Warning: Nerd entry.

I finally did away with Movable Type. I never fully recovered from the upgrade to MT4, which forced me to rewrite my comment templates.  I had previously been using Movable Type’s own <$MTCommentFields$> tag to create my comment form, and they ruthlessly abandoned the tag in version 4, so I had to recreate my comment form after upgrading.

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Now I can tell just how infrequently I post blog entries, because I’ve already received and spent my next $3 coupon from Staples. This time I bought some paper for my printer, because I need paper, and because it was on sale for only $4.99 a ream. So $1.99 later, I’ve got myself a nice ream of paper. Woo-hoo!

I guess it was actually $4.99 plus tax, minus $3, so that’s about $2.38. Good thing I bought it before April 1st, otherwise it might have been $2.43! (The sales tax in California goes up 1 percentage point on April 1st, so about $.05 on a $5.00 purchase.)

If you’re planning to get me a present for the big 2-9 on 2/9, here are some suggestions!

You can look at my whole wishlist on Amazon.com.

It’s tax time again. I yearn for the day when it’ll be simple… a year when we don’t move, for instance. This past year, we moved, we bought a house, we had a home office, Ash had more than one job… lots of things that make our taxes complicated.

My mother has been begging me to post pictures of the house all decorated for the holidays, so here it is! Amusingly, I took all the decorations down today.

Our house is all moved into now, and decorated for Christmas. We couldn’t have done it without Ash’s parents and our friend Ryan. They helped so much, our house turned out amazing!

I’m listening to Spring Awakening and it made me think about books that are banned from schools. I think one of the greatest reasons to allow access to controversial books, particularly coming-of-age books, books about prejudice, and books about depression, is that young people need to know that they’re not alone in their thoughts–other people have been through the same things, and they can learn from those experiences, fiction or nonfiction.

In Spring Awakening, the characters are restricted from sex education, and as a result, they don’t know the immediate consequences of what they’re doing. It’s an important message to consider: Over-protecting people can keep them from being able to protect themselves.

Ilse was really matted when she went for her haircut today, so they had to cut it really short again. She looks like a big white rat.

Wow, I haven’t written anything since May? The saddest part about that is that my archives will always skip over June 2008, as if it’s the month that time forgot, or as if I don’t know the order of the months. “Let’s see, April, May, July… July? That’s not what’s next!”

June had weddings and stuff. Work was pretty hectic too, and is even more so now that it’s July. Ash and I have been watching a lot of HGTV, and I even tried my hand at some “Hidden Potential” inspired makeovers using Photoshop.

Ilse is sad every day while Ash is at work. She just camps out by the front door waiting, or she sleeps in her Sherpa bag all day. Oh, the poor neglected puppy. Of course she wouldn’t be neglected if she were willing to play with me, but noooo… she wants her “mommy” instead.

Flickr lets you assign locations to your photos on a map, so I’ve started mapping some of my photos. Right now I’ve just got a few in New York, Anaheim, Seattle, and Vancouver, but I’ll hopefully get around to doing more. It’s a pretty fascinating tool for tracking where I’ve been.