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!

I’m stiiiil tweaking around with the design here. Thank jebus for the Internet, for how would I ever waste time without it???

This time I’ve found a new design that I like even more than the Coffee Cup one, with the added bonus that you can actually fit graphics and content on the page together at the same time simultaneously so that people like Carol who use medium resolution settings can actually read my witticisms without giving the scroll bar a workout. I think you’re really going to like it, it looks really, really great.

But, um, it’s not working right now. Here, at least. It’s working great on my test site, but not so much over here. Sigh.

I think I know what’s wrong with it but since I don’t know jack about javascript I can’t fix it. So I’ve sent an email to the person who ported this to WordPress and I’m hoping to hear back with an easy solution. Keep your fingers crossed.

In the meantime I’m going to leave this up even though the graphics aren’t loading right. I like the three column layout well enough to deal with the issues I’m having with the graphics and javascript not loading.

Once I get those ironed out, then I’ll start battling the other issues I’m having with it even on the test site where it’s running right. It looks great in Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox and Opera, at least), but IE chokes on the right sidebar and pushes it down to the bottom of the left column sometimes. But maybe I’ll leave that part broken as an example of why Firefox beats the pants off IE: view the site with both and pick the winner!

But for now… Well, for now it’s 3 a.m. and I ain’t gonna be fixin’ nothin’ more tonight. So goodnight, Irene.

So Beth thinks she can mock me, huh? Thinks she can make up a little coat of arms for me based on a private conversation and embarrass me by posting it in her blog, huh? Oh yeah? Well, to paraphrase my close person friends Boon and Otter from Animal House: You can’t do that to me. Only I can do that to me.

I will not be mocked!

I just checked my hit counter a little while ago and I thought it was broken. Hits are through the roof right now, 300+ today and growing. (Okay, that’s not that much, but it’s through the roof for me.) Where are all these hits coming from? MSN again. Of course. I can’t get hits from a decent search engine, no, I have to get slimed by MSN.

So what the heck, I’ll do a little Public Service Announcement. Attention MSN searchers: Google. ’nuff said.

But what are all these MSN-heads looking for? Is it “women fucking cats,” like back in March when I was “Number One With MSN“? No. Is it “better sex ever,” like back in February when I was number nine over there? Sadly, again, no.

No, this time they’re looking for pictures of the baptism of David Arquette and Courteney Cox Arquette’s kid. I wrote a few days ago about how some private pictures of it are getting emailed all over the place and that I’d gotten a copy of them. I said that I was going to break the chain and not forward them to anyone else.

But, hell, now I’m getting all this traffic from people looking for the pictures. And I have the pictures. So I thought maybe I’d post them after all. Because, you know, I have them and if I show them to you maybe you’ll think I’m cool, maybe some of that celebrity pixie dust will rub off on me and I’ll be fabulous too.

So fine, here you go, here are the pics. And as you’re clicking these links to look at them you should keep in mind that you’re prying into a private family event, that the family is upset that these pictures are out there, and that you probably wouldn’t like it if it were your kid’s baptism pictures getting sent all over the internet by strangers to strangers just because they’ve seen you on TV. You should consider that clicking on these links might make you feel just a little bit small. And that it should.

But don’t mind me. Enjoy.

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I finally — finally — have a captcha working on my comments to block spam. Thank God. I’m not thankful because I needed it, I’m thankful because now I can stop working on it.

This has been a huge time-sucking headache that has been pissing me off for weeks. I first tried to set one up a month or two ago in the Movable Type version of this blog and didn’t have much luck. I never could get it to work right and I ended up screwing up the formatting of my search results and category templates so badly that you could hardly read the text in them. My hosting tech support wasn’t much help, Movable Type’s support forum wasn’t much help, Karl tried to help but didn’t get much further than I did, etc. I finally gave up, took it out, and kind of made myself forget about the formatting problems.

Then a week or two back I had an attack of the stupids and tried again, and again got nowhere. Again, my hosting company’s tech support was zero help — emphatically no help, I should mention — and again I gave up. And the formatting issue starting pissing me off again and I stumbled across a WordPress design I quite liked (this one, “Coffee Cup”) and I suddenly didn’t like my old design anymore. So I switched blog engines — all because of a captcha.

So now I’m on WordPress and I find that I’m getting a ton less comment spam than I was on Movable Type. I dunno why, I haven’t even gotten around to instituting a blacklist or any spam prevention measures at all, really. I’m just not getting spammed now. (Not that I’m complaining.) So it’s not like I really need a captcha, but … dang, I think they’re cool. I still want one.

