister’s washing machine, and then golf with said sister and a brother.  Meanwhile, my lovely sister C. and her fine man D. have been visiting.  My sister S. spent some time with us as well, and I was all smiles with a houseful of family.  🙂  We enjoyed a delightful breakfast at a local cafe/bakery, and played with Mr. Boo.  Sadly, they had to return home, and I am alone with my love bug.  He’s got almost boundless energy.  All of these things are great at keeping me from the task I’m supposed to be doing. 

Ugh.  Taxes.  The bane of spring.  I have been giving myself permission to procrastinate, saying that I can work on them when Mr. Gadget returns, because he can then keep my little one company.  But, you see, Mr. Gadget hasn’t returned, and the day is drifting away.  I think I hear my love bug stirring, so I will have to stop what I’m doing and go attend to him.  Which I love.  I’m in no way complaining about needing to spend time with him.  I love our moments!  We play and play and play and play.  He laughs and shrieks and gurgles and giggles and squirms and writhes, and it’s the absolute best.  I love it!

I ought to document all the little steps required to make this migration, in case I need them in future to save me some trouble.  Little tiny things have caused me such trouble.  Things that are supposed to be intuitively obvious, I guess.

Basically, I followed the instructions on the support site, posted by Poco.

Starting with this thread, I installed EasyPHP.

1. First I had to find EasyPHP.  It’s French, but the latest version comes with the English language choice.
2. Installation was easy enough.  Getting it working took a bit more effort.  I have XPpro, and I needed to stop IIS in order to get the Apache server to run.  Once I got the green light on Apache and MySQL, I was stuck.
3. Sometimes it helps to read the installation instructions.  I swear they were in French when I was trying this, but now that I go to document it, from their site, there it is in plain English.  Anyway.  I was tripped up because I didn’t know that all I needed to do was right click on the little e-icon in the System Tray to get the menu of things that could be done with EasyPHP.
4. I copied wordpress to a folder under the www directory in the EasyPHP folder on my hard drive.
5. I followed the WP installation instructions to define a new local database, etc…  (using the phpMyAdmin steps).
6. I tried the Import Blogger option in my local WP and got the same CURL extension error, so I enabled the CURL extension (right click EasyPHP –> Configuration –> PHP Extension), tried again and voila!  It worked.
7. Then I imported my blogger images (to my local WP) using the blogger image import plugin.  I had to run it over and over because it times out after 30 seconds. (Lord help you if you try this over dial up!)  It eventually retrieved my images (at least most of them) and didn’t appear to hose my database.
8. Next I followed the instructions for moving WP to a new server.  I used the existing Backup plugin and saved the on-line database to my hard drive, and did the same to my local WP database.  Then I compared the two and merged them.  This part was no fun.  I recommend not doing it.  If you migrate from blogger to WP using the long and drawn out method here, get the WP running, but don’t start posting anything that you want to keep until after the migration process is finished.  Just get the structure and options and all that set up the way you want, mimic them on your local machine, and when you go to update your online database, upload the local one.  I ran into an error when uploading the new database, but found the solution in the support site.  The error and what worked for me are documented here (support site).
9. Finally, I copied my imported blogger images to my web server.

I had some odds and ends things to clean up, but essentially, the big task is done.  Now I will go back and cleanup the loose ends as I have time and ambition.  (It may never get done!)

My little crumb cruncher tends to get these bug bite looking bumps on his face now and then, and I’ve been noticing them around meal times.  I have been meaning to try and find out what could be biting him.  Last night I was getting him ready for bed and noticed a couple of these bumps on one of his legs.  I looked closer to try and determine if they were bug bites.  Maybe we have bedbugs.  I don’t know.  It was a thought.  I moved my hand and his leg was covered with red spots where my hand had been.  I gently rubbed them to see what kind of bumps they were, and they seemed to get worse, before my eyes.  I asked Mr. Gadget what he thought, if it looked like chicken pox or not.  It sort of did.  I asked if chicken pox develops so quickly.  He didn’t know, and neither did I.  I decided to check the other leg, and saw three faint bumps, so I looked closer to try and determine if they were old or new.  As I touched them, it seemed as though they got more pronounced.  I told Mr. Gadget that it seemed like he was reacting to me, so I took my hands off and waited a few minutes to see if they’d fade (they did).  Meanwhile, I tried to think of what he could be reacting to.  I used a hand lotion that day which was out of the ordinary, but had since washed my hands at least a dozen times, so I didn’t think it could be the lotion.  I’d washed and dried the bedding and put an extra fabric softener sheet in the dryer, which was out of the ordinary as well.   He was on the bedding and not breaking out everywhere, so that left me.  We had a fabulous tossed green salad for dinner, with red, yellow, and green bell peppers, radish, green onion, cucumber, tomatoes, mixed organic greens, and leafy green lettuce.  (Big boy Boo had lentils and rice and green beans.)  I was done in the sense that I’d put my dishes in the sink, but I was still snacking away at what was left in the salad bowl, using my fingers to pick up pieces of salad and munch happily away.  It’s the most plausible explanation I can find at this point.  My baby is allergic to fresh vegetables.  At least one of the mix, anyway.  Now I will have to try and isolate the culprit.

