This happens more often than I care to admit. We have a french press because my husband likes to have these little morning rituals like grinding his coffee beans and boiling the water and plunging the plunger and sitting down to one perfect cup of coffee. Me, I just want caffeine so some mornings — like today — I just drink the cold coffee he left in the press instead of going through the bother of making more. Some mornings I’m just that desperate. If I really cared I’d make up a new batch or go drag our old, convenient coffee maker out of the basement but I think of cold coffee as a gift horse — why look it in the mouth? It’ll get me moving even if it tastes like old socks. I’m not picky. Put enough cream and sugar in there and you can’t even tell it’s been sitting on the counter for a couple of hours. I’m just wishing he left enough for two cups so I wouldn’t have to decide whether I should stay groggy or go through the bother of brewing more.

WordPress 2.7 is about to come out and I’m trying to decide whether or not to approach my clients and offer upgrades. It’s a huge change and for some of my clients, it may not be worth it. It might break their themes and likely some of their plugins and the interface is so different that it might also send them on a whole new learning curve. My typical client doesn’t love the backend of technology, which is why they hire me to make it easy-peasy for them. I think some of ‘em ought to just stay put if they like how their site is functioning. I need to look into how to turn off the pink “hurry up and upgrade!” warning bar that shows up in WordPress so that I could offer that as a service, too. I mean if you know you’re going to stick with 2.6, you don’t need to get hollered at every single time you login to your site.

I’m thinking I need to give it more time and test it out on some of my false installs to make sure that the common plugins I use work and also test out some of my clients’ themes. That way I’ll know ahead of time if the upgrade would make sense for them.

I’m even hesitant to upgrade here just yet because I’ve had trouble making giant upgrade leaps what with my blog being so big. I need to have enough time to back everything up four hundred different ways and time is precious right now. And when I type right now, I mean right NOW because Madison is calling with some small disaster (I think she’s got her shirt all twisted so she can’t get it on right — it’s driving her insane).

No surprise there — we knew she wasn’t ready to be whatever comes next (tadpole?) but Noah, who was jealous of the end-of-class Gushers given by the teacher, was trying to make her think she flunked. This from the formerly unschooled kid. See, I told you that virtual school was ruining him!

Speaking of ruining him — or rather his LIFE — we decided to give up cable FINALLY. I’ve felt guilty the whole time we had it but I’d be lying to say I’m not going to miss it. But so much of what we watch is available on the computer and we just figured out how to hook Brett’s laptop up to the television. Besides which we’re all watching too much anyway. When we broke it to Noah he began to gnash his teeth and tear his hair, poor dear. Life is hard in the big city.

Today I’m going to work on theming our new biz site after I get my regular work done. Hoping to debut it soon but we’re taking it slow and this time I’m walking Brett through some of the things so he won’t feel so left out and frustrated. We’re talking about what other aspects of the biz he’d like to take on besides the paperwork. Working with him is a challenge, frankly, because our communication styles are pretty different. Like he’s detail oriented and I’m “get-the-big-idea-and-move-on” oriented. And he’s a worrier and I don’t like to focus on worries because they sometimes catch me with their evil little purple claws and keep me stagnant. (Caution is one thing — chronic worry is another.) Plus I’m generally more optimistic, which would surprise everyone who knew me when I was a gloomy teen but there you go. Sometimes people change.

Oh and changing the subject entirely — since upgrading to Firefox 3, I’ve lost all my scroll bars. Very frustrating. I can still scroll but I can’t see the scroll bar. Firefox 3, to me, is like Wordpress 2.5 — perhaps released too soon seeing as how bug-filled it is. (I hear the beta of Wordpress 2.6 is out. I’m salivating for it because I haven’t learned my lesson about wordpress upgrades yet.)

I upgraded wordpress from 2.3.2 to 2.3.3 because there are security holes in 2.3.2 and also because wordpress reminds you to upgrade and I got sick of looking at the upgrade reminder. And somehow this upgrade, which changed out three or four tiny files, wiped out my database. So I lost most of January and what I had of February so far.

Ok, so I have a backup of my database and I went to restore it but for some reason it wouldn’t take. (That’s why my theme looks funky and my sidebars are empty.) I have no idea why and the wordpress geeks have no idea why. These are the kinds of things that shouldn’t happen. Because I have about 50 megs of entries on here it took a long, long time to strip the exported file down to something manageable to import. (About two hours to be exact. And this was after I did some handy-dandy footwork to get the content, which would take too long to explain but of which I am very proud because I had to get quite creative to figure out a work-around.) Then because I hadn’t backed up since 1/7, I had to go and swipe my other content from livejournal even though there was at least a week the crossposter wouldn’t work that I’m missing and I was too tired to strip out the “this post originally appeared on” header. I also lost all of your lovely comments.

But at least most of it is here.

And now I’ll back my database up once a month. (Wordpress has a plugin to do this but my site is so big that it sometimes times out. I messed with a setting and hopefully it’ll work now.)

I swear — I’m having the worst blog luck so far this year. I think my horoscope said something about that…