Yesterday was July 4th, Independence Day here in the USA. This year marks America’s 250th Anniversary, or put technically semiquincentennial (or quarter millenial)
As we always do, we parked in the lot from our old Big Lots to watch the local fireworks. Here’s a photo and video I took
It is with heavy heart that I update yesterday’s post. The vet’s office could see Kaiser today and after examining him it was determined the issue was neurological. Dr. AJ said he could try a medication but it would not be long-term. We made the hard choice to say goodbye to our sweet 14 year old boy.
Play hard with your sister Zoe and friend Chevy, Kaiser. We miss you and will love you always.
Everything was normal as can be when I went to bed last night, but today seams to be different :(. Tried getting Kaiser out of bed for the day and it was like he just couldn’t get his hind legs under himself. It took mom and I somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes to get him out of his crate. He’s alert, eating and drinking (though we have to bring his food and water in here to him).
It kinda seams like he just wants to be left be, though he did sit up, scooted over a little bit and laid back down, though more on his tummy than his side
(photo not from today, it was from February)
Happy National Pet Day <3
Tried Mountain Dew’s newest flavor, Dirty Dew. I went into it not thinking I would be much of a fan (as it’s cream soda with a hint of classic dew, and although I’m a big Dew fan, I am not one for cream soda (except for Big Red).
After staying that, I will say it wasn’t as bad as I expected, and the more of it I drank, the more I enjoyed. Now, is it a favorite? Not by a long shot, but it wasn’t discusting either.
TemplateToaster does give fits, but Redoing the themes will take time, and the content block I think will be white (even if I’d wish it to be colored) That is the only issue I’m now having with TT — oh and with the themes now made with TemplateToaster, comments no longer work
Turns out, this white spot is just on the browser version – mobile I see the color background for the content. ACTUALLY, this whiteness is a CHROME issue! Just tried the site in Edge and Ace (by 2 backup browsers) and it looks like it should, EXCEPT, still no access to comments (not a big deal)
Working on new themes for the year and I noticed Artisteer (my theme builder) is no longer usable — the company discontinued it and is wanting people to try NicePage — I tried it but I DO NOT LIKE IT.
So, I may have to try TempateToaster again and see if I can like it and it’ll work for me (the last time I tried it, I went back to Artisteer because all themes with TT didn’t show the comments form)
SO, after the new themes are done, the site may look different (and NOT just because of newly made themes)
I wish I could just find a tables-like free WP theme I could just customise, that would make things SO much easier for me — actually, I really wish old B2 wasn’t so problematic and I could just use it and only redo the layout when I want it changed (have one layout, so no themes, and edit it to the new layout when I would normally switch themes, but b2 is too outdated in todays internet 🙁
I don’t always post on birthdays, but Happy Birthday Mom (she turns 69 today)
Wednesday we bid our blue & red vans goodbye, and say hello to our new white one
Went to visit my sweet Oreo at the vet’s today…he’s looking a bit better than yesterday
My poor 11 year old tuxedo cat, Oreo doesn’t feel well 🙁 He’s crying a lot…so tomorrow he has to see the doctor.
Update: As we suspected, poor little Oreo is urinary blocked, so he’s still at the vets being unblocked. Boy do I miss my cookie-man 🙁
I meant to post this last month, but never got around to it and forgot. Our bank’s app is updating and our old phones (Moto G Stylus) wouldn’t have been able to handle it (needed Android 13 or higher and Moto G has 12), so after I got off work, we stopped at Verizon to see about upgrading. We were looking at Samsung S25 FE, which outright would’ve been $650 each. Higher than we wanted suddenly, but would’ve been the better option, however, Kendra looked at mom’s offers in her account and found one better. We got the new Google Pixel 10 Pro XL for $1000 off (each) — making our price, per phone, $162.06 (mind you Pixel’s full price is nearly $1200 outright) – this made this top tier phone actually cheaper than our mid-grade moto g!
It took some getting used to (and sometimes I still forget the side buttons have the power button on top and you DO NOT long hold the power button to shut the phone off or restart the phone)
This is the first phone I’ve had without access to a micro SD card, which I didn’t like the idea of, since I stored music, files, photos and videos on it, but this phone has twice the space as the moto g did with formatting the sd as internal
PLUS, I got to get a green (my favorite color) phone! It’s a pastel pearly-green, but the green hue is awesome
I cannot believe I never posted an update!!!!!!!!!
