My mommy got me goodies!

No, not the pictures, the cross stitch kit to make them!

See, when I was little, I absolutely adored the Holly Hobbie character. According to Wikipedia, the character was originally un-named and was “born” right about the same time as I was. I had several dolls, and my very first ever pair of glasses had small images of the blue girl on the temples.

A few years ago, someone came out with an updated version of Holly Hobbie. Probably the same jerks who decided to reboot Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite. Yuck yuck yuck. Stop frackin with my childhood. I did give the new Holly a try, honest. But the new Holly shared absolutely nothing in common with the girl in blue calico patchwork of the 70s, and the TV show that served as the foundation for the relaunch was – IMHO – more of the same little girl drivel that serves as the force behind most of the shows on Nickelodeon and Disney lately. Maybe I’m just too old, but eww.

So anyway, Mom was out shopping this last week, getting an embroidery hoop and needles so she could do some cross stitch pillows she got from someone somewhere. And she spotted this kit. She almost didn’t buy it because of the price, but she knew what my reaction would be when I saw it and decided that alone was worth it.

I literally SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEd when she handed it to me. I cannot remember the last time I saw a *real* Holly Hobbie picture. And when Mom told me it was mine, I squeeeeeeeeeeeed again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist stitching her for long LOL. I’m not as interested in blue boy, never was, but I know I’ll just *have* to stitch him as well to have the set up on the wall.

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack!!

It’s been an insane couple weeks here, mostly because of figuring out new routines and then having them all immediately tossed out the window when Spring Break hit.  Just a few more days of that left, at least.

I have even been stitching! Not as much as I would like, but still more than I had been.  I’m mostly working on Chrissy the Christmas Fairy on my lunch breaks and occasionally working on Autumn Sunset at home. 

As for work, I’m in a nearby suburb.  My boss owns the building we’re in.  The office is on the second floor of a downtown building with lots of huge windows that face to the south, so lots of sunlight, and a Starbucks below me.  I love the smell of coffee but not the taste, so its proximity is only a small temptation because of their peppermint hot chocolate.  And a raw chocolate boutique is in negotiations to move into the currently empty first floor space next to Starbucks.  I don’t know if that will be dangerous, the sample they brought in yesterday didn’t interest me much, but I think I need to check out their website to see what else they might have.

I’m not sure if the RSS is actually updating afte rall. That last post never did show up on my reader.  So I may have gotten excited about that for nothing. If anyone out there using WordPress has suggestions, I would appreciate it.  I would also love to get my dashboard to showme all tags and not just my “most used” ones.

And right now I am SOOOOOOOOOOooo loving this Akami spam filter system.  Yeesh, I wander away for a little bit and come back to 35 spam comments plus 5 new spam user sign-ups.

The RSS feed is actually updating now!! yay!

In other awesome news, I have a job at last!  Not the one I interviewed at last week (still haven’t heard back from them after leaving a follow up message on Wednesday) but an attorney who’s local to me and was a second-generation referral from church. I met with him yesterday and he put me to work immediately.  Woot!

Also, my dad just got confirmation that he’ll be working for the Census Bureau.  NOT as a census taker (the people that go door to door when you don’t send in your form) but as some sort of supervisor. And it’s a government job, so that opens up major doors for hi.

I managed to complete 4 hats and 1 scarf in time for the church auction for Girls’ Camp.  I also added in the baby blanket I made back in September, just because.  We’ll see how much actually sells and how much comes back home LOL.

Another interview this week. They’ll make a decision next week and plan to have someone start approximately 4/1. I’ll be following up with them and with the tax attorney from a month ago on Tuesday.

We’re having a fundraiser at church next weekend for girls’ camp, and I’ve been churning out crocheted hats and scarves to add to the auction. I’m hoping to get one more hat-and-scarf set and maybe another 2 hats done, and then maybe I’ll see about doing some little beaded pins as well.

Buggie’s been doing a ton of babysitting recently, which is great. At least someone is working, and she doesn’t have to keep asking me for money when she wants something. Which really isn’t often anyway, she’s definitely learned how to be self-controlled and frugal over the years.

I clearly have too many places to share certain types of information… I completely forgot to post here and now it’s a non-issue.

I had a series of interviews for a temp-to-perm job the last two weeks. I ended up not getting it, but I’m not upset about it. Over the course of the nearly 3 weeks since I was first contacted to determine my interest, we went from “occasional overtime” to “a couple days a month” to “I’m so backed up that you’re going to be putting in 2-3 hours a day every day for 4-6 weeks”. The interviews went really well and in the end it was down to me and one other candidate. They ended up going with the other person in the end, and I think it was because I have kids and they were concerned about my ability to work that much overtime. I had family lined up and ready to cover so I could take it, even though I was having doubts myself. In the end, I’m glad that she decided to pass me over. It would have been nice to have gotten all that overtime pay, but it would have been a major strain on the family situation. I do have other irons in the fire.

I’m back in the stitching groove as well, putting several hours into Autumn Sunset Sampler as well as working on a crocheted scarf during church. Half an hour a day, one day a week…. this is an awfully slow scarf. Then again, so are all of my other projects lately.

I’ve had a rash of new user registrations in the last week or so. No comments waiting for approval to go along with them, though. So far, only one of them came up with anything on a google search, and that “person” got deleted as the only hit was a spam post elsewhere. I find it interesting that they’re actually registering accounts and not just trying to enter comments (which I did test and is possible, but they sit in “awaiting moderation” or get stopped by the spam filter).

Anyway, another interview today! This is the one that I was waiting to have set up last week. This is another law firm, temp-to-perm assignment for one attorney in the Loop.

