Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Interesting times

I got notice last week that the company that's been hosting my website for the past several years has decided to stop offering shared hosting plans and instead concentrate on dedicated hosting. I can't really complain, since they'd been hosting me for free as a favor to my company since we had been sending a lot of customers to them. But still, it was something I didn't really want to mess with.

I didn't actually have to move for about 60 days, but I decided to go ahead and do it and get it over with. I downloaded the entire site, then uploaded it to the new host over the weekend, and I switched the DNS today. I have a lot of experience in setting up website hosting, but something is happening here that I've never seen before. If you type in just willa.com, it goes to the new server, if you type in www.willa.com, it's still going to the old one. However, I can't get to my email on the old server, and my mail is now being delivered to the new hosting company.

I lost all the mail that I had read today using the old webmail application, but I don't think there was anything there that I hadn't dealt with; I don't know, however, whether anything fell through (or is still falling through) the cracks during this interim period. If anyone sent me anything that they think I should have responded to, you might try sending it again, or wait a day or two. Or just leave me a comment here. Things should shake out by the end of the week, hopefully.

There was good news and bad news over the weekend -- the bad news was that I got food poisoning and hadn't done any laundry over the weekend, so I didn't have any jeans clean. The good news was that I got food poisoning and lost enough water weight that I could fit into my skinnier jeans so I had something to wear to work Monday . . .

I don't actually know if it was food poisoning or not, it may have been a 24-hour virus or something. Whatever it was, it was vicious. On Monday morning Bob asked me what time I eventually stopped throwing up and was able to sleep, and I said it must have been around 3:00 a.m. He apologized, and said he was sorry that he went to sleep. I told him it was okay, I was just lying on the bathroom floor moaning, there wasn't anything he could have done. Of course, you don't really want anyone hovering over you anyway when you're that sick, and if I had needed him, I certainly would have woken him up.

Earlier, he had brought me Gatorade, and he would come in and check on my every once in awhile. Usually I try to sleep through something like that, but I didn't have much luck.

I feel fine now, just sore, and wary of eating anything except the most basic, bland stuff.

I probably should have stayed home on Monday, but I had already made plans to be off on Tuesday. I usually try to make my yearly ob-gyn appointment and my annual mammogram appointment on the same day so that I don't have to take off twice, and that's what I did this year. I figured I needed the rest of the day for mental health after doing all of that anyway. I took myself out to lunch and sat and read for awhile, then went to a couple of bead stores.

One of them struck me as kind of odd. They had a lot of beautiful stuff, and I browsed for a long time. I've been concentrating on Bali silver and semi-precious stones, and they had a lot of nice ones. I've found that most bead stores will have baskets of little ziplock plastic bags and Sharpie markers; if you find something you want, you put it into the little bag, and mark the price on it.

I found several things that I wanted, so I went up to the counter and asked if they had any little bags, and they looked at me like I was nuts. I said that I wanted to keep the stones separated. They said, oh, use a beadboard, and I said, oh, um, okay. they also said to write down whatever you want to buy on a sheet of paper--they gave me a little clipboard. A bead board is a plastic tray with a few compartments, maybe four or five separate places. It's used for laying out necklace designs, and has circular grooves. Not really appropriate for what I wanted, but oh well.

I picked out a few beads of Leopardskin Jasper, some Rhyolite, some agate -- I don't remember what all, but probably three or four different kinds of stones, plus a few silver beads.

As I was doing this, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to remember what was what, so I kept a separate list for myself of what I was buying, and tryed to write down things that would help me remember what was what -- 5 - 6mm Leopardskin Jasper beads, 10 Moss Agate Ovals, 6 - 8MM Honey Jade . . .

When I got up to the counter and put down my board and handed them the list, the woman behind the counter started counting and ringing things up, and the other clerk started picking the beads up and was going to put them all into one bag. I stopped him, and asked if he could keep the different kinds separated like I had kept them separate on the board, and again, I was looked at like I was nuts.

I don't know, maybe other people who buy stones just buy them for what they look like and don't care what they are, but I definitely care what they are. There isn't a lot of difference in the appearance of, for instance, Rhyolite and Leopard Jasper, and if they were mixed up, I probably couldn't pick them out with any certainty, but it's important to me to know what they are, what their names are, so I can look them up later.

It seems weird to me that someone would buy a bunch of stones and not know what they are, but that must be the case. Once again, I'm the oddball.

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