Serene of the Oakland Serenes

Nice day yesterday, making stonebender and tracytreefrog's Gram's potato bread. Have figured out that I'll be very sick for a couple hours following taking my new meds, so I'm trying to time taking them better. I failed at this yesterday, but it's gonna take some fine-tuning.

It'll be a long day at work with little time to stop and be online, so have a wonderful day, all, as I go about the business of shortening this pile of files on my desk!

Thank you, everyone. The day got much better as soon as my local family woke up. Several things made the day better as it went along:

The kid made me tea with milk and sugar and was sweet to me.

Both boyfriends were, as always, sweet to me. Sense a theme?

loracs was sweet to me.

Then james_huber and I took the kid to Best Buy, then the grocery store for Mom Food stuff, then home, in the Zipcar. Have I mentioned I love Zipcar?

Oh, and on the way to get the Zipcar? Dance flashmob!

Walked the 2 miles home from the Zipcar lot, bought a jacket and some burgers on the way, and just talked about how I wished I'd awakened everyone sooner to make me feel better.

And somewhere along the line, got a hint that I'm probably really hormonal today, which would help explain at least some of the crying.

And james_huber and wtfpotatoes cleaned the kitchen! You have no idea how depressing it is to me when the house is a pit. It's still a pit, but at least the kitchen is lovely, so I can cook tomorrow!

Talked with the kid for a long time about how complicated her emotions about her mother are, but I interrupted too much, so I hope I get a chance to do it again soon, with more listening.

Now I'll sit and veg for a while and write a blog post or six.

How was YOUR day? Anything joyful happen to you, with you, because of you?

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, my life was consumed with BlogHer Food, a conference for women food bloggers (and a few token men) in San Francisco. It's due to the wonderfulness of badgerbag that I got to go, and I talk a little about it (not terribly coherently) here: http://www.momfoodproject.com/2010/10/12/blogher-food-wild-rice-salad-and-tossing-things-together/

Other stuff: Work is fine, though still backed up, and I've got extra hours for a while, so my paychecks'll be a little bigger, so that's nice.

The kid has a kidney infection. She's taking antibiotics, but they may be the wrong ones.

I had a pharmaceutical screwup that was compounded by not having any of my docs in town when I needed them, so it'll be a week or so before I feel like I'm really awake and alive again, now that I have my prescription. And I don't wanna say why in public, but mactavish and loracs were the heroes of the revolution on this one.

Mom is okay, but really tired.

My blog is still making me happy, as are my family.

And I'm home. Home home home home HOME. I have the day off tomorrow, and if I didn't HAVE to, I wouldn't leave the house. (I do have to, though, to pick up my prescription and submit to a bunch of tests. *sigh*)

You should go read The Mom Food Project today. The lovely and talented chrishansenhome has contributed a wonderful piece about his Mom's food failures, and what they contributed to his family's story. Serene-Bob says check it out!

(The Mom Food Project blog is ramping up to daily posts, with the help of some wonderful contributors. Maybe you want to contribute, too?)

As I just posted to Facebook: Lasagna is assembled; will bake it tomorrow. The house smells like my childhood. Oh, and fair warning: The kid appears to be catching a cold. Make your visiting decisions accordingly.

Mom likes the new blog, and my aunt likes it even more. The first real post is up today. If you want, you can see it at http://www.momfoodproject.com (or the feed's at momfood_feed).

Yay!

Next steps: take a photography course, preferably online; buy or make a lightbox; choose or write something to archive the recipes for when I want to put them into book form

1) Last night, my ankle popped. For less than a second, it hurt so badly I wanted to throw up, and then it was fine. And it's been fine since. I can walk! Hallelujah. I'm still taking it easy, but the difference is huge, and I'm so relieved.

2) Still having fun building the blog. LOTS of fun. http://www.momfoodproject.com (mom doesn't read DW/LJ, and it's almost ready to launch anyway). The kid is working on a logo/banner theme.

3) And even having a little fun on Twitter (@momfood). I never wanted one for personal stuff (still don't), but it's fun connecting with other food bloggers and with famous chefs and geeks.