He has so many looks.  I love the blue of  his eyes.  In some photos he is absolutely gorgeous.  In others, he’s a silly little thing.  I love them all, all the funny looks he comes up with.  He’s so active now; I can hardly get him to hold still for a photo.  It’s wonderful that he has so much fun.  I’m loving it.

I’ve been busy busy busy lately.  Wanting to blog.  Not having time to blog.  That, and it’s taking me a long time to tweak my template to look the way I want.  I’m new to php, so I’m rather slow at it.  Little things can be so annoying to me, and I have a hard time just letting them be.  For instance.  I want my hundred things list to have numbers.*  Yes, I have it defined as an ordered list.  But when displayed on the About page, the numbers don’t show.  I have a style sheet, and probably something in there is overwriting my “ol” definition, but it’s not making sense to me.  It should be straightforward and for whatever reason, I’m not seeing it.  Exasperating!

Blackbird has asked to see windows this week.  I don’t have any particularly interesting windows.  If I did, I could integrate them into the corners of my home theme as well – I think Amanda Soule Mama started that one.  I might be able to find some interesting corners of my home to share eventually.  As for windows   I am remiss.  I see there is a window in the background of this picture of my Boo.  It will have to do.

My Boo is growing out of  his nickname.  He’s getting to be such a big young man, I’ll have to think of a more mature nickname.

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*update:  When I enclosed my list in a blockquote, the formatting took effect.  I chose lower case roman for my default.  Just because. 

Last night I dreamt that my mom gave me a gift, and with it the normal commentary that she had intended to make something, but found this (undoubtedly thrifting or yard saleing) and couldn’t pass it up because it was so much nicer than what she could have come up with on her own.  It was a handbag.  A purse, and of course we all know that I am nuts for purses.  So.  She gives me this purse.  It’s made of an assortment of fine materials and she’s pointing out the various rarities and identifying them.  The purse had a partially wooden structure, and the one visible flaw was that the side piece and the front piece didn’t fit quite smoothly together, but it was something that could likely be easily fixed.  I turned it around and there was a pinkish shimmery leathery part on the base.  This, she explained, was a rare pink alligator skin, or something like that.  She was excited about it and turned it inside and out, showing me different things about it, telling me the exotic woods and materials it was made from, and for some reason, and this I don’t recall, but it made sense at the time (in the sense that it was something she would do, explain it as she did it, do it, and then not be able to undo it because she went too far), she clipped the corners off.  Swiftly, deftly.  Snip, snip, snip, snip.  There, that’s better, she showed me triumphantly.   And she was still going on about what a find it was and imagining it’s value, because she had an eye for this sort of thing…  …and then…  a piece of paper, like a postcard, slipped out and she picked it up, and it was a valuation sheet.  It had the purchase price and an appraiser’s price.  It had been overlooked until now.  This bag had made it through the thrift store/yard sale circuit, into my mother’s hands, without the tag.  A true find.  The stuff of Antiques Road Show dreams.  It said $1,000,000 for the original price, and $255,000 for the appraised price.  It had lost quite a bit of value in its life, but nonetheless, this proved that it was indeed an item of value.  Either way, it was a LOT, since she’d gotten it for almost nothing (under $5).  There was anguish as she realized what she had done, because that quick little snip snip had decimated its value.  The dream ended with me telling her not to worry about it, that I’d very very carefully hand sew the pieces back.

We have a whole lot of woo around here.  Woo is a good thing.  There’s the woo woo train.  If we say, “Woo, woo,” the boy perks his ears, and starts looking for his train, crawling about with an air of keen determination.  When he finds it, he presses the part that makes the woo woo sound, and off it goes.  It’s a great toy.  His second-cousin has one, which is how we discovered it.  It has turned out to be one of his favorite toys.  The woo woo train.  It’s actually a Fisher Price Peek-a-Block Press and Go train.  It has neat lights and it drives forward, makes funny train sounds like woo woo and plays some various melodies as it moves the blocks.  Some spin and some move up and down.  Very clever toy.

 

The other woo we’re enjoying is the woo hoo in the black horse and cherry tree song by KT Tunstall.  I don’t know why, but I’m really digging this song.  It’s just one of those things that appeals to me for some reason that I can’t quite pinpoint.  It’s sort of bluesy but upbeat and fun at the same time.  I really like the woo hoos.

I decided to try out a new blogging utility called WordPress, so I loaded it to a webserver and spent some time this weekend installing and configuring it. I like its features, and it’s free. It’s not been the easiest thing to configure, but that’s mostly because I did a custom install on my own webspace. There are low cost providers out there who offer WordPress blogging and they’ve done all the hard stuff so it’s easy for a newbie to get started. I had to do things the hard way, though, because that’s just my way.

Anyway.

Here’s my new blog.

http://sueeeus.holyshiznit.com/

I will eventually move my blogger archives over there, but that is thus far proving to be difficult.