Oy.

Wanna hear the great part? The not getting comments emailed thing? The whole reason I started this upgrade thing in the first place?

Yeah. Not fixed.

And also, comments seem to be disassociated with all the old posts, at least for the purposes of getting a comment count on the front page. That? That I’m not going to worry about.

Update: Oh. Good. I decided to upgrade Wordpress to see if that would fix the comment email problem, and ended up seriously breaking the blog.

Fantastic.

And this time, it’s not only come back, but it’s spreading, and it sounds very much like this guy is going to die. He has kids, including a new baby who was born a few weeks early. He started his current round of chemo and radiation while she was still in the NICU.

I don’t know this guy well at all, but it breaks my heart. My heart aches for his wife, and especially for his kids, who will miss out on so much with a loving father. It’s a tragedy. An honest to god tragedy. One that’s played out every single day all over the world.

Sometimes, I’m absolutely astounded that there is yet to be a cure for this disease. With everything that’s possible in our modern world, how can it be that cancer keeps on going?

Yesterday morning, the UPS boy trudged through the sleet to my door with no fewer than five packages, ranging in size from small to quite large. Two of them were things I ordered for Christmas gifts. The rest were gifts for Scott and me from my mother-in-law.

Some of you may remember that last year, she gave Scott a towel for Christmas. One. Towel.* I got an amaryllis and counted myself lucky.**

This year, Scott’s mother decided to bury us in baked goods. English muffins, to be precise. Two of today’s packages were from Wolferman’s.*** We received both the Christmas Bloom Tower and the Merry and Bright Presents gift box. That comes to a grand total of seven bags of English muffins, along with some jam, crumpets, cocoa, and tea breads.

I don’t think I need to buy baked goods for 6 months.

I’m not complaining. I like English muffins, and they freeze well. It just makes me giggle, is all, to see all those many bags of English muffins lined up on the counter.

*Don’t get me wrong, the yearly Mom Bonus Check and B&N gift cards are really the true gifts, but the side stuff is always a little wacky.

**That was a lovely gift which I tried to regrow this season, but my Black Thumb of Death^TM kicked in and that bulb was having none of it. I gave in and tossed it a few days ago.

***Incidentally, if you’ve never had a Wolferman’s English muffin, I really to recommend them. They’re delicious. Pop in for coffee some time and I’ll toast one up for you. I may have spares.

At long last, I just finished Scott’s Berkshire Pullover, about half an hour ago. The ends are woven - blessedly few, thanks to spit splicing (with water, not spit, thank you very much) - and it’s spinning free of its Soak water right now. I’m still not happy with the neck, but whatever. It’s a casual sweater, so no big deal. As long as his head fits through it.

In with the sweater is a purple scarf knit in Misti Alpaca, in a horizontal rib pattern. This was knit for a secret Santa swap and will be shipped out to its new home this weekend.

Lady Eleanor is off the needles, her ends are woven in, and she’s been soaked and blocked. She’s just waiting for me to finish cleaning the kithen so I have space on the kitchen table to work the knotted fringe. She is stunning even without it.

I think I’ll cast on for a pair of socks today. Or maybe for Ice Queen. I just got my Fire Mountain Gems order today, with the beads I need for Ice Queen, so it’s most likely going to be that project that gets started today.

Photos of everything completed will be forthcoming once they’re dry.

On another note, why is it always assumed that a woman will know how to sew something like that up? Or how to sew on a button? These pants will be going to the tailor, thank you very much.

After a year, and after emailing for comfirmation and getting no reply, I closed the account. Everything gone. I was nice, though, and left his other three active Web sites untouched, even though he ignores my invoices.

Now he says he never got the invoices. And who knows, maybe he didn’t. But I brought it up with him when we had the deleted account brouhaha and he chose to ignore that part of the email.

What sucks is that we used to get along very well, this client and I. I think things turned sour when I started pushing him toward a bigger company for his main site. I didn’t want to grow my business to the size he needs to properly support his business, but he took it as me not wanting to help him anymore. He even said that exact thing at one point. I think it all went downhill from there.

Honestly, I know I should have picked up the phone and called him to straighten it all out at some point, and not let it get to this point. I didn’t really know what to say, though.I’m terrible at conflict and the worst thing is that I’m a crier. Things that make me feel negative emotions - anger, sadness, fear, frustration, etc. - make me cry when I try to deal with them head on. Handling everything via email may be unprofessional, but I think it would be a lot less professional to start crying on the phone with a client you’re trying to convince to pay you.

This is the part of working for myself I really, really hate.

JFK Jr. shared my birthday. My mother always thought that was a good reason for me to marry him. When I was in my early 20’s, she used to encourage me to go out in NYC to clubs where John-John was known to hang out, so I could meet him and we could laugh about how we shared a birthday and he would fall in love with me and we’d get married.

The day his plane crashed, she called me and said, in all seriousness, as if I ever had a chance with JFK Jr., “I’m SO glad you didn’t marry him!”