Ackery

Suddenly a history.

Now, that's more like it.

Apologies to those of you who have just had Bloglines or some other RSS reader spew old entries all over your screen -- I was finally able to import the old Ackery entries, so now I look like slightly less of a newbie. Next up: returning emails (I swear it!) and prettifying this place, just a tad. Also, school starts in two weeks, and as God is my witness, I WILL park in the garage before then, even if I have to rent a backhoe to do it.

Any Landing You Can Walk Away From

The nasty carpet is gone, and in its place is very neutral, very clean carpet. Naturally, the cats threw up on it mere hours after the carpet guys left. I keep trying to explain to them that, really, Save-A-Pet is mere minutes away from our house, but they don't seem to care -- probably because getting them into a cat carrier for transport is a near-lethal job.

Have you ever seen that show, Clean Sweep? Where they empty out an impossibly cluttered room onto a tarp in the back yard and people have to sort through all of their belongings, harden their hearts, and throw away all of their old crap? That's kind of what things are like here right now. We moved everything into the garage, and now we have to slowly move it back in, decluttering as we go. Of course, on TV, they build attractive yet highly functional furniture and organizing systems to hold all the crap, and we are stuck with the world's largest collection of Rubbermaid boxes, but otherwise, it's essentially the same. I would really like my garage back, though.

On the blog front, I am feeling fairly confident that everything switched over to Typepad and GoogleApps and various other places, which is a lovely surprise. There were some issues originally, and I didn't want to get overly excited until the old place completely shut down, lest there be some sort of disaster that erased all of my painstaking work. I owe all sorts of people email, and real mail, and I apologize for the slow reply times. On the schedule for the upcoming week is getting a feel for Typepad and sprucing this place up -- right after I can park in my garage again.

Too Early To Tell

As I type this, mysterious things in the dark corners of cyberspace are occurring. In 24-48 hours, we'll know if all of my messing around with settings far beyond my ken were successful. At some point in the future, I'll be able to import my old Ackery entries over here.

But for now, we wait. I wait for my domain name to propagate, I wait for Google to decide I really do pay a nominal fee to own ackery.com, I wait for...oh, hell. Godot, maybe. And while we wait, I move all of my worldly possessions into the garage in preparation for new carpet.

According to the MommyWatch, though, our fancy-pants pizza is done, and it is time to eat. Waiting sucks.

We may experience some slight turbulence, and then explode.

Quickly, before pretty much everything around here blows up in my face and is returned to binary code scattered across the interwebs:

:: Deathly Hallows was wonderful. I finished it Sunday morning. Now I'm waiting for my UK copy to get here so I can read it again.
:: The lightning bolts came off.

:: The new carpet is being installed on Saturday. This means that I have to move everything out of all three bedrooms into my dining room, bathroom, and garage, which will undoubtedly be a feat that physicists will study for years to come. Should be interesting.

Lastly, my webhost has decided to close up shop at the end of the month, and I've decided to switch over to Typepad for a bunch of reasons too dull and geeky to get into here. I should be able to port over my entries to that site, and with any luck, keep the URL the same. I'm already having problems (someone has taken Ackery as a user name. WHY would anyone take Ackery as a user name? And then not create a blog? Because the universe is out to GET ME, that's why.), but I hope that some technical finagling will take care of it. So, if I disappear for a while, or if the emails bounce (still trying to address the email situation, because I REALLY don't want to print up new business cards), don't fret.

Now that I think about it, a technical difficulty-based hiatus probably won't look any different than a inadvertent laziness-based hiatus.

Back as soon as I beat the interwebs into submission!