My colleagues and I will be posting updates to our live-coverage Tumblr tonight, tomorrow and Sunday — gomemphis.tumblr.com. Follow us there or on Twitter: @gomemphis. You can also watch the action at our Memphis in May info site, where lots of tips and tricks are posted for your perusal. We’ll be the first to know if the river decides to swallow Downtown, so stay tuned for that.

Happy weekend!

<3<3<3

So anyway. Go here and vote! Be sure to fill out the majority of the ballot — write-ins are welcome — for it to count. I’m also nominated for best local Twitterer, so if you want to vote for me for that too, I will hug you twice and both times so hard, and then probably tweet about it.

Thank you. And may the best self-absorbed internet citizen win!

* Hotness and wetness may not be available in your region.

** Not really.

Now that we have gifted her with a portable computer, I feel like it may be only a matter of time before she finds her way over here and starts paging through all the things that I’ve written about my life and the family. And I hope she doesn’t take offense to my telling stories that may or may not be mine to tell.

I know she’s not going to like the cussin’. But, well, that’s just who I am. Filthy.

So, Mom. If you DO ever stumble upon my humble digital abode, do me the kindness of leaving a comment so I will at least know you’re around. There’s no need to lurk.

:)

I should really stop redesigning my blog at 4 in the morning, but I can’t help it! I was checking up on all the Memphis blogs today — clicking through, not using my reader — when I noticed the lovely Ms. Lemonslush‘s snazzy theme and got serious theme envy. It is rare that I find a WordPress theme that I really, really like. And yet Bueno seems to be a solid, well-built, FREE theme with lots of customization options. WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE. Designy bonus: These awesome Photoshop brushes.

I am considering installing new headers when the mood strikes. Kinda like Dooce does it, only amateurishly and without humor.

I’m still working out kinks, obviously. I’m not 100 percent sold on the Rockwell ChunkFive. I mean, I like it. But it’s the theme default, so I have a hard time letting it be the boss of me. ALSO, and this is a dealbreaker, it does not seem to want to let me use apostrophes or slashes in blog post titles. !!! and ???. There is a fix for this, but I can’t access it because I didn’t pay for the theme and therefore can’t get in to the Woo forum. Bollocks. Anyone know of a good fix? I am totally willing to ditch Rockwell if that is the issue. UPDATE: It was a cufon issue. And since I just learned what the hell cufon even means, I decided not to try to mess with fixing it and just disabled it.

I’ve got to give some TLC to the sidebar, which looks way more cramped than the proto version, since I expanded the main content area to be able to accommodate my HUGE FUCKING PHOTOS. I may need to take the entire content area wider since there is a lot of padding there on the left hand side. The sidebar just feels dumb when it’s this skinny.

I went through a brief but terrifying moment of panic at about 3:30 when, in the midst of FTPing the new theme via Filezilla, the blog starting giving me database errors and wouldn’t let me log in as an admin at all. Having accidentally killed my blog via Filezilla before, I was ready to vomit everything I had ever ingested. But, before I knew it, things were working again. Server reboot? Yeah, we’ll go with that.

So, sayonara, latest version of T&G with the hand-colored lettering. You were cute and quirky but you were built on a template I never could really get a handle on.

Let’s see what we can do with this one.

The first thing I did when I decided to take a hiatus two months ago (prompted, mostly, by the fact that I have very little time to do blog cultivation during work hours now since the newsroom reorgnization, and I was spending a TON of hours at home doing for free what I should probably be getting paid to do) was unsubscribe from every Memphis blog feed that didn’t contribute anything meaningful to my life. That means I unsubscribed from a lot of blog feeds.

The most daunting challenge I face now is making sure I am up to the task of resubscribing and wading through all that stuff again without letting it bog down my life like it did before, when I would go to a friend’s house after work to hang out, and then end up tabbing through Google Reader and making 4 a.m. posts about local reactions to news. While that may be super useful for our readers, it burned me out and fast.

I have got to find a good way to manage my time because I refuse to devote as many home hours to the blog as I did in year one of its existence. Seriously. You have to slog through a lot of shit to get to the pearls. I hope that’s not insulting. I feel like that’s pretty much the case for the entire internet. So here’s hoping I can do a better job this time around.

If you get bored, please come visit!

Kerry Crawford and I are trying our hand at a little ol’ fashioned blog aggregation for The CA over at The Memphis Blog. The blog is still under construction (the design and functionality is going to change within the next few weeks; right now it’s hard to distinguish between my and Kerry’s posts, there’s a jump link even when it’s not needed, the RSS feed is janky, and eventually we’re going to have a public blogroll as well as, hopefully, some other interesting features, etc. and so on) so there is some wonkiness to contend with, but as with everything else on this great wide web of the world, it’s a work in progress and we’re hammering out kinks left and right. Or at least we’re trying to.

Ideally, The Memphis Blog will be a place where we round up the most interesting Memphis-centric stuff on the web and serve it up for whoever wants to dine at the digital buffet of the Bluff City. Hahahaha, I can’t believe I wrote that. Well, I’M STICKING WITH IT! Anyway, we want to start conversations and get and keep the Greater Memphis community engaged. My Nashville friends, remember the community that formed around Nashville is Talking 1.0? I still get warm fuzzies when I think about that. I’m hoping we can continue to build something similar for the ol’ 901.

All input is welcome.

I see that the English-only bullshit in Nashville looks doomed. GOOD. Sheesh.

I’ve got so much to say about the things I have seen this week. So much.

But it will take some time for me to get my thoughts together. So I beg patience.

If that’s your bag, that is.

One of my fabulous birthday gifts this year was a mouse (a wireless Mighty Mouse to be precise), which means I can finally get back on a proper design horse rather than the rickety little pole-with-a-mop-on-top I’d been using as a horse since I got this laptop. I don’t know about y’all, but I can’t design for shit using a trackpad. I mean, it’ll do in a pinch, but I’m kind of a mouse girl. Is that unevolved? Meh.

I think I’ve promised several people I’d help them with their blog designs and now I can finally make good on that. Uh, eventually. When I get a spare moment. [Insert sheepish grin and comically shrugged shoulders here.]

So anyway, I’m still dinking with this template and I’m sure I will be until I get tired of it and pick a new one. Despite my admitted love of all things tacky and loud, I have toned down the colors quite a bit, in part because I’ll be resurrecting Project 365 in 2009 and I want the photos to pop against a subtle background. And also I want people to think I’m sophisticated for long enough to read until the first F-bomb.