Domestic Geek

All right! Nine more days. I like the skin that Miss Zoot has for the Half-Blood Prince. Change the skin to default if you don't see it. I'll do a screen cap tomorrow to save it for posterity.

I'm a late-comer to this whole Harry Potter phenomenon. I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone quite a while after it had come out in paperback and liked it well enough. I didn't understand the hysteria about the subsequent releases. In fact, I didn't read the other four books until after Order of the Phoenix was already in paperback. I am so hooked now, though. I told myself when I finished reading the last one that I could wait until the next one was out in paperback, but...I can't wait. I'm an addict, I admit it. I've read the first five more times than I can count in the last year. I check the HP fan sites daily. I go to J.K.'s site weekly to see if there are updates. Absurd? Maybe. Entertaining? Definitely.

I've got until Monday to order my book to have it delivered on Saturday, July 16th. Must remember to order it after Friday's payday.

I was linked from Instapundit today and when I went to look at my Branica stats, I see that I have had over 1500 hits from there. Whoa. I normally get between 18-35. I didn't get that many hits of people looking for the infamous Toys 'R' Us singing bunny commercial. Everybody but one guy has been a lurker, though. Sorry I don't have anything interesting to say.

I also noticed that somebody found me by searching for "LaDonna (lastname removed) blog". I took all references to my full name off the ol' blog quite a while ago. Will the cached versions of my site ever go away? I'm hesitant to start a professional life when all people have to do to find my lunatic rantings is do a google search on me. I'm really regretting having put my last name in the blog at all. Lesson learned. Maybe it is time to switch this thing to a different domain. I'm thinking of letting ladonnasworld.com go when it expires in January, anyway. We'll see. It would've been nice to find out who was looking for me, though. It's not like a have a really common name.

Of course, that may not totally help. Even though I found no reference to his full name in it, the blog of sex offender and accused murderer Joseph Duncan was found. Maybe the goDaddy site linked it originally or something or a newspaper drug it up. Who knows? Reading some of those entries was chilling, though.

Damn, that embroidery machine went for $1100. What a steal! *sigh* I need money.

OK, not much to do at work again, apparently. This totally sucks. They're really busy down on the production floor this week, but there's not a damned thing to do up here. *sigh* I know I should be trying to work on the proofing system for our web site, but I'm not focused enough today to try and write program code. So, here I sit writing a blog entry. It would be fine except that I feel guilty pulling in $$ while not accomplishing anything productive.

I broke down and applied for Paypal buyer credit to try and get an embroidery machine that ends in 7 hours. Bastards (thankfully) didn't give me enough. I know I need to wait until I have cash in hand to start the embroidery part of my future business. The last thing I need right now is even more debt. Whew. I need to concentrate on the web design aspect. That will have less start-up cost.

I also came across PrintMojo, an online screen printer that will host an online store as well. When I come up with some cool designs, a place like that might be a better way to go than CafePress. We'll see.

You know it's time to figure out how to move on when you're sitting in your bathroom at 3:15 am, crying, because you don't want to go to your suck-ass job anymore. Then you find yourself posting about it because it delays the inevitable.

I'm beginning the official ten day countdown to the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I'm excited to see what kind of new things show up (if anything) on J.K. Rowling's site in the next few days. I'm wishing I could go to one of those big gala release parties, but I'll probably just pop into the Tattered Cover to see if anything interesting is going on and then have my book delivered from Amazon.

I shall re-read the previous five books in the next week and a half in eager anticipation (and to clean out any fan fiction residual that still clutters my brain).