Domestic Geek

Yeah, yeah...so that took a little longer than I expected.

Honestly, I'll admit that I was more than a little burned out with blogging (both doing and reading - I blame paid blogging). I've also been in a really bad place mentally and didn't want my new home to once again be the Continuous Blog of Woe® that Marcus had once dubbed my little cyber home. I've had the header and main layout done for months (it was actually almost finished when I closed down the old blog), but I just couldn't bring myself to fix the sidebars and get the rest of it running. Even now a lot of it is still jacked, plus I realized I never did fix the contact or archive pages of my old site. Whoops! The motivation to get the site fixed well before Blogathon came around again was shot to heck when I heard that they were taking this year off.

Well, I decided this weekend that it was finally time to come out of exile. Recently, I've decided it's time to stop wallowing in "someday" and "if only" and turn my life into what I want instead of allowing it to just happen. I need an outlet to post my thoughts and journal my existence. It's where my dad, Marcus' mom and my friends go to keep up with us. Big changes are going to be happening in the next couple of years (thanks to Saturn in my chart) and I need a place to share.

As for what have I been up to in the last four months? You guys get a little bulleted list:

• Work went to Hell in a Handbasket - post about what happened coming soon
• I met The Yarn Harlot twice
• I'm obsessed with knitting and spend most of my free time on Ravelry
• Marcus and I went to Tennessee on vacation via St. Louis and Indiana (was too short - should've taken more time off)
• Our water heater died
• Our lot rent went up $45/mo and our park is turning into a Mexican Ghetto
• We only have one rabbit left (Neo) - all the others have passed away
• I got two free parakeets on Freecycle
• We got a Wii and a WiiFit
• I got a free Nintendo DS - post to come
• I got back into reading - didn't realize how badly I missed it
• I got my first camera speeding ticket - City and County of Denver can bite me
• I decided I'm never doing Graphic Design for anybody (except for Marcus) ever again - clients suck much ass
• I met author Maggie Sefton at The Tattered Cover (she writes knitting mysteries set in Colorado)
• Marcus bought me a new camera
• I've become obsessed with Alpacas — I want to own some

I know there is more, but I can't think of anything at the moment.

So, I'm back and if you've read this far, thanks for visiting. I can't promise a blog free of Woe, but I'll do my best to eliminate it.

OK, just as a heads up, I'll no longer be putting new posts here and I've turned off commenting. I'm in the process of moving this all to my new domain and once I have the template done and fix all the little quirky things that are going on associated with the move, I'll update this post and direct you all to my new home. With any luck and little interference, this should happen by March 1st.

Sorry that I’ve been MIA lately. I’ve done got myself addicted to The Sims™ 2 again. Later this month, the expansion pack “FreeTime” is coming out. Man, I wish I could get that one — I’m all about the hobbies! I’m actually a couple of EPs behind still. I was hoping to pick up a couple cheap during CompUsa’s closing, but software was the first to go and it didn’t even go cheap. People are such suckers. Even at “Liquidation Prices,” I could still get those games cheaper on Amazon or eBay. Just wasn’t meant to be yet.

I got a “Save the Date” email from my high school’s reunion committee yesterday. Our 25th reunion has been scheduled for mid-July 2009. How in the heck did I get old enough to be coming up on a 25 year high school reunion? I was looking through some pictures from past reunions on the Gateway High School Class of ‘84 page that they have set up (I’ve yet to attend one) and it’s weird seeing people that kind of resemble people I kind of knew back then. I know I’ve written about it on here somewhere before, but I feel really detached from my past. I know I went through those experiences, but for some reason, I don’t have any “feelings” associated with them. It’s really hard to explain, but even now I feel oddly disconnected from my life.

Anyway, I decided I will probably go to this one if the funds are available. The people I would really like to see probably won’t be there (most of them haven’t been to any reunions either), but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. It’s pretty cliche, but I definitely need to get myself in better shape before I attend. I don’t want to be the one that every points at and says, “Gee, look at how fat she got!” If they even remember me, that is.

In other news, I’m still sick. Argh! Positive health vibes coming my way from anybody that reads this would be greatly appreciated. I’ve got crud in my upper chest that just won’t let loose. I’m so tired of coughing. It was really bad today because the pollution levels are pretty high. Other than that, I’m feeling pretty good.

