Why I Didn't Post Yesterday's Treasuries until Today

My wireless modem bent at a 45° angle thanks to Act of Dog.
Yesterday was a day that I should have spent avoiding human contact. My head was particularly zappy with weird floaty migraine aura lights, piercing pain, and more than my fair share of forgetting what had happened 30 seconds ago. Instead I ran around to Clear Wireless stores and internet cafes, trying to figure out how to get a new modem ASAP and dealing with the most necessary bits of Etsy business. I fell asleep at 6 PM and woke up in time to walk the dog and go to bed.

Today I got up, walked the culprit of a dog, took photos of antique doorknobs, and crossed the street to the free wireless internet cafe/eating establishment Charmers/Dagel and Beli. Over 4 hours, one bagel, and two cups of chai tea (non-latte) later, I'm still plugging away.

The passage of time is much more pronounced when I'm not at home. At home, I spend all day every day on the computer. It's my job, my television, my video game system, my communications device...it's both work and my diversion from work. Plus I get up and wander around, eat things, throw treats for the dog to chase, clean the kitchen, take more photos, etc. Being at the cafe is much more like being at a real normal-people office. I'm not sure I've been any more or less productive here. I get to eavesdrop and people watch, I have to wear pants. There's always a trade-off.

Trade off I get to experience now: other people make a larger selection of food and drinks, but it's relatively expensive. Am I sick of chai? Hot chocolate perhaps?

Dog-dawn-it

The early morning-ness of that last post was brought to you today by my dog, who decided he HAD to go out at 7 AM (though his campaign of whining started much earlier), and is now back asleep on a pillow by my desk.

It's a good thing he's cute.

Sticks and Stones and Lazy Bones

Little Koi1 art print by arinfish available for sale at arinfish.etsy.com

I'm seriously considering changing the name of the card portion of my business to Off the Wall Greetings. I came up with it about an hour ago while I was making dinner. It covers both my WALLpaper envelope stuff and my general snarky/offbeat stuff, and that's pretty much what I do. I was a little surprised it doesn't already exist, but there's no offthewallgreetings.com yet or anything I could find by googling it (except the descriptive phrase referring to cards). I already created the gmail account and offthewallgreetings.etsy.com, but now I have to convince myself it's really worth it to move everything to the new name and make new business cards and all that. Possible logo: wallpaper background with a bent nail? Still just thoughts. I'd love to hear your opinions, though.

And why am I doing this on New Years Eve? Because I decided that while my cold is getting better and I'm finally off the nasal sprays and things ending in "-quil," it wasn't worth forcing myself out in less clothing than the weather would logically call for to some semi-awkward uber-social function full of people I don't know or barely know and sneeze on the one or two people I actually want to see for a few minutes and drink things I shouldn't and spend money I shouldn't and wander home frozen to a pair of dogs that will want to go out and play having already pooped in my kitchen and wake up tomorrow as sick as I was five days ago, all just to have a "proper" New Years.

Hot Cocoa card by winemakerssister for sale at winemakerssister.etsy.com

Instead, I'm curling up with two warm (and appropriately emptied) dogs, a hot drink, and as many movies as I can stand. I'll probably call a few important people to wish them a happy 2009. I might stick my head out the 13th floor fire escape at the countdown to watch the fireworks, since my apartment building has one hell of a view, but that's it. And I'm looking forward to it like crazy.

TheModDog collars Freud

Since my dog Freud* is a rescue and I have no idea when his birthday is, this year we celebrated our "anniversary, ie when he was more-or-less dumped on me by the crazy dog rescue lady in Ohio. I love him infinitely much, and even though he's crazy, I don't mind. I bought him a new collar (he kind of needed one anyway) as an anniversary present this year from TheModDog and it is fabulous! Obviously, we had to do a photo shoot. I'm still a moderately lousy photographer, but he is a gorgeous model. Please enjoy, and I highly recommend TheModDog for all your pet collar needs!

*I named him because he is crazy and when I got him he was obsessed with his genitals. Now he's got the mommy complex, too, but I guess I asked for that one.

Find more photos like this on Indiepublic

Sweet mother of templates

Someone in EtsyGreetings sent the link to this wonderful page of free blog templates: http://lenatoewsdesigns.blogspot.com/

So first I messed around with just changing my template to one of theirs. I really liked a few of them except for "_____" where "______" was the image at the top or the background or some other detail that didn't it my personal style/snarkitude (how dare they be imperfect, the free site amazing service that they are and all). I chose one I thought was close enough and started to personalize it, but the top image just kept bothering me and I wondered if I could change it to my scissors background thing I use on my shop banner without exploding all the HTML code and such.

Fortunately, I am a giant nerd. I found the spot in the HTML for the template that had the link to the image I didn't want. I dragged it into Photoshop, thinking I'd just play around with it a little, maybe add a poop heart or some of the sheep that Amy drew for the "ewe" cards. But it looked dumb, so I tried using the original banner's dimensions and changing it entirely to my scissors thing, then uploading my new branded-ier banner to flickr, taking the URL of the full size image, and pasting it into the template HTML where the old banner image link was. Bingo. But now my banner didn't go with the background (which I really liked). So I found the background image URL (not far from the banner one) and started playing with THAT, only to overhaul THAT whole thing...I'm still not thrilled with the background, but I feel very techno-savvy and my blog is now undeniably mine-looking. Maybe tomorrow I'll take some photos of googly eyes and yarn or something and turn that into the background instead. Seems a bit ridiculous considering how much time I spent arranging those photos for the current background, but I'm in Super-Fuzzy-Stabby-Head Mode, so I was bound to get stuck on some strange useless project or another.

No, Freud (my dog), you may not have my artichoke kalamata hummus.