linky lurve: the blogging edition

amanda at blogger buster has completely revamped the site, and it's mighty purty. she continues her blogger template design series with this post on backgrounds and borders. if you've been thinking that you have to hire a professional or be an artist of some sort yourself in order to have a decent looking blog, just take a deep breath and follow some of amanda's tutorials. she's developed a very user-friendly approach and you can't go wrong if you take things just one step at a time.

if you've been looking for ways to monetize your site, blogging gal has been checking out pepperjam...might be worth looking into.

blissfully domestic started off their blog info series with some information about basic bling for your blog, including links to my favorite favicon maker, my equally favorite mini-button maker, and various other bits and bobs. incidentally, if you're using blogger and think you can't have your own favicon, you actually can. check out annie's great tutorial on adding your own favicon!

how many topics can i fit in one post???

i currently have 100 links in my reader. oh my holy hell. there was a time not too long ago when that was de rigeur for me, but that time was quite a while ago.

some of the sites i've thrown in there have gotten overwhelming. like lifehacker. there's a new post every 2.5 seconds it seems like. wtf. every time i'm about to pull the trigger on unsubscribing from it, some post from heaven appears in its feed that i would probably not have found immediately otherwise, and i think, but lifehacker totally has its useful times....i shall keep it... and so it goes...

other than codependently wracking my brain about whether or not to keep lifehacker in my feed reader, today has been fairly quiet and serene. j was able to come home early and is grabbing a nap, which is awesome. he posted the most lovely post today, you can find it here. he's very thoughtful and sweet, my honey.



i have been off a day all week. tuesday i kept thinking it was wednesday, although wednesday i was fine, then today i've thought it was friday twice. i'm not sure why the internal clock is off so much. the good part is that tomorrow actually is friday, thank biff...



i'm toying with giving my mom the link out here. she never had the other link - oh, the horror if that had happened...oh mah gah... - and i never mentioned it to her. but a couple of months ago, oddly enough while i was quietly debating blogging again, she mentioned out of the blue, "have you ever thought of starting a blog?" ohhhh mom, if you only knew... this is definitely a different space, and i don't have a problem with her reading out here. it's just old hangups, i suppose...she knows that writing has always been an outlet for me. would be nice if i accomplished something with it, however...





if you haven't heard of or been out to the league of extraordinary wives, you might wanna take a toodle over. it's a lovely (i think) approach to improving relationships. j and i work very hard at our relationship, but most of it is not *work* so much as wanting to make our partner happy and content. we seem to be very much in tune with making sure that we each have what we need in our relationship. not that we're perfect - no one is - but, for example, we don't nag each other, we don't put each other down, we fight clean - on those rare times we fight, that is. i can only count on one hand the times we've argued, and each time it was because one of us was upset about something totally different and just didn't talk about it and we ended up fighting about something stupid instead. we work very very hard at communicating, which i think is essential. anyway, my point is, there is some excellent stuff over there, take a peek.



i think that minou is teething. she's cranky and listless. she's still eating, and is healthy otherwise. poor thing...i pried her little mouth open to peek this afternoon and i see where she's lost a couple of her baby teeth. hell, i'd be cranky too if i had teeth coming in again and pushing my old teeth out. clio could care less about this event, as long as it means the cat is not getting attention.



and i think that's it for now...felt good to purge the brain a bit...happy valentine's day, folks!

intentions

i've had a post rumbling around in my head lately which has been rather distracting and caused me to just not post anything. that's how i usually end up, actually, paralyzed by doubt. but this time around, i blog guilt free...even if this is one of the few places where i manage to check my guilt at the door.

i almost created a new blog for posts of the sort taking up real estate space in my head, because i felt that, well, it probably didn't mesh well with what was already out here. then i thought, ok, well then, probably you need someplace for the recipes then. and then there's the kid stuff...and then i thought, hell, you have no real purpose behind the place anyway, so why bother to create some new url?

i've heard and read a lot lately about knowing the purpose for your blog when you start it, thereby giving you the best results, blah blah blah. so many are trying to become the next dooce. cracks me up, because i had no real intent with this the first time around other than finding my own voice. ended up selling off my original domain for about a billion zillion percent of what i paid for it. my, i had quite a bit of traffic...and traffic as they say is money.

but i never monetized anything, didn't have so much as a single ad. wasn't my purpose then, and isn't my purpose now. although i do have a lonely little adsense ad down there in the corner. *waves at text ad* was just curious since i've heard so much about it all, so figured i'd give it a whirl. i've already warned it not to get comfy down there as it probably won't be sticking around terribly long.

so i guess this is my statement of intent, to myself as much as to anyone who might stumble along here. this small cubit of web space will likely be as chaotic and diverse as i am, and i'm ok with it not being a relationship blog or a food blog or a "mom to furry kids" blog. just like i'm not any one of those things...

household tips

the first clue you're getting your blogging mojo back? tackling a meme you weren't even tagged with... :)

via psychicgeek:

Instructions:
Write your tip(s) with a link to who sent the meme to you, along with the instructions. They are better if they are your own discovery, or not widely known. Still, tips that make a difference to you are all good. After your tips, you will want to tag some friends who may even be hard up for blog fodder. (As I am today) Perhaps some of your newest bloggy friends. I have several new friends who I would like to know more about.

mkay...there's gotta be some household tips around here somewhere...the cornstarch thing doesn't really count, does it? yeah...thought not.

see, i'm still relatively new still to this domesticity thing, so i don't feel like i'm exactly swimming in knowledge for others, but i'll give it a whirl.

if you don't have a bottle of lavender essential oil in your home, get one. it's relatively inexpensive, and is incredibly useful to have around. put it in a bit of warmed olive oil and you have everything from a hair conditioner to a skin lotion to a skin cleanser and makeup remover...kid you not...a drop or so is also helpful for sinus infections in that neti pot psychicgeek mentioned in her list of tips. lavender oil is one of the few oils that you can use undiluted on your skin, and it has the added bonus of being what is called an adaptogen...meaning lavender does whatever you need it to do at any given time. it's *wonderful* for burns, straight out of the bottle, dripped onto wherever you've burned yourself...not that i burn myself...daily...on whatever hot thing i'm messing with...not at all...ahem...

that's probably the best tip i've got...won't be tagging anybody just yet, so if you feel like grabbing it, please do...i need all the tips i can get! on second thought, i tag RAY, cuz she needs to start a new blog.... :D

honey really is a genius...

but blogengine and dotnetnuke are a royal pain in the fricking ass. so, i'm here for the time being. which is actually kinda nice, surprisingly. much has changed in the ol' blogger.com universe...and happily a lot is for the good.

took a bit of time to get my bearings with the new stuffs, and went ahead and got comfy. hello, prettiness! just love playing with templates... *pets the template*

sorry, i got distracted...where was i? oh yes...running my mouth...the widgets, etc are very entertaining, but i'm still getting used to the changes in how templates - pardon, layouts - operate. didn't do too shabbily for being out of practice, but still...

ahhh, fresh paint...

(note: originially posted here.)

not that i love that smell for real real, but virtually speaking, this is pretty exciting...

i've been a blogger for several years now, but it's been a while since i had a home. my honey had an idea, and *poof*, made it happen, so here i am learning a brand-new (to me) blogging platform. i've pretty exclusively used wordpress, since i absolutely heart it and recommend it highly to any and all who will listen, but we're not using a linux-based server, so i get to learn new things. good thing i like to learn new things...

i'm sure i'll have way more to add later, but for now...hi internets!