Kat is tearing through the house making occasional yowls, because apparently the invisible kitty demons are after him.

Kit is following him around, with body language that says, “What’s wrong? What’s going on? Why are you running around like that? What’s wrong?”

only hairy
Only hairy what? Tops of feet? Dinosaurs? Worms? I hope it’s not the later, because that would look too much like a centipede, and… EW.

male singer in 2006 2007 2008
Because he was a female singer prior to 2006.

bedroom slippers as fashion fad
Not fad. Error. Grievous error. And the same is true for pajamas.

capries and boots in fashion or not 2008
OK. Who on earth ended up here for fashion advice? No. No. No. A thousand times no. Capris and boots look STUPID. Though perhaps capries are something else entirely. I’m picturing a small sailboat. In which case boots are still right out.

random is not a word
Someone has been lying to you. Random is most definitely a word.

battleturtles
BATTLE TURTLES! REGROUP AND ATTACK!

apple pie comforter
I can sew and I can bake. But I do not think it would be a good idea to combine the two.

Today has totally kicked my butt. Nothing specific, just started the day off kilter and never managed to get back on kilter.

Think anyone will notice if I don’t get out of bed tomorrow?

There are lots of reasons why I love winter, but up at the top of the list is citrus. Winter is when oranges are in season, and I love oranges. It’s also one of the reason I love living in the modern world–I can live in West Virginia and drink orange juice all year round, and get fresh oranges when it’s snowing outside.

I’m not sure about anywhere else, but the first seasonal citrus to his the shelves here are clementines. I can sit and eat clementines like they’re candy. In fact, one day over the holidays when my brother was here I think the two of us went through half a box in a single evening.

I started seeing Cara Cara oranges a week or two ago, but what I was really waiting for was Moro or blood oranges.

I actually hadn’t tried them until a couple years ago, and now I can’t wait until they’re in season. They’re tart, which is usually not my favorite, but there’s something about them I can’t resist.

Given a choice between the two, I prefer clementines, but blood oranges are usually on their way in as clementines are on their way out. Which probably keeps me from getting sick of clementines.

And that is why I love winter.

For Anne:
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So there’s been a lot in the news over the past several months about people who are using coupons and “smart shopping” to save money on the grocery bills.

As great as this sounds, I almost always discover what these people are doing is–for me–completely unreasonable.

Why do I say this? Because in every interview these people talk about how they saved $78 by getting twenty packages of toilet paper for $10.

OK. Great that you saved that much money, but where do you store twenty packages of toilet paper and fifty bottles of shampoo and eighty boxes of mac and cheese? And how do you manage to use all that stuff before it goes bad?

Here are the food cabinets in the kitchen. Notice I have those horrible cabinets with wasted space in the corners. (Yes, the cabinets are a mess. Don’t remind me. Grandmom gets the lower shelves, since she can’t reach above them. Makes it hard for me to organize, since I can’t easily reach things on the top shelves.

So no room in here for extra food. Rest of the upstairs? No space. Living room, bedrooms, bath, and one very small closet for both my clothes and Michael’s clothes.

How about the basement then?

That’s even worse.

Here are the storage shelves in the basement. Notice anything? They’re full. And there’s not an inch of space for other shelves. (Rest of the basement is just as bad if not worse.)

So storing extra stuff is not even within the realm of possibility. (I can’t even buy paper towels in bundles larger than two.)

Then there’s the other trick they use, which is finding out what’s on sale and then buying what’s on sale from different stores.

I go to two grocery stores every week. Saturday morning I go to Target and Giant Eagle, and then Sunday to Kroger’s with Grandmom (I don’t like Kroger’s but they have milk from VA in glass returnable bottles.)

You know what? That’s already more time than I like to spend shopping. You want me to add going through the local paper (which I don’t buy because it SUCKS) looking for what’s on sale in every store around town? Are you kidding?

Perhaps if I didn’t work full time that might not sound so horrific, but I’d much rather spend more time at home relaxing, and less time shopping. (Laundry is bad enough.)

Now I’ll admit I could certainly save money by using the coupons they give me at the store when I check out, if it’s for something I’d buy anyway. Except that not only do we not remember to take those coupons back to the store with us, most weeks I don’t remember to make a shopping list before I leave the house.

So is coupon clipping worth it? And if so, how much can one put into it before you’re spending more time shopping than relaxing?

