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Cold Coding

or coding with a cold. Either way – don’t do it. Early last week Erin got sick and spent a night throwing up. It was … unpleasant. She had a slight fever the next day and then was fine. Of course, the following day Chris went down. He tried to drag me down with him, but I managed to stay out of the range of “deathly-ill, can’t get out of bed, must sleep more” and just hung out in the “Land of Feeling Like Crap and Fighting a Migraine” all weekend. I don’t recommend that place, the service sucks and the towels are really scratchy. Anyways, the weekend was a slug-fest with Chris and I just lying around while the whirling dervish that we call Erin made a huge mess all around us. I basically spent 3 days just hanging out in my chair with the laptop keeping me warm. And since I had a bit of a break from Sweet Blog design work, I decided to finish up the work on my own design portfolio site and the photo-blog I created last Dec. And apparently I was a bit sicker than I thought, because things were much more difficult…

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only mostly dead

Well. Apparently my lack of blog motivation knows no bounds. I have been taking classes. Making new art. Erin turned 3. We went to Disneyland. Brother-in-law was in a motorcycle accident… ::crickets:: Nothing. I felt that elfini has run it course and I was ready to put this little blog o’ mine out to pasture as it were. I blame the all feedback I get from updating Facebook and Twitter. I know that people are reading those because I get comments and replies! amazing. I also starting a tumblr blog and found myself posting there. I love the clean, simple look of it. But I wasn’t “writing” for that blog – just posting photos, random videos and quotes. No pressure. But I have decided to not give up on this site. (Mostly because the ubers said how much they missed my posts and well… how can I refuse them?) So in an effort to re-ignite some passion in me for this little corner of my mind – I am going to give the site a face-lift. Of course I’m screaming busy with Sweet Blog work (YAY!!), woefully behind on photo editing,  my house is a wreck, and let’s not even…

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Puke this!

Weird. My last post, which contains a mere 43 words, somehow got the attention of “diet girl” who left 3 programmed comments. Now my photoblog, dawnblanchfield.com, gets spam comments all the time, but they usually consist of gibberish. I’ve never had that problem on elfini. Is this a WordPress thing? Where did “I Lost Thirty Pounds in Thirty Days” aka “Amazing Weight Loss Story” aka “My Amazing Weight Loss Story” come from? Did she find my site because I mentioned ‘I feel a bit like throwing up’? Is she trolling the internet for potential bulimics? “Hey, don’t ruin your esophageal lining; try my sure-thing diet pill?” I would delete the comments, but at least she is telling me that I have an obvious talent for blogging and not jumping on the “Yeah, you are a pain in the ass” bandwagon. So, short week and the weekend is upon us again. Sweet. Or not. The office is so quiet and peaceful… Kyle is supposedly going to his dad’s this weekend. We’ll see how that pans out. Chris is going to be busy working on the boat for his upcoming camping trip in Ventura, which I don’t want to talk about. So,…

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Split personalities and well-lit toes

Second post since the upgrade and I’m already facing a conundrum… Hmm, I’m not sure how to go about discussing this without revealing my master web-site plans. Oh well, just know that all I speak of will take time. Lots of time. And if it happens earlier than that – consider it an early Christmas present. The plan is to change dawnblanchfield.com from its current incarnation as a photo-blog, to a website proper. Meaning a home page with links to photo galleries, About page, blog, etc. The galleries will be set groups of photos organized by themes, only updated occasionally and treated as more of a portfolio. My big question is the blog. I had thought about starting a new blog for the website that is about photography only. Leaving the elfini blog as a stand-alone personal blog that I would only quietly link to from the About page. Maybe. Or should I just include elfini as part of the site and post the photography related entries here? What to do what to do… I’m sure you have an opinion- please post a comment with your thoughts! I would set up another poll, but the results display from the last poll…

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Maiden Voyage

Hello! You made it. I guess the directions to get here that I left for you weren’t as vague as I had feared.  Quick – click Add to Favorites right now! Okay… onward to the WordPress blogging platform test drive.* As you can see, elfini is now a sub-domain of dawnblanchfield.com. No more typing elfini-thescenicroute.blogspot.com. Man that url sucked. I just didn’t know any better when I first set up that blog. I would love to get elfini.com, but that is taken by some Turkish spoon maker or something. So here we are. I’m flexible. (shut-up Chris!) Well, what do you think about the new digs? Do you like it?** Are you as freaked out by change as I am? I’m surprised I’m not drinking vodka from a sippy cup by now. I had been thinking about making this change for some time now. Then we ended up staying home this past weekend, and instead of working on my painting, I got creative with code. I’m not sure what prompted me to start this process, but once I had exported that first file from Blogger there was no turning back. I was muckin’ about in .xml files, FTP, MySQL, .css, and what the hell…

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And the ones that mother gives you. Don’t do anything at all…

Hmpf. This blog needs a new post. I finally have a little breathing room this morning while I wait for IT to call back, and what do you know- I feel like crap. I’m border-line contemplating getting a headache. So, fun for you. Buckle up. Odds are this will make no sense at all. Hmm, I wonder if Bob Mould is on Twitter. No. So onward for better or worse. Ya know, somewhere there is a smart-part of my brain that is shouting “take the pill now!” I’ve heard it’s message faintly a couple times this morning. I suspect that part of my brain is being sat on by the ‘you-only-get-6-pills-a-month’ pill-horder part of my brain. The same part that has enough vicodin to choke a cow stashed away in the bathroom, but never sent up the suggestion to take some while I was suffering excruciating pain pre-ER visit last month. Yeah, that part. The evil s.o.b. part of my brain. Oh dear, this is not going well. Must focus.So, last Friday was a good day. I had planned to write a nice post on Friday afternoon, telling you all about this wonderful chickpea sandwich that had brought me one…

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