The morning started out by being awaken by a phone call from my husband, who was yelling and ranting about a tornado headed our way. I was still in a severe sleep stupor, and I hadn't even had my first cup of coffee yet, so I was slowly, very slowly grasping this. It wasn't till after looking out the window to the west and noticing low and heavy clouds, black as night, with thick, sharp lightning strikes reaching down like fingertips from God, that I suddenly took action.
I looked at all the girls and told them to dress quickly (in case half the house blew down, I didn't want us wandering around in pj's and pull-up's), and meet in the hallway. I was actually screaming something to my husband over the phone about jumping into the car and hauling ass two hours to the northeast to my mother's house.
Remember, I haven't had anything remotely resembling caffeine yet.
By the way, what/who sends a potential tornado to your doorstep before you've had your first cup of freaking coffee? So I'm squashed in the bottom of our towel closet with my three girls smelling the coffee my husband had already made before he left, and I can't even get to it yet! But that thought is quickly washed away with the quiet whimpers of my three and seven year old girls. I'm not sure if they are whimpering about the weather, or my laying on them in the name of protection is actually hampering their breathing efforts.
Luckily, we survived unscathed, and the tornado passed us by like a big, bad bully stomping over our heads.
Which, by the way, my sincerest thoughts and prayers go out to those who had to suffer through the tornadoes early this morning. Coffee or no coffee, those people need rallying around right now.
As the morning progressed, things seemed to get better as the thick black clouds rolled on to the east and the rains eased to a mere drizzle here and there. I was finally able to plug the computer back in and begin again where I left off last night; Googling "how to make a scroll bar for blogs". Still, everything I found wasn't working on my blog. Most html codes just left a box with a pretty border, but no scroll, no personal blog badge code inside the box.
So much for "Blogger" Help Forum.
After three days and a tornado later, I finally find a code for a scroll box that would actually "work" on my blog. Then I start having issues of having the actual code for my badge show up inside the scroll box. Figuring this out is nothing short of climbing the Himalyians - NAKED! I'm desperately asking for help from all my "Mom Blogging" sites. What I get back is bloggers having similar issues to mine. I feel a sense of depression seeping in when suddenly I hear the "ping" from my Plurk account.
It's "Tara"; she's a fellow blogging friend who lives in the town next to mine. It's so good to find a fellow blogger so close to home so I'm eager to see what she has to say this morning. She has successfully survived the onslaught of this mornings storm and then she announces that she's been nominated for the 2009 Blogging Awards. I am SO excited for her just for the fact that she lives so close and I actually KNOW someone now whose been nominated for one of those things. I wanna vote for her so bad cause she's got a good blog called "If Mom Says Ok"!
Then curiosity gets to the best of me. I type my blog URL into this site and realize I've been nominated TOO - for three freaking categories! Who the hell did that! I'm thinking my husband because he has been so supportive in my efforts to getting my blog off and running. But it doesn't matter cause I'm so excited that I screech as loud as I can and Toni and Nia think something dreadfully awful has happened.
Can't they tell the difference between an excited screech and a terrified screech?
I email "Tara" back to tell her that I've been nominated to and that we should click and vote each other to death! Our fingers may fall from all the voting off before we accomplish anything though. Then I do the next best thing; I decide to nominate my cousin's site. He's an accomplished writer, so he deserves a lot of votes too. Plus, it's real good karma to pass around!
So after I nominate my cousin, I decide to send a mass emailing out telling everyone about the nomination and to nominate my cousin too. Okay, so I'm a bit over zealous, so what! Will it help? I don't know, but I sure felt proud about the whole process of doing it. Anyone who first starts blogging knows exactly how hard it can be because it's not just writing about this or that. It's about expression of the self; of who you are, and how much damn money one can make!
So after my little hoo-hah session with my ego, I'm back to trying to figure out this perplexing scroll bar coding. I've had a decent crash course over the past couple of months since starting this blog, so I can understand a bit of
I'm copying, pasting, switching, rearranging, researching, banging my head on the wall, nervously stuffing grapes in my mouth, managing a bit of playtime with my girls in between. When suddenly, God sends me an angel on Twittermoms. It is "Dealicious Mom", and she unknowingly been sent by God to rescue me and my sanity from this html abyss.
She offers for me to check out her site and use what I need. I see the same badge and scroll box with code on her site that I'm trying to do for my site. Another brick wall. Till she offers me to email her.
I quicky fire a email to her, and she replies with the most beautiful email I have seen in months; that gorgeous bit of html code that I already have, but instead, it's written twice. It's written twice except it has one piece of code dividing it, that I haven't noticed before: form with two little arrows on each side.
This one stupid six character piece of code is what has completely fried my brain for three days. It has caused so much chaos between my girls and I, that I should hunt down the shithead who invented this and hit he/she with a karmic two by four; cause that's what they deserve for messing with so many of us who are just trying to sludge our way through html and survive.
So, I convinced my girls to unpack their bags and stay for awhile longer. I mean, after a rainy day, how far can they get on:
- a bag of popcorn,
- two apples,
- Wuzzy - Nia's stuffed seal,
- Toni's Nintendo,
- and Nadia's jar of change?
It was my que to put down my keyboard and glasses and take up baking cookies instead.
Man, double chocolate chip, pecan cookies baked by your daughter and her friend are sooo much more satisfying than learning html any day of the week.
And a heck of better than squished bodies in a towel closet!
