Have I mentioned how much I love Amy before? Because I do, a lot. She’s absolutely adorable. Kumo loves her even more though. When we get into the parking lot at PetSmart he starts to whine and attempts to climb out the window. I can’t exactly see his thoughts but I imagine it’s Kumo and Amy running towards each other in slow motion with Bolero playing softly in the background.

We got through the basic new commands rather quickly so Amy was teaching us some tricks to work on with him for fun. One of the tricks was pointing your finger at the dog and giving a loud verbal “BANG” which the dog responds to by laying on his side and playing dead. Ben was giddy watching this new trick. He had a huge grin on his face and I could clearly imagine him at the dog park showing Bob, and anybody else who showed up, this awesome new trick that Kumo had learned.

Amy mentioned that she had worked on the same trick the week before so while all the other dogs had a whole week to learn it, we’d be back the NEXT day so in order to not be shown up by all the other dogs, we’d have to get on it!

Amy: All the other dads had all week to practice!
Ben: We’ll get it!
Amy: Yeah, he’s such a smart boy! He’ll have it in no time!
Ben: Because he’s a GOOD BOY!
Amy: Yes he is! He’s a good smart boy!
Me: Yeah! And Ben will be home all day tomorrow BANGING THE DOG!
Ben: ….
Me: WHAT!?
Ben: HONEY!
Me: OH! OOPS!
Ben: *glare*
Me: *giggle*

And that is why often times when Ben has to leave the house he tries to lock me in the crate and take the dog with him instead.

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Make sure you all check out her Etsy store that has ADORABLE necklaces, earrings and rings. I’m thinking about getting a piece of her jewelry for the next giveaway. Or possibly a gift certificate for her store and the winner can pick what they want? We’ll see!

PUPPY UPDATES TOMORROW!

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I discovered dooce.com and Heather Armstrong the day she posted the photo of Leta’s birth. That one small post captured me and I spent the next several days between work and home life reading the blog from the very beginning. I loved every single post. I’d never thought going forward from there that her writing would effect me as much as it did.

When she started suffering from depression, and OPENLY wrote about it, I would read the posts and say WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY HEAD!? The words she spoke, the symptoms she had, the feelings that she was expressing, they were all things I had felt, suffered, hid and ran from for much longer than I can remember. There have been times that I’ve started to feel that way again, and I go back and read those posts and they somehow remind me of how far I’ve come since then, and that there is always light on the other side of that dark, deep tunnel of despair.

I know that I’m not the only person she’s touched with her writing so when I went to her reading and signing for It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita I immediately thought of getting a second copy to give away here. I know that quite a few of my readers have had similar experiences with the disease and if reading her thoughts has helped any of you as much as it’s helped me, I think you will appreciate this book.

The book itself is basically passages pulled straight from her blog, although some of them seem to have been expounded on a bit. Now I have a convenient, hard back covered way to read through these passages while sitting on the toilet trying to get five minutes of peace from the ALWAYS TALKING NEVER STOPPING ten year old.

AND! YOU CAN TOO!

I’m giving away a signed copy to one of you. All you have to do is comment here and say hi, tell me about your experience with depression, just say I WANT THE BOOK, or take a few minutes to tell me how awesome I am. I don’t really care what the comment says, you just have to get one in to enter and use a VALID EMAIL ADDRESS so I have a way to contact you. You have till next Wednesday, April 8th at midnight to enter. I will write down the name of all the commenters (one entry per person), put them into a hat and pull one out. Seems more fun than those silly randomizer things. I’ll made a video of it or something too just to make it MORE EXCITING! I’ll post the winner Thursday or Friday so make sure to check back then.

Also, if you’d like to tell others about the contest, feel free just don’t be spammy about it. Your blog readers and twitter followers will appreciate it.

So go forth! Comment! Enter! Discuss! AWAY!

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Oh wait, that was, like, a week ago. Lets start over.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

I really hope that everybody had a FANTASTIC Christmas. Our was awesome. Five days of sitting on our asses being as lazy as humanly possible. One morning I ate chocolate ice cream for breakfast AND dinner. Not having a child around you have to set an example for is SO TOTALLY AWESOME.

