faboo mama

inside the mind of an opinionated mama…


Why I’ve been silent

I’ve been getting emails the past few months asking me why I rarely blog any more.  Some of it was that I got so burnt out on politics that I just shut down. Some of it, is that I won’t want to put just anything on my blog. You can follow me on Friendfeed and see some of the content there. Logic would dictate that I figure out this MediaRSS plugin so that I can import my FF content to here. But the main reason I no longer blog is financial.

Meaning: I have no money.

The stress of constantly being behind in bills, of trying to keep on top of billing has turned me away from writing.  Anything I write will be shot through with how broke I am and I do not want to have that be the focus of my blog. But the truth is that due to a dominio effect that started in Spring of 2007, there’s a very good chance of my family being homeless in the coming months.

We spend most of our money on paying late bills and their fees, but we’re also behind on our mortgage now. Having that over our heads has made the effort to get out and enjoy life a little hard. Add in the IRS funds we owe for the past 2 years, it becomes a little suffocating to try to be fun.

We don’t have credit card debt, a car payment or anything like that.  We just owe on our house, the IRS taxes and property taxes.  When we purchased our home, we got a decent rate, put down 20% on a home that was underpriced for the market.  Even now that our home’s value has dropped a bit, we’re still not upside-down on our mortgage.  What hurts a bit more, is that even if we were renting, we’d still be in the same boat, but propbably would have been evicted by now. We have no place to go if we lose our house. Nowhere.  Many people are lucky enough to have friends and/or family willing or able to help them in dire times.  Neither of us can claim that. Nevertheless, the domino that fell in Spring 2007 has created a cacophony of sound we can no longer ignore.

As you know, I work for my husband–our small company of two. While there’s been some industry upheaval, there hasn’t been enough to explain why we went from working 20 - 30 sites a month down to about 10.  Even at 10 sites a month, assuming they’re new sites, that’s still barely scraping by. Even if I were lucky enough to find a job outside the home, we’d need childcare for the kids and another car, so my husband can continue his company he started in 1995.

We’re trying. We’re trying so hard to give our kids a good life. We don’t spoil them, but I enjoy taking them to the zoo, botanical gardens and museums.  I’ve given up my memberships to the Arboretum and Natural History museum. Instead opting for the museums free days and saving for Arboretum or Descanso Garden trips.  Our zoo membership ends soon, so that twice monthly visit will end too as it’s either than or end the hosting on our business website. They’re growing so big, so fast that I can’t afford to get them clothes that fit properly. That makes me so sad.

It’s so frustrating to see all the work you’ve done so much to create topple. I’ve been here before and weathered it, but then I was single and childless. I didn’t have any responsibilities except to myself.  I do not find solace in knowing that I’m not alone in this experience, that other families in this country are feeling the same effects.  We can all hope for the best and hope that it comes sooner rather than later. That some solution presents itself as soon as possible. Otherwise, this could be the end of my blog as it stands.

Thank you.

Don’t know what you’ve got…till it’s gone

This is a blog whine, so feel free to ignore it or teach me how to work this thing.

******

I know I switched my blog over on Monday and I do really like my new template and I am so completely in love with the site search. It’s so pretty. Still…I’m a bit unhappy with WordPress.

See, before Blogger started sucking hard, leaving me unable to alter my widgets for way too long, I decided that the past 6 months of unhappiness weren’t worth it. There are other bloggies in the sea. Right?

Sigh.

