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Meet Beatrice and Bugly
I have chairs now. They’re not exactly what I was going for but they’re growing on me. We’ve named them Beatrice and Bugly. Beatrice is the gold one on the right. I wanted to name them Ugly and Fugly but Bug thinks the golden chair is rather pretty and princess-like and deserves a better name than Fugly. So we compromised and came up with Beatrice and Bugly. Hopefully Bugly doesn’t turn out to be an omen for creepy crawly bed bugs that you all have so graciously warned me about in the comments. Eeeeee…. I’m totally creeeped out.
I’m pretty sure they are clean though. They smell like a combination of dry cleaner and moth balls and I’ve inspected them deeply and see no sign of bugs or dirt. But I guess time will tell. My Uncle who happens to be a pest control operator is visiting so I’ll ask him to check them out too.
I really like the lines of the top part of the chairs. I love the velvet and the colors. I feel like I’m on a tv show from the late sixties. But I hate the bottom part of the chairs. They’re rocking chairs! Which I do not like at all. They swivel around in circles and are always pointing the wrong way when I walk into the room. I think they secretly are plotting against me when I’m not around.
I thought maybe I could detach the bottom ruffle and the circular rocking parts and then attach some spindly wooden legs that would look much cooler. However, upon closer inspection I found that the rocker is totally incorporated into the chair structure and taking it apart would seriously compromise their stability. So rocking I am stuck with. Though I do have to admit that my guests who have sat in them so far approve. They are quite fun to swivel around in so you can converse with anyone in any part of the room.
And the best part? The dogs do not like them. So far there have been no dogs sitting on chairs. I think that’s great.
I’m not 100% on them though and since they only cost $12 and $17 respectively, I might take them back to the thrift store if something better comes along. We’re also talking about making an outdoor living room where my carport is so they might work out there for a summertime thing. I don’t know. I figure I’m just renting them for a flat rate of $29 and I can return them whenever I like.
But for now they’re kinda fun. I even bought a mumu for fifty cents at a garage sale to get in the spirit. It so groovy and unflattering. I’m sure it would look super cute on me if I was seventeen though. Maybe I should make it back into a tablecloth. Or I could just keep it around for those crazy days when you don’t care what you look like because it’s ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE DEGREES IN THE SHADE! I’m so not looking forward to those days.
For now I can just wear it when nobody is looking and pretend I’m living in the good old days back before I was born.
Were you wondering where I put my old white chair? It was quite a conundrum at first. I went from having no chairs to suddenly having too many chairs. I tried to fit them all in my living room and while it was great for conversation, it really got on my nerves that everything was so crowded. I didn’t realize what a neurotic freak I was until I found myself up at night stressing out about having too many chairs in my living room.
The next day I moved everything around in a manic blur and ended up with the white chair in my Parisian bedroom. I can’t believe it fit. It is actually kind of nice there. Holly thinks I put it there just for her.
Addendum:
Now that I’m looking at Bugly in photos, I’m not loving him so much. What do you say? Hot or NOT. I’m thinking most of you are thinking I’ve lost my mind in some kind of seventies haze. He really does look better in real life and that crocheted blanket actually is so clashy it’s cool, in my mind.
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An Explanation
You’ve probably been wondering what happened to me and this blog this last week. Me too. I might have more of an idea about it than you do though, so I’ll share what I know. You may have noticed my site has been down from time to time since the beginning of the year. And then it went down for good last Wednesday and couldn’t be resurrected from the dead at all. This could be due to some linkage from some big sites (Thank you OMSH and whoorl), the popularity of my Valentines maybe, my newfound ability to link from facebook (you crazy facebookites) or just plain bad luck. Or it could be spam, which is also bad luck.
That’s what my old server company said it was. They said I was being bombarded with so much spam that they called it a denial-of-service attack. A wha? I never really understood why I would be the victim of a DOS attack. I don’t have any credit-card information on my site. I’m not a bank or a credit-card company. Why would someone want to take me down and mess with this silly blog? I’m not even that big! I have some haters but not that many. Did I offend a troll who had hacker skills? Was someone using my site as a way to get to a bigger site? Maybe the government was taking me down because of the words “secret agent” in my domain name…ooh, conspiracy theory. Who knows. Nobody could really explain it to me.
So I moved to a new server company where hopefully if this happens again they can explain it to me. Or at least be there around the clock to talk to me when I’m freaking out. I switched to Liquid Web and so far I’ve been super super super happy. I even called them at three in the morning and they totally helped me. Nice guys on the phone 24/7. Who needs a husband?! It’s been wonderful.
Except for one little problem: I did not make a complete back-up of my old site before I switched servers. I thought I had. I had manually dragged folder after folder over from my ftp site to my hard drive late into the night. I even went to bed watching bars going across my screen from on my bedside table. I did wake up to a few errors in the wee hours of the morning saying things like a “wpchron” file wouldn’t copy but I figured it wasn’t that serious. I’d check with an expert in the morning and everything would be fine. I also did have some back-ups that I’d done before via my WordPress dashboard. So I figured I could put the pieces back together one way or another.
I was wrong. I did need that wpchron file and a bunch of other stuff that sounded like gobbledygook to me. And now my domain name was pointed at my new server and I had no way to get back to the old server to get those missing pieces. This is when I started freaking out and chewing on my desk.
A few days went by while I pestered all my friends who know anything about programming and WordPress until I finally came to the conclusion that I had to point my domain name back to my old server so I could do a complete back-up. Except I couldn’t do it. Even the great OMSH couldn’t do it. Something was screwy with my files and they wouldn’t copy. Finally, Liquid Web had to pull out some mad ninja hacker skills and the files got copied.
When that was done I pointed my domain name back to the new server and waited. And waited and waited and waited and waited. The dang thing wouldn’t propagate! That’s what they call it when you have a new site and it takes a while to show up on the internet via the many webbings of servers talking to each other. It turns out it did propagate (show up) but there was a “deny all ips” file in my website somewhere that made it look like it hadn’t propagated. Who put that file there? Crazy troll, I’m looking at you!
I know this sounds like gobbledygook. It sounds like that to me too. All I know is that every person who tried to look at my website got blocked so it looked like it was down. Eventually, Liquid Web figured out this was the problem and removed that file. And now I’m all fixed.
Hallelujah! I feel like I’ve aged about three years.
So you know what lesson I’ve learned from all this? Maybe I should stick to paper diaries and photo albums.
Just kidding.