We are having a few friends over but I wanted to take a few seconds to get a blog post out there before 2008 comes to an end forever. I’ve spent some time today in google reader reading all your wonderful 2008 recaps. Some are doing memes and some are listing important things that happened month by month but I kinda hate memes passionately and I’m blond so you can’t reasonably expect me to remember what I did last January. For serious.

So I’ll just leave you by saying that 2008 was one of the most awesome so far. I got married to my soul mate and we bought a house. Two things I’ve been dreaming about for years and years. And two things that totally made me not feel bad at all about not being able to buy Christmas gifts for each other because we are BROKE. Every day at least once I look down at my ring finger and get that little rush of adrenaline knowing that he’s MINE. FOREVER. And every day we come home from a long day at work and an even longer commute home and we pull up to our house and I think, “We are home. This is OUR HOUSE! We have a house!”

Everybody be safe tonight. Surround yourself with good friends and the ones you love the most and make sure you get a kiss at midnight. I’ll raise my glass of champagne to all my online friends. I love you all. Happy New Year!

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“The post” will be up tomorrow. I’ve been working on it. Working on it while I was supposed to be working, actually! I just, in some cases like this, need some time to let things stew, let them simmer down a bit and properly blend so I can go back and backspace where needed. Mainly the sentences where 15.5 out of 17 words are some variation of the word FUCK. Because, I dunno, I think that sometimes my original point gets a little lost when that happens.

Thanks to all of you who have, or will in the future, registered. I know that the last thing most people want is ANOTHER FREAKING PLACE TO ENTER A PASSWORD but I really appreciate the effort.

I’ve been working on the site quite a bit in the last few weeks. Things you probably don’t see or notice because a lot of it is back end stuff or else updates to pages that are LONG overdue. And actually, one of these days I might get that ‘about’ page done. Maybe. I’ve missed getting my hands dirty (SEE: breaking and then having to fix a lot of shit) in code so it’s been kind of therapeutic.

Going along with that theme, getting my hands dirty again, I’ve picked up my camera and been able to look through the lens and really FEEL like taking shots. And Photoshop! Oh how I’ve loved and missed manipulating images and making them much prettier than they really were ever meant to be.

Also, I like pie.

I think that’s it for now…

Yep.

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UPDATE – It looks like everything got moved over an all I lost was one comment on this post. YAY! If you notice anything off or not working properly, let me know!

I’m in the process of transferring all of our many domains to my reseller account. For a long time they have been spread between my reseller and the servers at the company I used to work for and it seemed kinda silly to be paying two different places when I could consolidate it all into one.

The only reason I hadn’t done it before now is because it’s a pain in the ass to have to transfer and move everything and hope you didn’t miss anything and wait for DNS to work out and SOMETHING ALWAYS GOES WRONG.

So if posts or comments or the entire site disappear then you know why and hopefully I’ll get to fixin’ ‘er up soon.

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We’ve been busy, busy, busy working on the house. Ben’s been painting the garage and I’ve been trying to get the last of the unpacking done and the back yard cleaned up more. There’s pictures of all of it if you click on one of the flickr photos up there.

Other than that, things have been pretty much normal and everyday grind type of stuff.

Weekdays: Get up, work, gym, homework, dinner, sleep, rinse, repeat.
Weekends: Get up, work on house, eat, work on house, eat again, work on house some more, pass out exhausted on the couch, watch TV, sleep, rinse, repeat.

I kinda feel bad about not blogging as much though so I’ve decided to start video taping more and posting them here and there and all across the web for you awesome people to enjoy. Here is a little gem that happened Monday after school.

Happy Wednesday! FOUR DAY WEEKEND AHEAD! YAY!!

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I deactivated Intense Debate. It hurt my heart a little to do it because all the folks there have been REALLY AWESOME with my constant desire to FIX THIS! AND NOW THAT! But aflux’s load times with ID deactivated is MUCH better. Much.

Also, it was causing about 111 validation errors and apparently that’s like, really, really important to some anonymous people on the internet. *nods*

Unfortunately, the process to import all those comments back into the WordPress database via the control panel is causing a memory error and until I can call my host to have that fixed, they have all disappeared. If I get time I’ll do it today but I just wanted to let you all know I haven’t deleted you! Just kinda hidden you in the back of a closet till I can find the time to organize you all neatly again.

