Farewell Blogspot, I Knew Ye Well

• Bottles of water consumed: 10
• CSS tutorials consulted: 15
• Wordpress themes reviewed: 30
• Hours of coding, revision, and more coding: 12
• Knowing your blog is cooler than anyone else's in the world ever: Priceless

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with unbridled enthusiasm that I invite you to my blog's new home: ParsingNonsense.com!

Wes and I spent (literally) all day today fixing it all nice and pretty-like and it's finally ready for public consumption. I kid you not about how many hours Wes especially put into the new design, he was tireless!

I will still be blogging more or less every day, just over there. I'll keep this blog up for a little while, but all new posts will be on the new site. All my old posts and comments came over to the new site with me, so if you have a hankering for an oldie but a goody you'll be just fine.

Come hang out with me at the new site. I promise I'm just as ridiculous over there: www.ParsingNonsense.com

TTDNST: Brickcicles

As you may have noticed (OK, if you haven't noticed there's something different around here you're either blind or new) the blog's looking a little more awesome today. My husband is honing his HTML skills and, if I do say so myself, the blog's looking better as a result.

I was almost too excited to post today but I cannot neglect my self-appointed Things That Do Not Suck duties. The world keeps getting darker, the workplace gets more dangerous every day, but one thing shall shine forth as a beacon of light, and hope, and silliness and that thing is the weekly Thing That Does Not Suck.

This week's Thing is a bit different. I selected it because it was neat, and something I'd never seen before. What makes it different is that it's not happy in and of itself. In point of fact, one could construe it as sad if one were sensitive about such things.

I'll post it, though, and give you the chance to form your own opinion:

This image is brick icicles. The Russians were experimenting with their version of Napalm and testing it out in (presumably empty) brick houses. The ensuing fires were so hot that they melted the bricks and the resulting icicles are all that's left.

I found this image here, where you can visit if you'd like to see more images and find out a little more backstory.

As a naturally curious person, I think it's fascinating to see this. Of course, the idea of Napalm is a bit horrifying, especially if you're on the receiving end of it, but I'm fine with using this as this week's Thing because there is no death here. Only coolness. And coolness? Never sucks.

Remodeling the Blog

No, I have not been hi-jacked and forced to girly up my blog at threat of knife-point, not have I been abducted and inhabited by an other-worldly pink-loving cretin (though of course, if I had been either of these things, I wouldn't ever own up to it, would I?).

Wes is working on re-designing my blog for me so things are going to be a bit messy around here for a little while. Maybe you'll be looking at this blog and everything will seem normal. Maybe you'll barely even recognize the place.

Don't worry. I'm still here. So's the nonsense. If you have a desperate need to verify my identity, feel free to ask me questions with answers only the real Erika Mitchell would know.

Finally, an American Pope

I was thinking back to my post on Monday (the one with all the crazy-talk about babies) and one of the points consistently kept coming back to me:

I am ambitious. I want to be the chick who gets pregnant the very second she starts trying! With the smartest baby! And the lowest amount of weight gain!

The reason this kept coming back to me is that Wes and I had a conversation about this very attribute not too long ago. I was a bit bummed (not depressed, or crying, or even sad really. Merely bummed) because I'd just found out that I wasn't pregnant.

Wes was in the process of cooking me dinner (I know, best husband ever) and was trying to comfort me by saying, "Who even gets pregnant the very second they start trying anyway?"

Of course, as I'm sure you can guess, my response was, "I was hoping it would be me!"

This was a natural segue to a story I told him then, which I will share with you now. Way back in the dark ages, slightly after the time Jellies were in vogue but thick in the middle of when The Backstreet Boys were big, I was a middle-schooler.

Tall of stature and big of ambition, I was a bespectacled band nerd with a deep deep adoration for the French language, which I'd just started learning. During one of my classes, wherein we were taught key points about the major world religions, I learned about the Pope.

Head of the Catholic Church, direct line to God, scandalous history, yadda yadda yadda. What stuck out for me, though, was when my teacher informed us that there had never been a female Pope and there never would be.

That was it: My calling.

I was convinced that it was my higher calling to break through what was, in my mind, the thickest glass ceiling of all and become: The First Female Pope.

Some important things I didn't realize until much later:

1. I wasn't (and am not) Catholic.


2. I had no desire to be celibate and chaste the rest of my life.


3. I liked swearing. A lot.


4. That hat looks heavy and would probably look ridiculous on me.


5. Not real fond of crowds, especially not crowds made up of frenzied religious devotees.

To bring this back around, it is clear to me that my desire and drive to be the best/smartest/fastest/loudest/whathaveyou is not a new thing for me. The reality is, I will never be all of these things all the time. There will always be someone who's smarter, or richer, or faster.

