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Bug, coffee!coffee!coffee!, fighting the fat gene, fitness, Funny Fashion, illos, the dogs, the sticks
Exercising with Bug
This is the post I was going to post when my blog went down last week.
This is me at two in the morning. I have very weird sleep habits. I go to bed at eight pm. Why? Because I’m tired! Bug and the day wear me out. So when I put Bug to bed, I read her a few stories and before I know it my eyes are closing and it’s night night for me too. I really want to stay up until ten or midnight like the rest of the adults but I don’t know, I’m just too much of a morning person and I run out of steam when the sun goes down.
However, my body doesn’t need 12 hours of sleep like Bug’s does so I pop back awake at two in the morning. This is especially bad when I drink too much coffee and get no exercise. When I lived at the beach I walked everywhere so I was physically exhausted and could stay asleep until at least five in the morning. Out here, not so much. I’m cutting down on coffee (of course) but I’m also trying to figure out how to fit in exercise. It’s been a challenge. The neighborhood is not really the walking kind and well… it doesn’t take much to discourage me when it comes to working out.
I thought I had a plan. I was going to take Holly, the dog, on a long long walk early in the morning. That would be great for her (we usually take her on short walks just down our street) and for me because she’s a big scary black dog who will scare all the bad guys away. I called my mom and was all ready to send Bug over to my mom’s house to watch cartoons while I got some exercise.
Except Bug didn’t want to be left out. She loves working out. You know she does The Shred, right? She does it more than I do.
She puts me to shame.
So anyway she was having none of this walking dog business without her. Before I knew it she was off in her room changing into a workout outfit to match mine. I gave in and let her come with.
{click to enbiggen}
Biggest mistake ever. Never take a kid on a long morning walk BEFORE breakfast. She might be shredded and spend two hours a week doing ballet and gymnastics but she does NOT like to keep up with me when I’m walking, especially when she is hungry, tired and bored. We walked about a half hour and I spent nearly all of it trying to get her to keep up with me. It was mental workout not a physical one. I miss my stroller. (I left it at the beach with Toby. It doesn’t travel well.) So I’m back to square one.
Jump rope anyone? Or maybe some shredding in the Pink Princess room?
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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.
