A little blog housekeeping here. Don’t run away. Please.

When I was little, I was in Bluebirds and/or Brownies and I learned the song that’s first verse is “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.” I have lots of good “old” (the term is not in reference to age) friends and I am making some new ones.

I have been neglectful in mentioning that I was awarded this I Love Your Blog award. Twice. First, Fantastagirl, from The Adventures of Fantastagirl, gave it to me. Um, a long time ago. Then about a week or so ago, Wander, from Wander’s World, gave it to me again. I really have no excuse for not putting it up. Well, except that I was either without computer, working, doing lots of end of the summer stuff, doing family stuff or I was having lots of inspiration for posting fodder. I’m sorry. I hope you guys will forgive me for not getting to this sooner. Thank you for bestowing this upon me. You are good, long time (that’s better than old, isn’t it?) friends.

I’m sure you all noticed that I did some changing around here. Not only did I change the template, but, in an extreme period of geekiness, I signed up for a bunch of social networking stuff. This is the making new friends part. You can follow me or friend me at these places, among others: digg, LinkedIn, Mixx, see my Netflix queue, Plurk, Reddit, Stumbleupon (give me some Stumble love), Vimeo and Popego.

My Popego link over there in the sidebar is really cool. It’s just below my FriendFeed button. Click on it. I’ll wait. *whistling* You back? Isn’t that cool? You can also click through to the actual site and it will show you all my moves around the net and stuff I’ve posted and whatever. FriendFeed also does thata. You can click on my FF link over there, too. I think Popego is more organized and easier to read than FF, so if you were only going to sign up for one, I’d recommend Popego.

Of course you can still find me at YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and gtalk (shellimil is my gtalk username). Good grief, you would think that I don’t have a real life or something. Wait, do I? The really cool thing about FriendFeed and Popego is that it pulls it all together for you through some weird Internet magic thing. I don’t know if that scares me or thrills me. hmmmm…Can you say extreme dork? Yep that’s me.

All that stuff that I just talked about is in the sidebar. Take a look around. Also, there is a box that says, “Shelli’s Shared Items”. That’s the stuff that I read in my Google Reader that I think is worth sharing with the rest of the world. Check it out and then check back again from time to time. You might be there sometimes or you may find a new friend or two.

(Quick note: If you didn’t see my post that I did from my Blackberry and you have a smartphone such as Blackberry or iPhone, you should check it out. It’s about a cool plugin you can get for your WordPress blog that allows you to publish from your phone. It’s pretty awesome.)

(Quick note 2: It was my Mom’s birthday yesterday. Happy birthday, Mom. I didn’t post yesterday or I would have mentioned it then. She’s old now. Almost old enough to retire. She has to win the lottery first so she can help support me, too.)

Yeah, there’s this thing. It’s on Sunday. Sunday evening at 6pm ET. That’s 5pm for those of us who are the HEART of the United States. I don’t have a clue what time it is on the left coast. You can click on this button and when you get to the site, you can set a reminder for yourself. If you can’t listen live, which is the awesomest when you can be in the chatroom, you should really download it and listen to it at another time, or times. Why, you ask? Because the first duet show was so fun and so awesome. But mostly because I am going to be singing and that is just something you don’t wanna miss. If only for the laugh factor.

Click here:

If you wanna be in the chatroom during the live presentation, you will need to sign up with Blog Talk Radio ahead of time. It’s free and it’s fun! Well, it’s only fun if I am there and I will be so, it’s all good.

This is really such a great community that we live in here on the web. You ask for help and you get it. Usually. Yesterday I asked for help finding someone to help me upgrade my version of WP and all anyone would tell me was that nobody could do it. Thanks. You guys are a great help, I thought. Then I re-read the comments and I realized that “nobody” was capitalized. Nobody can help you. And he did. Indirectly, I suppose, since he had turned Dutchbitch on to the WP plugin, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, and she told me about it. It was so freakin’ awesome! I installed it and activated it and with a few clicks, it was done. I was upgraded to the most recent version of WP. I wanted to get up and do a little jig. But, then I would have had to put the laptop down and my feet would get cold and I would have to stand up, so I just said, “Hurray!”

Look up there…See that? No, you don’t. You don’t see a search box up there anymore. Wanna know why? Luke helped me with that! And Suzi helped with some awesome suggestions, too.

I think that I figured out my problems with the smilies and the comment quicktags. I just have to find time to work on them. It’s back to work today, so I likely won’t have time until this weekend to work on it.

Wanna know what else I have been working on? I have been working on my brother-in-law’s site. You can check it out at JohnVleck.org. The benefit for him is on April 19th. I have been putting up pictures and descriptions of the items that will be in the silent auction. I am sure that I will be talking a lot more about the benefit as we get closer to it. I did get an email yesterday from one of the main people working on the benefit and she said:

I just wanted to email you to tell you what a great job you are doing on
the website. Everyone I know who has looked at it has commented on how
well done it is. You really captured who John is and I believe that I
have been able to get some of my donations, because people have been
able to go out and view our website.

That made me feel really good. I need those attaboys sometimes, y’know?