So I went out and found a few WordPress captcha plug-ins and I installed them. And I could. not. make. them. work.

Pissed. Me. Off.

Again, my host’s tech support was no help. One of their forum moderators put some time in helping out but he eventually just … stopped. Never told me he was giving up or that it just wouldn’t work on their servers or anything, he just … stopped. Which was slightly frustrating. So I gave up again.

And then there was Stan. (As Beth would say, “Cue angel music: Laaaaaaaaaaaaa!”)

He wrote a captcha for his own blog and he sent me the code to it use here. And of course I couldn’t get it running either. But Stan stepped up and over the course of the last three days he helped tweak and tweak and tweak through email until it worked. And now I have a captcha! Yay! Check it out, kids, give it a whirl, post a bunch of comments about how cool and fabulous it is.

So I’m sending a big shout-out to my man Stan. Thank you very much for getting me up and running with this. Spammers the world over hate you now for inoculating the Lunchroom against them. Well, okay, maybe they don’t, this is such a small site that they probably didn’t even notice, but if they did want to spam here specifically and did notice and did gnash their teeth in frustration, well, they’d be really pissed.

But whatever. Stan, you da man!

I’m at the lunch break of the first class I’m training since I don’t know when. I finally did manage to knuckle down and do some prep work for today, so I came in feeling like I had a little bit of a handle on what I was going to do. I had forgotten, though, that computer/software training students — especially for a Level 1 class — tend not to have a handle on, well, just about everything. Bringing a bottle of aspirin was all the prep I really needed.

I find that I’m falling back into the flow of teaching pretty easily. I usually connect well with my students and I’m doing that here today. Having a sense of humor helps. On their end, too. But I’m finding that I’m relaxed and comfortable in front of the class and I’m not getting lost in the material like I thought I might. The fact that we’re moving at a snail’s pace is helping. Last night I was worried that I’d go through it so fast that I’d have to stretch and fill; today I’m worried that we’re not going to get halfway through. Part of that is my fault because I tend to over-explain and go off on related tangents, but a few of the students are helping slow us down by asking, um, “basic” questions and “trying things” on their own when they can hardly do what I’m asking.

Also had to be flexible right out of the gate today. I’m training at “a local power company” and about 20 minutes in we lost power to half the computers. Oopsie. They got them back up and running, but I had a group of unhappy campers on my hands for a few minutes there. I joked that it was a good thing it hadn’t been a water problem or we’d all be in trouble.

I had to roll with the punches on that one. Only problem with rolling with the punches is that you’re getting punched.

Huh, go figure. I thought I was a little trampier than this. And masculine.

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When it comes to crastinating, I’m a professional. Whoever came up with the adage “never do today what you can put off ’til tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow” must have had me in mind. I’ve always been this way — tests in school, writing deadlines, projects around the house; I wait ’til the last minute on all of them.

And I’m doing it now. I’m teaching my first class tomorrow for my new training job. It’s a Word 2000 Level 1 class, so it should be pretty easy, but the thing is that I haven’t actually trained in a classroom situation for something like two years. I’m so rusty you can see flakes of, um, rustiness falling off me. I really need to prep for this class to make sure I’m comfortable tomorrow. Prepping has been on my mind for the last several days.

So of course rather than prepping, I’m monkeying around with this website. And I’m sending out resumes for a better job. And I’m reading journals. And I’m folding laundry. And I’m writing entries about procrastination. I’m doing everything I can think of to avoid doing something that’s only going to help me. I do the same thing when I want to work on my script: I avoid that which I feel is most important.

I have no idea why I do this. I hate it.

Dateline: The Internets – Courteney Cox Arquette and husband David are so mad, they could scream. Or, at the very least, sue someone.

Sent Friday, the fast-spreading email reportedly had a subject line of “FW: Friends in town” and contained pictures of Aniston, Cox Arquette, Arquette, baby Coco and various other friends and family members. The text read: “Jeff, Here are some pic’s [sic] of that Christening that I went to, that I was telling you about…”

…And now I’ve received this email.

Yep, pictures are in there. David, Courteney, Jennifer, Coco, various family members. Yep, looks like Aniston started it (but I’m sure that was spoofed). Loooooots of email addresses in there from all the forwarding, too, no doubt some of people who would rather not have their email spread all over the internets. I guess I’m supposed to send it to all my friends now, too.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Like I’ve said previously, I don’t do chain letters. Besides, it’s private family stuff, it’s none of (y)our damned business.

Delete.

Chain broken.