Up and at ’em

It was a harrowing weekend spent not really caring about getting the site back to normal again after some ill-timed editing to the backbone of WordPress. After a few hours spent messing around this morning I have things more or less back to some semblance of “normal.” There’s still a few problems here and there but I really didn’t feel all that much like dealing with it. There’s some ugliness to the site if you look in the right places, but, in the end, who cares?

The good news is that comment moderation has been lifted! (This due to some of the struggling this morning, having implemented two techniques that should all but eliminate my comment-spam problem.)

In other news . . .

Today officially marks the “almost-completely finished with Christmas shopping” point. All of the important gifts are bought and hid away; it’s just down to little straggler gifts now – stocking stuffers and the like. Strangely, the gift I’m stressing the most about is for my work team-lunch this coming Friday. It’s a “secret snowflake” deal with a limit of $10 for the gift. “Snowflake,” you ask? “Snowflake” is because “Santa” is both sexist and secular, of course. That’s the kind of thing you think might be a joke for a moment, but then you realize that this is a workplace and nobody dares make a joke like that with HR a phone call away. Suppressing groans of disbelief is one of the skills I am still learning, but I luckily kept the one inspired by this escapade deep inside.

I guess we actually combine a couple of holiday traditions – there’s both a secret gift-giver and a struggle over who gets to keep said gift. With 20 people on my team at the moment, we’ve had to limit the stealing of gifts to three times – the third to steal a gift is the lucky bastard that gets to keep whatever it is. Of course, most of the gifts no one will really care about – pen-and-paper sets, potpouri thingies, etc – but there’s always one or two gifts that everyone fights over. Last year, mine was one such gift – a “itty bitty Buddha.” Tell me you wouldn’t want that little dude for your desk. Buddhist or not, it’s hard to say no to a tiny, smiling fat guy. How do I top that this year? Especially when I’ve had as little mall-exposure as I have so far (and thank God for that – I was able to keep the mall-shopping to a minimum. Trust me, this is a very good thing – you don’t want to see me in a mall around Christmas. I am stressed out enough as it is with getting the “right” gifts – people cutting me off, bumping into me, needlessly meandering SLOWLY around in such a way that I can’t get past them . . . I just can’t handle it.) Unfortunately, it is now all too obvious that the mall is exactly where I’m going to end up. With only four days left, there’s only so many weird little stores I can hit to find that special gift that no one can say no too. I suppose, of course, that I could always resort to a nice leather playing card case that I saw the other day. I hear that “poker” thing is real big right now . . .