That very same week (it may have been a day or two later, I forget exactly now) she interviewed both at Dollar General and Rulers. DG gave her a good offer, but not a guarenteed amount of hours, but Rulers offered more and a guaranteed 30 hours, so as of January 6, she’s been working there.
At work I get a text from Ang (which doesn’t effect me but I still feel shaky and stressed)
Big Lots might be closing so she may have to switch jobs. She texted me to see if we’re hiring, and said Todd got a notification that the deal that kept our BL from closing got canceled by corporate, so unless something changes, the Big Lots here might close.
While texting with her, I got real cold, and spazzed. The store here seams to do real well, so I don’t get why they’d want to close it (plus it was supposed to be getting new registers)
I hope either our BL stays as is (#1 hope for her) or she gets hired in somewhere with the same range of pay
Tuesday night I partially closed my laptop to get something off of the table behind it, and the hinge crackled and partially broke! I brought an old PC in from the garage and chatted with Dell. Apparently they only offer hardware support for up to 4 years (the old PC was 4 years and 123 days old, and the Dell tech said that in the chat). Truthfully, the PC is not usable. The only solution Dell had was to send it to be fixed, It would cost $40-$60 for them to even diagnose it, then on top of that I would have to pay for the repair. Not knowing how much it would cost in the end, I started looking at PCs at Walmart. I’ve always ordered my laptops from Dell, so this was a new experience.
The local Walmart had a couple in my price range. The one I wound up getting it Lenovo ThinkPad 1 AMN7. It’s quite a bit slimmer than my Dell (and lighter). I had to find a workaround for the USB ports (technically I need 3 and this only has 2, but with the aid of a USB to USB-C adapter (I have 3), I turned my USB-C port into a USB (this is where I keep my bluetooth mouse’s receiver).
This is the PC I got: Lenovo ThinkPad
Yes, there are a few differences, but so far, I’m loving it.
I’ve spent more than 2 weeks having website issues. When DewLance switched from cpanel to a different system, webmail was no longer usable (gives and error that PHP needs to be atleast 7.3, even if you have it higher) and I couldn’t use Fileazilla (my preferred FTP program — it would say retriving files, then error to saying there was inactivity for 20 seconds). I had support tickets in, but DewLance would not address my issue (they ignored the email issue and just said for ftp for hostname use evo.decentserver.com — which I had previously told them did not work)
Anyways, I started looking into a new host because I was fed up (also, I had made my sister an email on my website, and since you couldn’t access email, she had no access to it and she uses it for Instagram), after no reply what-so-ever, for over 10 days (the previous time took 8, yet support is supposed to be 24/7), I started migrating to a new host, so we’ll see how happy I’ll be there.
I register my domain name with NameCheap, so I looked into them for hosting. Initial year is cheaper than I paid DewLance, though renewals is a little more, but it’s Cpanel (which I like) and so far (officially ALL migrated, even with the emails) so very good.
NameCheap did 99% of the migration for me, so there are a few WP plugins I didn’t have before, but my pages/posts/photos/themes are all there!
Happy National Cat Day
Darling, Frasier, Elijah, Pumpkin, Dabbie, Lizzie, Tink, Bandit, Harold, Chester, Maverick, Simba, Valravn, Panda and Sidious
I love my cirkul bottles I have for home, and I have a few: one plastic 22 ounce (my original), 2 32 ounce stainless steel (one is rose gold and the other is Chameleon), and a 40 ounce tumbler (bright pink). With drinking from those, I do drink more water.
I wanted to drink more water at work, instead of buyinh 5 20 Mt. Dews every week (which I am a Dew girl, I LOVE my dew, but buying 5 a week adds up)
SO, I spent some money, ordering a stainless steel 22 ounce cirkul (to JUST be my work bottle), with matching lid, matching silicone shock sleeve and a few flavors to add to my stash.
My package came today — 2 days earlier than the original estimated delivery window began.
I love that Big Lots has been getting yarn (and good yarn to boot) in the repack boxes! This time, this is what I got (all are marked at $3.99 but some rang in at $1.99 and some and even $2
Another good yarn day at Big Lots! I bought a second skein of Bernat Maker Home Dec, and all 6 skeins O’Go Bernat….all for under $20!!!!!
