Living Out Loud volume 19: Tooting your own horn

Looking back on the other evening when I had hoped to do some writing, discovered my blogs were all trashed, spent an hour feeling sick to my stomach about it and wringing my hands, then buckled down, found the fix and managed to still post to both blogs, I realized I had created a bit of an emotional roller coaster. Poor Rich was dragged along for the ride as I lamented to him about my blog being broken and by the time he was starting to have sympathy pains and came over to my office to share some "yeah, screw those guys" over the bastards that hacked my sites, I had fixed it and was all giddy. He had some sympathy whiplash from it all. As angsty as I was about my blogs being brokenBrokenBROKEN, in the end, I was pretty pleased with myself.

That planted a seed of thought for what kinds of things give us a sense of accomplishment or make us happy. And it reminded me of the "ice-breaker" I'd heard of that asked everyone in the room to name something they were proud of.

So let's try this for our next Living Out Loud. Tell us something that you're proud of. Ideally, it would be something about yourself that you're proud of and not that you're proud of Alberto Contador's performance in the Tour de France. It could be a specific accomplishment or a particular character trait of yours. It could be one thing for a combination of events/factors that make up the magic of you. I recently read an article about someone saying he wasn't brave for writing about one of his shortcomings on the Internet because he got plenty of the expected sympathy and hugs but that it took more courage for him to brag about himself online. (Ironically, he took the bragging post down or I'd link to it.)

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, August 1st (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

So let's hear it. Pat yourself on the back. Toot your own horn and tell it like it is.

Protecting my blog from myself

Last night I was in kind of a crabby mood. Several little things at work had gotten on my Last. Goddamn. Nerve. and Ian was being kinda grouchy himself. So since there would be people doing Fight Club in our back yard that evening, I decided to stay inside with the boy and work on dinner and a few other things. Long story short, as we were eating dinner at 10pm that night, Rich told me "tomorrow you're going to take your laptop to Panera and write and I'll wrangle the boy." I made a face and said, "no, I'm going to invite a bunch of friends over to the backyard and we're all going to do some fun activity that you're not interested in until all hours of the night while the dog and baby whine at the back door to participate." And then I agreed to spend the evening at Panera.

Until this afternoon when I realized my blog was broken. My blog was broken, Ian's blog was broken, Rich's blog was broken and even my brother's experimental blog was broken. They were broken and I didn't know why and I didn't know how to fix them and how was I going to write anything with them all broken?!?!

While I wanted to call up my server host provider and be all "FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT!" I wasn't sure if I had caused it. I felt stupid and betrayed and angry and ... ugh!

But then I found the solution! And I fixed it all by myself! And then I went through all the blogs and changed the passwords for every user and updated the database passwords and my system admin password. (I may never be able to get into any of this stuff again since I won't remember any of these passwords but at least no one else will hopefully.)

Now to try updating my theme before BlogHer - I have a whole 10 days before I have to leave. What could go wrong?

Hush little baby: not your mother's lullabies

Amazingly our son went to sleep at 8:30 this evening, which is unheard of, so I've found myself with some free time to play on the computer. As I was sorting through songs to make a mix, Rich asked if a particular song was a cover. He swore I had made him a mix with the song on it but it was a woman singing. After a bit he laughed and realized that the only time he's heard the song is when I'm singing it to Ian and this was the first he'd heard of the original.

That inspired me to share some of the gems I've been digging up. These are all songs I use to sing babies to sleep. Very few are actual children's songs but most of them can be sung in a soothing manner.

Let me know which songs are your favorite or if you have other atypical lullabies in your own repertoire.

The first song, Trouble, is the song Rich didn't recognize. I've sung that to babies for almost a decade now. Babies can be "so fat their shoes don't fit on [their] feet" so I figure it's appropriate. Here's the list of songs below, but you can click on the link to listen to the complete mix.

Hush Little Baby

1. Trouble (Little Feat) 2. Bird On The Wire (Leonard Cohen) 3. Everybody's Missing the Sun (The Gourds) 4. House at Pooh Corner (Maria Sangiolo) 5. Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo (Leslie Caron) 6. Tennessee Waltz (Hem) 7. Love At The Five And Dime (Nanci Griffith) 8. All Of Me (Willie Nelson) 9. Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What a Wonderful World (Israel Kamakawiwo'ole) 10. Love Will Come To You (Indigo Girls)