I have a profile on Ravelry (you’ll only be able to see it if you’re a member). If you haven’t heard, it’s an online community for knitters and crocheters. I’ve been chatting with a woman that runs the Parker Stitch N’ Bitch group and I’m thinking I’ll head down one of these days and join in.

OK, that’s about it for now. Being sick, Sims and work is about all that’s going on right now. Oh, the days are getting longer and that makes me happy.

I'm really trying hard to be grateful for the good things that happen to me. I've spent so much of my life focusing on what I don't have or the bad things that happen that I don't take time to really enjoy the good.

I am happy that my sickness lessened to a point where I could go to work today and not use any of my vacation time.

Today I am grateful that the girl I sit next to went home sick so I could spend the day focusing and working in total peace. I'm also grateful that I work in the same place as Marcus so that he could come look over my Applescript I was editing and see where I had a syntax error.

I'm thankful I made it home safely in the snowstorm.

I am proud of myself for resisting the urge to buy craft supplies when I stopped into Hobby Lobby to take a break from the drive. I'm also proud of myself for putting back the cake mix and frosting before I checked out when I was grocery shopping.

I just can't seem to get well. Maybe by spring I'll finally lick this crap that just lingers and keeps getting passed around at work. I really have stuff and I want/need/have to do and right now I'm absolutely freezing and get a little dizzy when I stand up. So not cool.

I'm using the time today to catch up on a little Internet reading and found a cute little quiz thingy at my friend Julie's blog -->:

Pft, I'm only an 8. Stupid 1 point letters.

In other news, I'm almost done with the design for my template here, so I expect to have Domesticgeek.com live by the end of the month. I'm also doing some work on my other sites (since I had to move them all from Dreamhost), so eventually I'll link them up, too.

That reminds me that I never wrote about why I had to get all of my stuff off of Dreamhost's servers. Oh, back on Jan. 15th, I got this neat little email from Dreamhost saying they had autobilled my debit card $119.40. Um, my hosting wasn't set to renew until March and I didn't have that much money in my checking account. I immediately sent a response off to support that they were in error. See, I had no intention of renewing for another year. They've sucked. Many times I've gone to work on templates or to make posts only to have their servers lagging or down. I fretted all day long about that charge and finally got an email from someone later that day:

Hi LaDonna!

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we've accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

I'm really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; I've already removed all those bum future charges on your account (#292017) and already refunded the $119.4 charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there's no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won't happen again. There's no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,
Josh!

So, everything is cool, I think. I go home and read the promised post on the blog: Um, Whoops. I was a little miffed at the tone of the post, but I was willing to let it slip because mistakes happen and the guy was probably dealing with his stupidity the only way he knew how.

I kept checking both their blog and my bank (to see if a charge ever posted) and since I saw nothing, I figured all was good. Well, after I get home from dinner Friday night, I see a friend of mine from a message board complaining on Twitter that she actually got charged by Dreamhost. I go and check, and damned if I didn't get charged also. The resulting charge also got me two overdraft charges. I was soooooo pissed.

Turns out they only "thought" they had refunded the money. They really hadn't and the original charges went through. Well, this was MLK weekend and the banks were going to be closed on Monday. Maybe you'll see a refund by Tuesday, they said. Well, it was late in the day Tuesday before they finally posted a refund. In the mean time, the comments on their blog got downright ugly and the Dreamhost team all but disappeared. I never did get any emails back from support in response to my inquiry as to what they were going to do about my overdrafts. To make matters worse for them in my eyes, a bunch of their servers went down on the 23rd. Time to leave now.

Another thing about this whole thing that ticked me off was my bank. I called them on Monday (it was a holiday, but they promise 24-hour telephone banking) and the woman I spoke to said it would be no problem for them to reverse the overdrafts when Dreamhost sent the refund through. When I called back Wednesday, that woman tried telling me it wasn't the bank's problem and they shouldn't have to reverse them. I was ticked and she eventually did reverse them. This is not the first time I have gotten the runaround from them. I'm seriously going to try to find a better bank.

Anywho, once I got my cash back, I transfered the one domain I had registered through them to my normal registrar, moved all my data to my home server and closed my account. Marcus found me a free DNS at a place called EveryDNS.net. It seems to be working pretty well. I'm going to have to send those guys a donation.

I've got one more story about the frustrating experience I had with the IRS, but this post is getting a bit long, so perhaps that one will wait for another day.

I'm off to knit for a bit.