Well, it’s the first day of the new year, and we’ve started it off in fine fashion by doing asolutely nothing besides going to my mother’s house. We hit Denny’s for our monthly breakfast treat, got to Mom’s, and Danielle stopped over for a little while and dropped off a present from Gramma (some yummy-smelling candles and a dish for them). Mom cooked a big pot of spaghetti and meatballs, sausage, and sauce, with a loaf of garlic bread on the side, and we had leftover cake for desert. We had a nice discussion at dinner about the fight outside the house last night, and Nanny told us we were all fools for watching out the windows because don’t you know that you should just lay down on the floor and hope the bullets can’t go through the wall?

Right now? The Mythbusters marathon on Discovery channel, and helping someone out with some Wordpress and PHPBB code. God, I’m such a fucking nerd. We’ll be sleeping in tomorrow, provinding that Comrade doesn’t decide that 7am would be the most perfect time to do some major construction on the house.

I’m in the process of updating my Wordpress installation. It’s not fun, since I’m having issues with a plugin and it’s completely pissing me off, and it doesn’t look like the plugin author has any intentions of fixing it (so far). Who knows if it will ever work again or if I’ll need to find a replacement that does the same thing. I also needed to upgrade my Kiwi, since that’s changed on the back end as well, and that was an ordeal that required editing and updating all of my featured posts because the directories for the images was changed.

I give them a lot of credit though, the new admin area is slick.  A lot of bells and whistles that I’m still playing with, but so far it’s pretty neat.

Another early morning. I hate these. Thankfully this morning was the last time I need to be up at 4am for a while. I hope I don’t fall asleep during the movie this morning.

Tonight we’re finishing up our shopping. Actually, “finishing up” isn’t quite the correct phrase - it’s more like “starting” our shopping. We know what we’re getting the few that we’re shopping for, and we need to buy some gift bags and wrapping stuffs. I’m not sure, but we also might be picking up some new jammies to continue the tradition we started last year of lounging at mom’s house in jammies all Christmas day.

Saturday we’re going to mom’s for dinner, and Nanny will show Eddie how to make applesauce from scratch to prove that not all of our secret family recipes come off of boxes and cans.

Since I’ve got a 4-day weekend, I’m going to finish up the one last blanket I need to work on, which hopefully won’t take forever and will get done tonight or tomorrow. It shouldn’t, considering that it’s perhaps the simplest thing out there, but I tend to get distracted easily. I did sit down last night for most of the time after I picked up Eddie and worked on the one for Dad. It’s all put together and the border is done, all that’s left to finish is weaving in the ends of the threads of the squares. I did make it slightly smaller than it was supposed to be simply because of time and because it was already pretty big even without the last row of squares on it.

Aside from Christmas, the rest of the weekend will be devoted to upgrading and testing the latest upgrade for Wordpress. There’s already a pretty much final version of WP2.0 floating around, and the official release is on Dec. 26. There’s also an existing version of Kiwi that’s supposed to work with WP2.0, and I’ve got to upgrade things so I know how it all works. I got offered a chance to help work on the next upgrade to the theme, so I figure it’s best to get my hands dirty and start trying to figure out how things work.

Note to self: Email the people about the monkeys this afternoon

In case you hadn’t noticed, I added an option to subscribe to comments on posts (by default you’re subscribed if you use an email address when posting a comment) and the current status info in the sidebar. Why? Because I’m a plugin whore.

I had a horrible sleep last night. Judging by the pain in my jaw, I think I was clenching my teeth/jaw up last night, which could explain why I kept waking up every hour or so. I was up at 5am wondering if I should get out of bed, but I decided not to.

My first exam was at 7:30am, and I was done by about 8am. I decided not to go home, because I figured it would be pointless to drive home (15-20 minutes), sit there for an hour or so, and then drive back up to school for the 2nd exam at 10am. I sat in the car, studied a bit, read some more of my book, and did some work on the geisha’s hair. At 9:30am I was bored and went back into the classroom and socialized. Mr. W asked if I’d dyed my hair because some administrator told me to, but I explained that I’d done it because it was inevitable that it would need to be done anyway. I was able to get a look at my corrected first exam, and aced it with a 97%. The second exam was harder and took me about 40 minutes. I only skipped one answer that I didn’t know (but remembered the answer to as soon as I stepped out of the school’s door), and there were only 2 or 3 that I was unsure of. I predict an 80% at least, but we’ll see what I end up with tomorrow. I ended up leaving school at a little before 11am, right after the 2nd exam, which was nice.

I did some work on my site, adding a new theme (oooh…. pink!) and breaking some plugins, and Eddie’s now searching through some DVDs and screencap sites to find a new header image to make a new theme for him. Pickle came out and played for a while before deciding to go all toddler on me and chew my feet until I put her back in the cage. We went to KFC for dinner because Eddie didn’t get out until 5pm and neither of us wanted to cook.