  1. I switched everything over and find that the category to tag converter doesn’t quite work. It converted about 20 tags and then gave me a hearty ‘fuck you’. Sweet.
  2. I can’t arrange my blogroll in the order I want them. Actually to make it worse, I use blogrolling.com for my bookmarks and in Blogger, when I updated my blogroll at blogrolling.com, it automatically updated on my blog. Rememeber those UPDATED tags on the blogroll. That was from blogrolling.com. It was a well oiled machine. Here I had to put some OPML thingy on here and WP determined the order of my blogroll. Alphabetically. Sigh.
  3. Sitemeter: This is actually my biggest hurt. I was addicted to my sitemeter. I crackdictally checked the referrals page. Bored? I just checked to see how people got to my blog. That functions is gone. WP has something in these templates where you can’t get that info. Now how am I going find out how many times a day ’sean kingston sucks’ is searched? ’tain’t right, ’tain’t fittin’.
  4. So, I wanted to add a music player. Should be easy. No…WP offers some songeriffic or whatever it’s called. I’ve spent the last 3 days looking for a song that I like or even know. I was getting desperate. That thing had me looking up Apples and Bananas, Happy Birthday or Mary Had a Little Lamb. How is it possible that they don’t have one artist I listen to on that thing? So, I have my Pandora feed posted. The thing that sucks about that is that Pandora offers cute little badgy thingies and even those won’t show in WP. I’d put my Napster links here, but guess what doesn’t work on WP?
  5. Did you know that a lot of blog toys don’t even work here. How the hell are you guys going to learn if I’m smarter than a 3rd grader (yes), how many 5 year olds I can take on at once (23) or what kind of dessert I am (key lime or lemon meringue)?
  6. I can’t get my BlogHer badge to work here either. In fact, you may have noticed the delegate counters are missing. Besides the blogroll issue, those won’t work here either. In fact, anything with an <iframe> or <script> tag gets dumped from the widget boxes. That’s just hateful.
  7. Which brings me to the the fact that I have to pay to edit the CSS of my page and WP still decides which tags to dump. WTF is that about? If I want to fix all the above issues, save the <script> tags, I’ll have to pay for the honor to aggravate myself with stupid CSS. From my way of thinking, If I drop some cash, WP should fix my CSS for me. Or am I wrong?

So, to Blogger, I offer you this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A0FxTDeklM&rel=1]

And maybe I’ll start looking into Typepad.

Kidding.

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UPDATED:  I just noticed that i had installed the WP blog counter.  And that it was actually telling me all the stuff that sitemeter used to tell me.

Holidailies 2007

Holidailies 2007

I just found out about this via NaBloPoMo. The site is called Holidailies and guess what you have to do? That’s write (pun intended)…you have to blog daily during the month of December. It wouldn’t be too hard for me to do, but the question is… Do I want to?

Yeah, you know I signed up for it anyway.

NoMoNaBloPoMo!

I just realized that today is the last day of NaBloPoMo. Wow…what a month it’s been. With this post include, I”ve done 125 posts. Not bad. To do it, I’ve sort of had to ignore posting on other blogs for the month and I definitely neglected my other 4 blogs that I own. It’s been an interesting experience. I’ve “met” some interesting people that’s for sure. I know that I won’t keep posting every day after this month, but I’ll consider doing this exercise next year.

NaBloPoMo 07 - 102 posts

Wow! We have 4 more days to go and I’ve done 102 posts (this is 103) this month. Granted most of them were pretty pointless, but still. Now, if only I can put this much dedication into something that pays…like more work.

I am Martin Silenus*

h/t to happy-green-tea:

free dating sites

Isn’t that just awesome. No kids allowed. I’m carding everyone!

*That’s an Hyperion reference if you’ve (sadly) never read the book.

No faking the funk

h/t to shayera:

I got my blog readablity rating:

cash advance

Get a Cash Advance

What I posted to her blog:

faboo said…

High School.
Must be all the potty words and the fact that I use little words on purpose. I’m gunning for 6th grade then maybe more people will understand what I’m talking about.

11/20/2007 4:18 PM

NaBloPoMo 07 - 11 days to go

I’ve done 79 posts this month! Whoo-hoo me! This post makes 80.

Catch up

Part of the reason I haven’t been blogging is that there is just too much to write. I could have easily posted 9 things before noon on Thursday. I couldn’t get organized. The bigger part, is that I’ve been playing Sims 2 (blush) and the kids are seriously driving me insane. That’s all to say that I’ll be playing catch up with my 365 photos and other pics I’ve taken. But we did have good news. We got a very nice unexpected check from a client so I can actually breathe a sigh of relief for the moment.

Speaking of NaBloPoMo…

Did you know that prizes were involved? I guess if you post everyday this month, then you get tossed in for a prize. I’m wondering if I should toss in some jewelry or something as a prize. With my luck, I’d probably win my own prize and break it wrapping it for myself. LOL! Check out the link. There’s a lot of girly bathroomy stuff on there, but there’s also a few other items on the list.