I had an interview yesterday with an attorney in a nearby suburb. The job sounds great, he sounds like he’s interested in me, but he’s not planning to have someone start until after tax season. The office is very sterile, and that concerns me because I work much better with music and he does not like having music playing in the office (I asked because of how bare people’s desks are). I’ll take it if offered and I’m still available.

I then had a phone interview today – yes, on Saturday – for a work-from-home typing opportunity for an attorney downtown. He’s temporarily displaced from his office because of an environmental issue, and his assistant recently relocated to another state. So there’s a possibility of an office position once things get settled down in the building. It almost sounds like I’ve got the work-from-home portion clinched, at least, but I’m not counting on it because that’s just the way things seem to go for me.

I also have a potential interview for next week with yet another office. The coordinator at the staffing agency called on Friday to feel out my interest level, she’s trying to get more info and has my availability so she can go ahead and schedule the interview for me without further delay.

And I’m stitching! I spent a little time on the Christmas Fairy while at my parents’ house last week, plus a couple hours today on Autumn’s Sunset Sampler while playing an online game with my father.

The import old posts project is on hold at the moment, mostly just because I had other things that were grabbing my attention. I’ll get back to that sooner or later.

And odd, I’m now seeing an RSS error on my dashboard… “XML Error, out of memory at line 1, column 0″. Make any sense to anyone?

Blogger imported without a problem (although my dashboard says there’s comments attached to something and I can’t find em). That’s roughly 2.5 years of posts.

I also discovered that the backup files for the most prolific time of my blogging career – 2005-2007 – WILL import. One month at a time, and they all come in with the same posting date, so I have a little bit of editing to do once they’re imported, but it’s a metric ton of cut and paste that I don’t have to do.

And I have a possible idea to see if I can get the more recent section into a format that will import. If it doesn’t work, then I have about 200 posts total still to cut and paste, which truly is not much at all in the overall picture. If it does work, I’ll be happy as a clam.

Once that’s all done, then I’ll be looking to see if anyone has come up with a way to import comments from Haloscan. I’ve already got those exported and in XML format. The issue will be matching them up to the correct posts, I think.

I’m still debating whether I want to fix formatting and broken links on old posts. I’ve noticed that some of them are coming through with line breaks in the middle of paragraphs and that some images aren’t appearing. If I do, that’s a ways down the line.

Things have really changed around here!

I got word recently through The Wagon that Haloscan is soon to be no more. I posted queries for suggestions on commenting options in a few places and sent a message to Fahim, the developer of the Blog software I’ve been using for almost 5 years, for his recommendations as well.

Fahim has moved to Macs in the last year or so and isn’t working with Blog anymore, but he suggested that since I’m hosting the blog myself rather than using Blogger or another similar web service, I might want to just install WordPress on my domain and continue to use Blog or another desktop software for posting. Sadly, this has so far turned out to *sound* much easier than we expected.

At first I was excited – the hosting company already has WordPress installed and part of my package, so I thought I could save myself a lot of time that way. Except they seem to have only a light version with limited features… and it completely over-rode the entire site. I couldn’t get to any of the nearly 5 yeras of posts I’d written since implementing Blog and I couldn’t get to the image gallery.  All I could see was my old Blogspot posts which I was able to import.

I deleted that blog so I could get my site back, and installed the full WordPress client. Another bit of fun as my FTP software kept dropping files in the middle. Which led me to install a different FTP program so I could proceed.  Finally I could get the software loaded and running.

Unfortunately, Blog still won’t talk to WordPress.  Knowing that there is no more tech support, I’ll be checking out the couple programs he suggested as replacements. My goal is to not be dependent on a web-based interface for routine posting, although if I must, I must. At least WP’s archival and import/export functions are clearly miles better than Blogger ever was. But first I need some sleep, as I’ve been up for way too many consecutive hours to be productive for much longer. I also need to find out if I can import 5 years of posts easily or if I have a lot of cut and paste ahead of me.  My fear is the latter, which is guaranteed if I go back to web-based.

Maybe later I’ll bring back the layout I’ve had for what seems like forever.  Maybe I’ll decide I like this sunset scheme better. We’ll see.

Well, it’s not done, but I didn’t expect it to be. K and her mom did completely
shelve all of Bosses #1 and 2, and almost entirely sorted out the other two attorney’s
boxes for unpacking. They knew we had to reset shelves so they didn’t unpack those.

Ran into a minor complication while setting shelves for Boss #3 – power outlet behind
the cabinet that got in the way of where I wanted to put the second to last shelf.
No major, just moved everything up one, but of course I found this out as I was
finishing the second cabinet. Ah well, it was still under an hour at that point.

Resetting and unpacking the fourth attorney took longer than I anticipated because
of the resort, but I was still doing pretty well. Probably about 4 hours total for
both of them.

Then on to supplies and spot cleaning as I went. Made some significant shifts in
locations because of lack of drawers and having opened up a second of the metal
racks. I still want drawers of some kind, though, because there’s so much little
stuff that used to be in drawers and I think is going to get lost otherwise. I’m
going to take a look at Container Store later and see what I can do with elfa or
some other similar modular unit to fit into the under-counter cabinet space.

We also did a final pass-through at the old space. I don’t know if someone did a
pass and brought over the plastic crate that had my gift wrap and cooler packs in
it or if the building decided that was trash, but they weren’t there anymore. If
they show up at the new space, great. If not, no major loss, the gift wrap was the
biggest thing.

We finally left about 6:45. 6 hours yesterday plus 6.5 today. That’ll really help.