I also got rid if IZEA’s ad over there *points right*. It was a “test ad” that they used to create some data points. I will miss it though because it was bringing in some decent money but, meh. It was causing validation errors also, and again, VERY IMPORTANT to be XHTML compliant if the original theme developer puts a link there!

And yeah, I need to add some kind of styling to the tweets and delicious feeds but they’ve taken a pretty big back seat to all the damn house drama. I’ve neglected pretty much every online project and community over the last few weeks (excluding Twitter of course, I’m busy, not DEAD).

By the way, did I mention?!

WE ARE HOMEOWNERS! We got keys yesterday and found a reason to get over to the house last night and took some clothes and food over with us. There is SO MUCH I want to write about the process of buying our first home. SO. FUCKING. MUCH. But today I need to just concentrate on getting work done, then getting home to pack the last of the stuff up before the movers come tomorrow.

Happy Wednesday, all!

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So, Becca installed the Intense Debate comment plugin on her site and it’s awesomness made me giddy. It requires an account but you can sign up right here in the comments and then you get a cute little avatar, you can thumb up/down comments ala Digg, and the more you comment the higher your “reputation”. It’s full of fun bells and whistles. If you have a blog, check it out. You don’t have to do any special coding or CSS work, they do all that for you. Plus, reputation carries over to other blogs and you can keep track of the comments you’ve made on every blog that has it installed from one place.

Okay, enough of the sales pitch.

I also added google ads and I’ve had that other ad there for awhile. I’m part of a “test program” with that top ad and they are paying me pretty damn well to keep it there. I was going to sign up with blogherads too but they won’t let you advertise if you have another “above the fold” ad in place and since I have a six month contract to keep that ad there, I can’t do that. Frankly, I think it’s a little silly you can’t have both there as long as they are both above the fold. Lame.

Anyway, that’s what’s new. Enjoy! Non sales-pitchy post to follow!

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*shrug*

I’d like to point out that I’ve been pretty active over on flickr. My 365 attempt has been a BIG SUCCESS so far. And by that I mean, I HAVEN’T FAILED! Yet. Yesterday marked my 49th day which means I’ve officially made it farther than any other attempt. This time I let go of the ridiculous notion that all of my pictures are going to be fabulous and planned and brilliantly photoshopped into perfection. And it’s odd because now that I’m not constantly stressed out about getting a shot up, the days that I do take the time to set them up and then photoshop the hell out of them they are coming out pretty damn well! Some of my most favorite self portraits to date, actually. Here’s a few that I’ve loved so far:

THERE! I’m done whoring myself. For now!

Lets see, what else is going on? Okay, I’ll start with this. I was temporarily pissed off at the internet. I lost a few (what I thought were) good friends over a message board around the end of November and I was just kind of like BLAH. And it was one of those things I really wanted to write about to “let it all out” but I know that it will just create more waves and it’s not really worth it. I never thought that by closing down a message board, so many people would turn into complete idiots and OMGHATE ME FOREVER(exclamation point). And to them I can just say: WHAT. EV. ER. If your way of getting over it is to have to kiss the ass of people that you claimed to hate and treated like shit for over two years so be it. I’m glad I finally found out your true character, which is “two face and spineless” and I’ll leave you with this:

You are a lemming. Enjoy the jump, it’s a long way down.

*splash*

Moving along!

I’m starting a “raw diet” today. Another reason I haven’t been around much is that I’ve been feeling like complete crap. Literally. Everything I eat is being ejected from my stomach in a foul manor. EVERYTHING. I eat plain white rice and suddenly I’m in pain and can’t get more than 100 feet from a toilet without panicking. I’ve done a lot of reading online the last few days and I’m thinking if I can get my body to detox it might help. I’m a little worried about protein intake though so while I might not stick to it as stringently as some people, if I do eat meat it won’t be blue cheese encrusted and doused in butter… sadly.

And lastly! I’ll really try and make a more solid effort to blog more. I have still been reading your blogs (Google Reader = *heart*) daily and need to get back into the swing of things around here.

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