Lucky for me, I've found a way to appease both my competitive nature and my desire to not be Catholic (I have nothing against Catholics, I just don't want to be one):

My dog will be The First Canine Pope:

Just a Dash of Hoopla

For those of you who don't know my Dad, let me just tell you what you need to know: He's awesome. He can whip up a gourmet dinner, make a homemade firecracker, and give you excellent financial advice all at the same time and make it look effortless. He's one heck of a guy.

He's also stealthy, and decidedly against hoopla, but given that he did something amazingly cool for me yesterday I figure a little hoopla is permissible. I'll schedule my marching band of circus midgets for another occasion and just stick to this blog post. For now. I may want those midgets around later, though, so be ready for that.

I was chatting with my Dad on the phone yesterday and he was asking me about my blogging aspirations. My most fervently held career goal at this moment is to become a mommy blogger someday. A mommy blogger is one who writes a popular blog and earns income from said blog and also from guest writing gigs on the side.

Essentially, I'd be getting paid to hang out with my kids all day and write about all the funny things that ensue. It's the perfect job.

We were discussing such titans of the mommy blogging world as Dooce and Amalah, and he asked how I planned to achieve said goal of becoming a mommy blogger. I explained to him my game plan:

• Register own domain name (ParsingNonsense.com)
• Design custom blog layout that's pretty
• Buy Typepad account in the future when I need more bandwidth
• Grow popular enough to merit having people pay to advertise on my blog? This one I can't really plan, I just have to hope it happens someday and work as hard as I can to see it through.

It was as I was explaining my game plan that he said, "Done." I inquired what he was done with, and then he informed me that he'd just registered that domain name for me. Win!!! A very early birthday present for me, ParsingNonsense.com is now mine.

This land breaking (for me, anyway) first step taken, I'm now free to boldly venture into the land of CSS and custom blog layouts. It costs money to hire a professional, but my fantastically wonderful (and handsome, and funny) husband has offered to put his considerable graphic design skills to works for me and do some preliminary design work for my new blog!

I'm thinking midgits, Labradors, martinis, and shoes. That sounds just about apropos to me.

Kryptonite Babies

This whole trying-to-get-pregnant thing has been a classic Erikan comedy of errors. At first, I was going to be coy about the whole thing. I was going to wait until I was out of the first trimester to break the news that Wes and I were expecting.

Ha.

That resolve lasted all of two seconds before I cracked from excitement and wrote in this post about how I hope Wes and I will be able to expand our family this year (and I didn't mean with a hamster).

Once that cat was out of the bag, it was all over and before I knew it I was Twittering about feeling nauseous (not because of baby, but because of nasty pre-natal vitamins) and lamenting that those "Test 5 days early!" pregnancy tests are a waste of money but so. very. tempting.

It would appear that I lack the strength of will, or self-restraint if you will, to be coy about this whole process. Not like this lady. I don't know how she managed to wait so long to tell the Internets but she is way more self-controlled than I am.

So, in the spirit of all the not-coy going on around here, I thought I'd share some of the things I've learned so far during this whole phase of hopefully expanding our family (and my waistline):

• I am unbearably impatient. I am incapable of waiting (with grace, anyway) for anything I am even a little bit excited about. For past reference, please see my little episode with Ambien during the week before my wedding.
• I am ambitious. I want to be the chick who gets pregnant the very second she starts trying! With the smartest baby! And the lowest amount of weight gain! This is silly and will only lead to problems, which leads me to the next point.
• I am incapable of thinking rational thoughts when I'm excited. I can tell myself 'til I'm blue in the face that testing early is a huge waste of money, but as soon as The Crazy starts up I'm done for. I may as well possess no critical thinking skills whatsoever for how much good they do me during times like those.
• Wes in incredible, and quite possibly the most helpful and loving husband in the world.
• I no longer have the ability to keep my pie-hole closed about key matters in my personal life. The minute something happens I have the urge to either blog or tweet about it. Am done for. You can list "social media" as c.o.d.

That's about all I've learned so far. Not too profound, but it's been eye-opening in a way because I never knew these particular traits of mine would become so pronounced the minute we started trying to have a kid.

All I can do is shrug and tell you I'm not really surprised because really, if I get completely insane and impatient about birthday gifts, there's really nothing at all surprising about me losing my mind over becoming a parent.