4) Got a letter from the IRS today. The short take is they said no to seven of the documents I sent. There's a chance I could get new documents together in the ten days they've given me to appeal this, but I'm not sure I can, and I'm not going to decide about it tonight; it's not worth crying over right now.

5) The kid has been making real money doing commissions for people on DeviantArt. She is a professional artist! She's amused and a bit turned off by the themes of some of the drawings, but she takes the work seriously and spends a lot of time and effort on them. You can see some of them at http://wetpaperbag.deviantart.com/gallery/

6) Things have been REALLY rough in stonebender's side of the family. Seems like there's never a time when all three of them are well at the same time. I wish I had a magic health wand, you know?

1) Can't decide if the injured ankle is a blessing or a curse. Well, it's both, I guess. I'm getting LOTS of rest, but I'm also getting cabin fever. First world problems.

2) Having a ton of fun building a new project. It will get its own post today, under access lock, because even though mom rarely reads my journals, I don't want her to see what her birthday present is.

3) Anything I planned to do today (really, just housework) is officially cancelled in favor of the MythBusters marathon! Well, maybe I'll do a little housework on the commercials. Or not.

4) I used to like to sleep. I used to do it a lot. Nowadays, though, I sleep maybe 5 hours, wake up at ungodly hours of the morning (today, it was 3am) and just stay up. I get so much done while everyone else is sleeping that I actually don't mind this, but it does mean I'm wasted by 9pm.

5) Made my first rib roast last night. Called mom for instructions. Came out GREAT.

6) Little things that brought me joy yesterday, even though I wasn't feeling all that hot:

• the new water bottle someotherguy bought me
• playing games with the kid, who is always really pleasant for a few days after we have an argument and the world doesn't collapse (she's afraid of parental anger, and who can blame her, but we actually argue well, without being very mean to each other)
• dinner: the aforementioned roast, mashed potatoes/carrots/cauliflower, gravy, and steamed green beans. Yum.
• a phone call from stonebender while he was out and about, just because
• honeydew from the farm box: sweet and ripe and delicious

What a nice day we had. The kid and I had planned to go to the Youth Jobs Program thingy (she could go alone, but she has understandable anxiety about going new places on the bus), and when we got downtown, it was lunchtime, so we ate lunch, went and got her an intake appointment, then sat in Peet's for an hour or so having a nice companionable conversation about everything and nothing, while she drew sketches.

Next, we stopped at the Korean grocery store, where she was *fascinated* with the live Dungeness crabs, which were very inexpensive as such things go, so I agreed to buy some for dinner. Since wild_irises was coming over to drop off Costco butter anyway, I decided dinner time would be the perfect time, and she and abostick59 came over and shared our crabs and butter and oven-fried spring rolls and cherries and pistachios and sorbet with us. Lovely dinner, lovely to see our friends again. Very funny and macabre to watch the kid do the actual work of killing crabs for our dinner.

Tonight, we'll work on the kid's application for the jobs program (her appointment is tomorrow), and I'll start playing with my own projects over the next few days:

1) Getting my new blog up and running (more about this later)
2) Getting my poetry chapbook together with the help of some wonderful friends who have offered to read some of my stuff
3) Knitting the rest of someotherguy's Doctor Who scarf

Well, maybe first I'll take a firehose to my house to clean up the utter crab mess. :-)

Okay, I've asked this in the past, but it's been a while and I'm working on a new (and exciting-to-me) blog project, so here goes:

DW? Wordpress? Typepad? Something else? (LJ is not an option.)

Considerations:

I think I want the thing on my own domain, which I've already secured, but I'm willing to be talked out of that idea.

I want to be able to choose either an ad-free blog or one on which I choose which ads are displayed. No automatic Google adbar, or anything like that.

More customizability is better, but since I'm really not a very good web programmer, it doesn't need to be down to the command line or anything. I'd love to be able to use custom CSS (I am pretty sure both Wordpress and Typepad offer that), and to view stats, but neither of those things is essential.

It doesn't have to be free; affordable is good, though.

Thoughts?