We have pets. Lots of pets. Two dogs: Billy and Suki. Six cats: Gable, Sparkle, March, Wanda, Cosmo, Nina. Assorted fish. It’s a zoo around here.

Having pets is great, we obviously must think so, but with a zoo like ours also comes … let’s just say moments:

• Finding cat poop in the bathtub daily
• Dogs snacking out of the cats’ litterbox
• Wet toilet seats from dogs drinking out of bowl
• Cats running half a step in front of you all the way across the house, forcing you to stutter-step around them the whole way
• Feeling the wet soak through the paper towel as you clean up fresh dog puke
• Cats peeing on clean, folded laundry
• Dogs puking up half-digested cat poop
• Cats peeing and/or pooping behind couches
• Dogs lying half on top of you while you watch TV — and farting
• Stepping barefoot into cold cat puke in the morning
• Hairballs
• Dogs barking at nothing every single night at 3 a.m.
• Near-daily refilling of the kitchen fishbowl because the cats drink out of it
• The stupid dog peeing on the living room carpet because he’s afraid of the dog door
• Ripped-up carpet in the guest bathroom from one of the dogs obsessively scratching at one corner of the floor
• Cat diarrhea in random corners of the house
• Half-inch deep chew marks on the wall where the carpet scratching dog chewed when she was a puppy
• Cats walking all over you while you watch TV and sticking their butts in your face
• Water all over the laundry room floor from dogs drinking from the water bowl
• Pet hair on everything you own
• Pet bail

I guess I should provide a happy list now, point out all the good things there are about having pets. Yeah, I’ll get right on that, right after I clean up whatever mess is inevitably waiting for me out there somewhere.

Oh. My. God.

I’m finally — FINALLY — finished kludging around with this stupid thing, and it’s a good thing, too, because I was running out of weekend to waste. Whew.

I have the new theme working now, obviously, and you might not have noticed but the comments were down (again) but they’re back up now, and I’ve installed/ moved/ reinstalled/ re-moved this stupid thing multiple times on the server, and I’ve edited and re-edited and re-edited php files out the wazoo, and, and, and.

And I think it looks pretty good. As long as you’re not using Internet Explorer, that is. IE isn’t showing the cool little icons next to the entry titles and the box titles on the right column there. And in fact it’s not showing the right column right, which explains why you don’t know what I mean about the boxes there. For you, the entire right column is down at the bottom of the page in the left column. It’s not there all the time, though. If you click into an entry to add a comment, well, the right column will show up in the right column then. Also, if you go to one of the monthly archives or categories — sometimes. Why is it doing this? I dunno. Short answer: Internet Explorer sucks.

Here, try Firefox. You’ll be glad you did.

As for the rest of it… I think that’ll do, pig. It looks good when I look at it, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? No? Well it is at 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday night. I’m about due for a weekend away from the keyboard and I have about 30 minutes in which to do it.

In the meantime, take a peek over at Beth’s page and donate some money to sponsor her in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. She’ll show you her boobies if you kick down with enough green!