Babies are like the most intense gift ever, and they even come with a surprise element because 1) You don't know what the gender is for a reeeally long time and 2) You never really know exactly when they're going to show up.

Given that I can't handle surprises, and it drives me crazy to be out of control and unable to plan for things, it just dawned on me: Babies are my kryptonite.

TTDNST: Punk Rock Daffodils

For you, a Thursday haiku:

One more weekday gone

Another excuse to drink

Bring on weekend glee

And who says I'm not deep and stuff? It's getting downright cultured in here! Lucky for all of us, the haiku was only a tasty little bonus on this, the day of this week's Thursday. I realize I'm not making a terrible amount of sense, and that I've resorted to inserting Godfather quotes at will, but bear with me because this week's Thing That Does Not Suck is actually quite nice.

For a delightful change of pace, I've decided to have this week's Thing be a photo I took myself, rather than one I culled at random from the Internets. Seeing as how we're still stuck in February, and the vast majority of my yard is dormant, there's not a whole lot of stuff to photograph.

I could snap a picture of my naked trees but that's a bit boring and I lack the artistic chops to make them look good. I could also bother my husband or dog for a photo but they're tired of pandering to my desire for blog fodder. What I can take a photo of, however, is the stuff that's just now starting to wake up and say hello to the world.

Like my daffodils. My daffodils have decided that the freezing cold temperatures be darned, it's going to be spring whether the weather cooperates or not. So, I present to you with pride this week's Thing That Does Not Suck: My defiant we-don't-care-what-the-weather's-like daffodils:Do you see them there, just poking their cheerful green selves out of the cold, hard ground? I cannot even begin to describe what joy they bring me every time I see that they've grown just a little taller.

The daffodils are always the first thing in our yard to wake up after winter and for me they signal a return to warmth, the re-emergence of the sun, and the quickening of life in and around our yard. Watching them defiantly start their climb to the sky just makes me want to throw my fist into the air and scream defiance at the cold wind, gray skies, and drab colors all around me.

I would just like to take this moment to say that this is about as artsy as I get with my photos. I had to get down on the ground, set the camera to the "macro" setting (whatever that means), and then hold the camera as still as possible while pushing the button.

Mad skills. I gots them.

World's Longest Post

I have been tagged for a blogging meme! What this means is that a fellow blogger, in this case the lovely lady from Perception, has tagged me to continue a meme she herself was tagged for. This meme is called "15 Things You Didn't Know About Me" and here are the instructions I was given for it:

• "For every answer for the following question you have to do a google/live image search and pick a picture on the first page with minimal explanation"

So, without any ado whatsoever, I present to you a photographic 15 things you may not have known about me (I have to say it that way because some of the people who read my stuff may be married to me or have known me since I was in diapers):

Favorite place: The kitchen, though preferably not with half-opened cupboards and cats in baskets.Favorite food: Anything and almost anything breakfast. Time of day is irrelevant, hot cocoa with whipped cream is crucial.Favorite color combination: Red and yellow, especially on flowers, pleases my eyes greatly. Not so much with the McDonald's decor though.Favorite pet: Well of course that would be Doc Holliday, who was named after our favorite character in an awesome movie. Which would be Tombstone. Naturally.Favorite drink: This one was a heated tie between coffee and a cosmo but, at the end of the day, who am I kidding? One look at this photo and I'm making doe-eyes at the freezer.A place you'd like to travel to: Paris now, Paris tomorrow, Paris forever. I would like few things better than to spend a month in Paris, renting a petit apartment in paris and just living the life, taking in the culture, and eating baskets of bread and cheese.Favorite TV show: CSI is one of a host of shows that makes me go bananas, but it's unique in that it's made it eight season now without going completely off the rails.Worst fear: I sure would hate to drown. I gt panicky if I feel like I can't breathe, so I would say drowning is my worst fear.First thing you'd buy if you had $1 million: Two old people. Sort of. I'd probably make sure Wes and I were set for retirement and hundreds of adventures during our golden years.What or who you'd want to be in the next life: I'd be nothing because I don't believe in a next life. Just considering going through middle school again should be enough to cure anyone of desires for reincarnation.If you had to punch someone who would that be? Probably Chuck Norris, because I'm certain if I punched him I'd actually get some good sleep. And an awesome story to tell people.What would you do on a rainy day? Drink so much hot chocolate I'd never feel cold again.If you could time travel where would you be now? Right here. I'm thinking it's a pretty good place to be.One thing that has fascinated you lately: Babies. The having of, caring for, and growing of babies.Now I get to tag three people! OK, Matt, Mrs. Higrens, and Lissie: Tag, you're it!