cranky pixels

Server move: pending. I probably could have made some progress today if I wasn’t so busy fruitlessly searching for a single slim manila folder which is theoretically located in one of the many unpacked boxes in our living room. (See below.)

Home move: finished! All that remains is…everything else. There are boxes. Lots of boxes. I have noticed that my emotional stability varies inversely with the number of boxes in any given room. Just because I’ve moved roughly once a year since I was born (some years we moved more than once, so I feel I can average it out) doesn’t mean I like it! In fact, I have what might be considered a moving aversion. A relocation phobia, if you will. It’s all good and fine to find a spanky new place – I am all about the obsessive searching of Craigslist for a dwelling which will more accurately reflect my Id – but once the reality of moving sets in I become increasingly useless.

Once we reach the unpacking phase, I’m practically catatonic. You’d think I’d want to unpack, to put things away and not be faced with mountains of cardboard, and you’d be right. Wanting to unpack and being able to unpack are two different things, though. I open a box, glance inside, flutter my hands around it a few times, and then need to go sit down because I can’t possibly imagine finding a place for any of this stuff, and why do we have so much stuff, anyway? Why didn’t we just throw it all away? And where the hell is the rental agreement? There was some paperwork (that’s the manila envelope I referenced above; keep up, people) I was supposed to send back to the landlord and now I can’t find it and OMG panic.

So now I’m taking a break from unpacking, if you can take a break from something you weren’t really doing in the first place, and hoping that a little time spent hiding in the bedroom will make the process seem less daunting. That, or I’ll just end up staying up here until Not So gets home and rescues me.

technorati tags: moving, unpacking, phobias, tired, boxes, useless,

I’m migrating my blog to a more stable server – one I actually pay for, which in Cranky Mama-speak means if it doesn’t work, there’s someone I can bitch to. Free is nice and all, but when the host of your site is basically doing you a favor it’s kind of hard to effectively throw a fit if the site is down more often than it’s up.

In order to switch servers, though, I have to backup my site. Sounds easy, right? I’m good with the FTP mojo, so copying files is no problem. It’s just when I get to the bit about the database that I fully grasp the breadth of my ignorance.

While familiarity with phpMyAdmin is not necessary to backup your WordPress database, these instructions should take you step-by-step through the process of finding phpMyAdmin on your server and then you can follow the instructions below as a simple and easy backup or for more detailed instructions see Backing Up Your Database.
* cPanel
* Direct Admin
* Ensim
* Plesk
* vDeck

WordPress Backups « WordPress Codex

Ensim? Plesk? These do not sound like words. They sound like some sort of made-up language. Get the ensim and put it in the plesk, vDeck. Not unlike the old Steve Martin bit about talking wrong around your kid. Yes, I am aware that that particular mental association means that I am very, very old.

So once I get all that figured out (a long, tortuous procedure which involves the highly scientific process of fluttering my eyelashes prettily at my husband, who thinks my lack of database savvy is cute) we’ll get Cranky Mama dot com all relocated. After all, the rest of us have moved; wouldn’t want my blog to feel left out.

We’ve spent the last two weeks moving. Why are we moving, you ask? Well! It’s a funny story. See..

No, wait. Funny means something else entirely. My bad.

The short version is that we found a really kick-ass rental in exactly the location we wanted just as our lease on the old place was expiring, so even though we hadn’t been planning to move, we jumped on it. But, hee, funny thing about having a baby: everything takes three times as long. Which means moving takes three times as long. And is exponentially harder, which I’m sure no one imagined because, hey, babies are easy, right?

Our old house is finally almost empty and ready to be surrendered to the landlords, and the new place is a Jenga tower of boxes. Boxes and ants, because it would seem that ants follow us wherever we go. I am an ant magnet. Should you desire ants in your house, invite me over! I am the ant whisperer. Et cetera.

I’m upset about the ants, because the place is brand freaking new and there is no reason I should have to deal with insects. We don’t leave stuff out. We haven’t had a chance to leave stuff out. The first day we were here I accidentally left a tiny spot of glaze from a donut on the upstairs window sill. An hour later it was teeming with ants. Seriously, tiny spot. The hell? And they were coming up through the crack between the window pane and the frame, which says to me that the damned house wasn’t sealed right. There are a crazy number of spiders, too. (I have a bug phobia, have I mentioned?)

Other than that, and the fact that the downstairs heater doesn’t work, and the lack of mailboxes (!!), the new place is great. Fabulous location, great layout, lots of storage…almost totally worth the massive panic-inducing hassle that was the move.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go obsessively clean my kitchen. Again.

technorati tags: ants, moving, baby

This morning’s news extravaganza yielded some wildly disparate results. First off:

Moderate stress during pregnancy does not harm the unborn child but can instead aid its later advancement, US research suggests.

BBC NEWS | Health | Stress may be good for the unborn

This is good to hear, since I was a bundle of anxiety during my pregnancy with Happy Fun Baby. (Speaking of my pregnancy: I’m trying to import the posts I made in LiveJournal all last year, but I’m apparently not clever enough to figure out how to do it. Anyone have any advice?) The fact that all the information I read at the time said that stress would practically guarantee a miscarriage didn’t make me feel any more relaxed. It’s like when you’re getting a back rub (I vaguely remember such things) and the masseuse says “Don’t tense up!” – it’s impossible to not.

Then, of course, I read this article in SF Gate:

“All toxic chemicals capable of accumulating in the human food chain will, sooner or later, reach their highest concentrations in the milk of human mothers,” writes Dr. Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist and mother, in Having Faith, her book on motherhood. “When it comes to persistent organic pollutants,” she goes on, “breast milk is the most contaminated of all human foods.”

GREEN / Milking It: Moms find industrial chemicals in their breast milk an outrage — and a call to action

Great. I’m feeding my son poison.

At least the fact that I’m stressed out about it is good for him…

technorati tags: anxiety, pregnancy, advice, news, chemicals, stress, pollution

You can easily blog interesting web content with Flock, in just a few clicks. Example: 1. Highlight a passage on a web page that you would like to blog about. 2. Right-click that selection and choose Blog This. 3. The blog editor opens with that selection already inserted. Not only that, the selection is properly formatted as a Blockquote and appropriate citation is included.

Blogging with Flock – Flock Community

Have I mentioned that I kind of heart Flock?

technorati tags: Flock, blog, WordPress

I read in Lifehacker this morning that SkypeOut is going to be free until the end of the year. I totally want to try it now, and naturally the first step in trying anything new is shopping for accessories. I’m leaning toward the cute little Skype starter set, partly because of the cute and partly because of the vast global conspiracy against the Mac (all of the adorable candy-colored USB phones seem to be PC-inclined). Then again, perhaps I wouldn’t even want to run SkypeOut on my Mac. Perhaps we could run it on the Accounting Computer. We have an Accounting Computer, did I mention? It’s like we’re going to be running a business or something.

technorati tags: skype, Mac, phone, geek, business

I’m posting this from Flock, a new browser that’s purportedly part of this whole “Web 2.0″ thing that everyone’s been buzzing about. I don’t understand what’s 2.0 about the web, but that’s because I’ve spent the last year afflicted with mama brain. (Apparently it’s all O’Reilly’s fault. The Web 2.0 thing, not the mama brain. That’s all Not So’s fault.)

Flock is a little buggy, but has a gorgeous interface and lots of features which have the potential to be really handy, like an integrated blog editor and photo management. I’ll let you know what I think of it once I’ve had a chance to play around with it some more. Beta testing with a baby isn’t exactly efficient.