Today my task was to take care of returns and exchanges. I may have mentioned before, I really hate talking on the phone, and I don’t like making returns, so I’d been putting it off. Unfortunately, unless I want to keep the products that either don’t fit or don’t work, I needed to deal with it, since it hardly seemed fair to foist this off on Michael.

He has, after all, dealt several times with Medicare customer support.

First up, Victoria’s Secret, to find out why the bras I ordered, which were the same size as other Victoria’s secret bras I have, were ill-fitting. Despite having to go through IVR, the wait wasn’t too long, and the woman was able place an order for new bras in a larger size for me.

I still don’t understand why racerback bras would fit differently than “regular” full coverage bras. Anyone?

Next, Land’s End. First off, I was shocked when a human being answered the phone. And was immediately able to help me. THANK YOU LAND’S END! I explained me problem–the pocket rivet fell off my new jeans–and she looked in their stock and talked to someone else, and told me that although they didn’t have any replacements in that size, style, and color, the rivets were mostly decorative, so I should be fine, but she put a note in my file that if I called in a couple months because the jeans were failing due to rivet loss, I’d get a full refund.

Awesome!

It’s nice to have unpleasant tasks I was putting off turn out better than expected.

Found some more books to add to the great book giveaway. And Michael decided to add to the pile.
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Sorry I missed Friday Cat blogging yesterday, but things happened. I’m sure you know how it is.

So here’s a cat picture today, of Kat all curled up in his cat window.

Isn’t he cute?

And no, his paw hasn’t been amputated. It’s just tucked under his leg.

Cold. Rainy.

Consequently: Read. Nap. Pizza planned for dinner. No thrilling post here.

Is still going on!

Fantasy
Fantasy Series
Supernatural Fantasy
Mystery

Taken books are crossed out, but there are still more books there than I want to take to the used bookstore!

So last night after dinner, I proceeded to rebuild my database. I dumped everything into Access, and created new tables from there. Why Access? Because I can *see* what is happening in Access, whereas in MySQL I have to take extra steps to see my results. The rebuilding wasn’t really as bad as I thought it would be, as I only needed relatively simple Access queries to manipulate my data.

From there, I uploaded the tables into MySQL, and proceeded to rebuild my php files to query the database.

With a minimum amount of bickering and quibbling, Michael and I were able to do that, although he kept trying to make one query much harder than it needed to be. Needless to say, by the time we finished up last night it was past my bedtime, which is why I didn’t have a post ready for this morning.

But the important thing is the new database is up and all public queries are working.

Now I just have to rebuild the administrative back end to allow me to add, edit, and delete books from the database. Hopefully now that the tables have better relationships, the rebuilding will be easier to do.

Hopefully.

Grandmom: What are you two arguing about with the computer?
Michael: Michelle has a database of her books and we’re trying too…
Michelle: Stop. We’re trying to get answers from the computer, and we can’t figure out how to ask the right questions.
Grandmom: Ah!

So, many years ago, what is now my on-line book database started out life as a simple Excel workbook.

When I had to learn MS Access several years ago, I took that Excel file, and tried to convert it into an Access file. It worked… ok. But at least got me comfortable with the basics of Access.

A year or so later I started working with the woman who was helping me re-write our Access classes, and as an exercise she helped me again convert my Excel file into an Access database, and this time I had a better idea of what I was going, and built queries and life was seemingly good.

Well, when I wanted to learn MySQL, I took that Access database and imported it into MySQL, and that’s how my book database began. I’ve used that database to learn to write queries of various types, and all kinds of PHP/MySQL manipulations. And I’ve gone on to write other databases since then.

Well, I’ve been tying to learn more of MySQL, and been playing with my database and been running into a LOT of trouble. It’s been frustrating, but I’ve mostly been able to get things to work. And as a matter of course the more I learn the more I discover that I should have done things differently, and gone back and changed this in light of this.

Well, yesterday I had a problem I couldn’t figure out, so I had Michael look at it. He was playing with the queries, and then asked to look at the database structure. Since he was driving, I was looking at everything from a different angle, and I suddenly realized the whole damned database had been set up wrong.

That’s right. Instead of having foreign keys liking the databases together, I repeated every bit of data in multiple tables.

(deep breath)

So I’ve dumped the entire thing back into Access, and I’m going to see if I can actually repair the damage.

Wish me luck.