Meet our newest friend, Simba! He was a stray that’s been coming around, and tonight he moved in
Got my themes back to how they belong! If I’d known the fix, I wouldn’t have deleted my themes and spent $99 on TemplateToaster, but we can’t go into the past.
I did, however, lose my past themes, thankfully I had a backup of last year’s themes, so these will be good for now
I found out it was the PHP verson that wasn’t letting my artisteer themes show. If I change down to 7.4, artisteer themes show as they always did, but any PHP version higher than 7.4 gives error.
So then, I thought to myself, HEY! I could just switch to 7.4, then I could use BOTH Artisteer and TemplateToaster (but then I loaded a theme I made in TT…..error-city. Below are screencaps, the first is the TemplateToaster theme with PHP version 7.4, the second is the same theme selected, but with PHP updated to 8.3
I had though I could keep both theme makers installed an use them both since I spent so much money on them. (the full version of Artisteer was $129, but I have used it for yeeeeeeeeeeears, so I feel it’s made it’s cost worthy. I like the ease of use with it, though some features I wish it had. With TemplateToaster, it’s full version is $99 (still on sale). It’s more complicated, but some of it’s stylizing is better than Artisteer.
I have 2 current issues with TemplateToaster:
Above and below the blog posts is the word Navigation and nowhere in WP’s dashboard is there a way to turn that off (nor is there something in TT’s program either)
Comments are not possible (the Dahboard for WP has commenting on, and themes not made in TT allows them, but in TT themes, if you click the [leave a comment] link, it just reload’s the post
Now with Artisteer, the themes show up the way they should (and I don’t have to go through the rigamarole of importing content just to not truly import (since it’ll import TT default pages not my pages, then reselect the blog posts to show instead of a static page), but my only qualm here is (aside from not truly liking having to downgrade php verson) is how to access commenting. The visitor has to open the post page. [Footnote: while typing this, I googled a way to add comments in Artisteer themes, I may have fixed it!!!!! If my thinking’s right, I’ll keep both programs, yes, but Artisteer will be back to #1. In hindsight, I did always want to try TT since Artisteer has NO customer support, and it can stay in my repertoire as a backup 😉
I randomly noticed my themes were messed up, so I started poking at them. It looks like WP and Artisteer aren’t being compatible (unless it’s my PC, but I have NO flipping idea). So I bore down and although I couldn’t really afford to, bought the full version of TemplateToaster.
Now, the themes are even worse fucked up! Colors aren’t alligned, the layout image is off-skew and not fully showing (yet they said everything looked fine with the theme on their end)
I re-exported the them as HTML, which then it DOES look right, but in that way, there’s no fucking blog! (plus I had to edit every page with TT for the menu)
I tried it with Drupal (even though Drual is beyond me) and all I get is system errors. In the beginning I went with Artisteer (and now TT I guess) because seeing things is easier for me with the coding, but it looks like to keep WP, I may have to find a way to edit a WP theme, which means doing it by hand, which makes TT a waste of fucking money! (I didn’t lob Artisteer there because, it was a third of the price, and with the years I’ve used it, it’s been useful)
[edit] After enabling a TT theme, the colors/image is still all fucked up (down and and to the right and the colors not how I set them) And ALL you can see is THIS FUCKING POST. Even if you click a different page in the menu [/edit]
Been having problems with my laptop’s keyboard (number row at the top and the end key not working) so I contacted Dell. They troubleshooted all they could and scheduled a technician……..this is where it gets aggregating.
I told Dell I work 10:30-4 Monday-Fruday, but they said technicians come between 9-6 and Tuesday (today) the tech would call and set up a time convenient to my schedule.
Yes, he called, but I got the impression I needed to make it convenient for HIM! (He’s an hour and a half from me and 4:40 would be too late)
He said he’d call and see if someone closer to me had an opening … But when he called back, what he’d done was fill today up with appointments so I’d either have to miss work tomorrow or find SOMEBODY to be in the house at noon tomorrow (or possibly push the repair back to when I could be there at noon!
Thank you Scott for pissing me off all day
Saw on Facebook that it’s National Pet Day!!!
Happy National Pet Day, Kaiser, Darling, Frasier, Elijah, Pumpkin, Dabbie, Lizzie, Tinker, Bandit, Harold, Maverick & Chester