Speaking of…Therapy went well yesterday. We are going to work on re-framing, taking those negative thoughts and turning them into something positive. He wants me to start journaling these things and see if I start seeing a pattern of some sort. I’m seeing him again on 4/1 and 4/9 and he referred me to the psychiatrist for med management. I see him on 5/23. Yep, that’s the soonest I could get in.

So thanks to you all. For your well wishes and for your suggestions and help with this blog over the last few days. You guys are totally the best bliends a girl could ever ask for.

My mind is wandering, so here are some bullets for you…

• Blue pointed out some more glitches in this template to me yesterday. If anyone else sees anything, can you let me know? Also, Blue, if your comments are still not showing, please let me know. I want to know where the hell they are going. I disabled commentluv to see if that was the problem for some reason. Also, Tug, thanks for your suggestion about the search box. I am still taking suggestions on how to take that out. I tried removing the search.php page, but that didn’t work. I’d be happy just to move it somewhere else but I can’t find where it is in either the header or sidebar pages.
• Aside from the template, I have a serious need to have someone whom I could possibly hire to update my blogs (or tell me in terms that I understand how to do it myself) to the newest version of WordPress. I went through every single step and it still says that I am at the older version. I don’t get it.
• I just figured out why people hate Americans. I heard on the news that someone is going to buy a frosted flake in the shape of Illinois for more than $180,000 on eBay. Seriously. We are in a recession (no arguments please, we either are currently or will be soon), people are losing their homes and someone is going to spend $180,000+ on a frosted flake? I suppose it may not be an American who is going to purchase it, but it was an American who put it up on eBay instead of putting it in her mouth. I have lots of corn or frosted flakes. I’m sure I could find one that looks like something. $180,000 would go a long way towards paying of my mortgage or getting me out of debt.
• Isabelle is staying over night tonight (well really last night by the time you read this. Usually her Mom works on Monday night (at a bar), but she took it off so she could celebrate St. Patrick’s day. It’s a really big holiday in our household. It is much revered. Let me see if I can remember what it is even about…Irish people, clovers shamrocks, St. Patrick and something about snakes. So, yeah. Why she felt she needed to take the night off of work for it, I’m not sure. Ohh yeah, it’s an excuse to get drunk.

  Oh well, Isabelle is safe and sound here. And funny. She told me tonight that she wasn’t going to wake me if she needed to go potty. She was just going to go. Because, according to her, she’s been practicing how to be a big gril (sic) and she can go potty in the night by herself.

• My cousin’s daughter is here for the second night. Emily doesn’t get to see her often but they are quite close, keeping in touch via MySpace and texting and IMing, etc. Emily also had a friend over who knows my cousin’s daughter through those mediums, too, but has never met her F2F. Isabelle was playing with the 3 of them and told them she wanted to play hide-n-seek. She looked at me and said Allie wanted to play, too. I told her that I have a hard time finding Allie when we play hide-n-seek. She said, “Yeah. ‘Maginary. Allie’s ‘maginary.” One of her “friends”. Her Mom freaks out that she still has them, but everything I have read says it’s fine and eventually they will just go away. It shows a creative brain. Sorta like her mother.
• Finally–I’m going to therapy today. First back-to-therapy visit. I’m not looking forward to it. I just don’t want to go. It goes back to guilt at not being happy. I feel like I am wasting his time. Or time that someone else who needs it much more than I could be using. I had a bad mental health day yesterday, though, so it’s probably a good thing I am going back.
• Oh, one more thing. What the hell happened to my smilies? And my comment quicktags (you know the buttons that put in code for you), too? How do I get those back? Anyone?

Think happy therapy thoughts,
Shell

I have been a busy little beaver here this weekend. Um, I mean, um, I was busy. An-y-way…

What do you think of the new digs? I know, it’s like, wow!, but isn’t it awesome? I was so tired of those irritatingly happy, smiley snowmen. You know I love winter, but even I have had enough. (Says she on a day in which we are going to get dumped on again. Yippee!) So, I did this new design. Well, really, I didn’t do it. The person who did it is linked at the bottom of the page, but I installed it and did all the switching around stuff. There were a few little glitches at first, but I am a creative problem solver and I fixed them. However, if anyone knows how to get that search box out of the header, I’m open to suggestions.

Do you know I have been blogging for 3 years? My blogiversary, which I missed mentioning, was on February 18th. There are few things in my adult life that I have done for 3 years straight. I guess the things that I have done for longer than blogging are the most important things, though–marriage, motherhood and employment. Anyway, the 3 year blogiversary brings me to the other thing I have been doing this weekend. I moved all of my archives from the first year over to a blog just for archiving. Fab gave me the idea for the name, which inspired the design (if you can call it that). I know you are all dying to read my archives from my infancy in bloggerhood, so you can do that here. Also, they are linked under the archives header in the sidebar. I manually moved them all, too. My muscles are tired from all of that heavy lifting. The weird part about it was that, looking back at some of those posts was kinda like reading my journal from junior high. Oh My God, embarrassing. So, if you go back and read the archives, keep in mind that (I think) I have grown a ton in the last three years. As a writer and a human, I think.

Finally, I haven’t been a very good girl as far as replying to comments. I will try to be better. Sorry.

Later,
Shellz
(Yep, I changed my name this weekend, too!)

PS. Happy St. Patrick’s day. Yes, I am Irish. Yes, you may kiss me.