Deborah Woehr

I have no idea. I’ve reached a point in my life where I have everything I need. My husband wants to replace my 14 year-old Mustang, which is finally beginning to show its age. But we can’t afford that right now, and since I’m not commuting, I don’t need a new car to get to work.

“So, what do you want for your birthday?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I respond.
“How about a microwave?”
I laugh.
“No, seriously. You’ve been the most vocal about getting a new one.”
“Okay.” The old one liked to cook the plates (and your unsuspecting hands) more than it liked to cook food.
“We can get a mattress or a refrigerator for my birthday,” he said.
Oh, joy, I thought. Aren’t we the picture of excitement.
I had plans to take the boys out shopping for clothes for our upcoming trip. At that moment, I decided to invite him along. “We’ll look for microwaves, and then we’ll have lunch.”

We bought the first microwave we looked at and fell in love with an Amana refrigerator that has a freezer on the bottom. That expense is slated for next month. Onto more exciting things.

We went to Chevy’s, which sits conveniently across the parking lot from Barnes&Noble. My family made a point to ignore it as we entered the restaurant. After we got seated, my youngest makes some comment about the bookstore (I think it was him.). I instantly piped up that I wanted to go.

My husband grins (picture the red-headed kid on Mad Magazine) and says, “Why don’t you take that hundred I gave you and go tomorrow on your real birthday?”

It was just as well because I over-ate and had to take a nap. My youngest doesn’t realize it yet, but I’m about to drag him to the big Barnes&Noble tomorrow while his older brother sits in summer school.

I know of one person offline and two online who have birthdays in July.

Deb Peterson - July 15
Fred Charles - July 18
Marti at Enter the Laughter July 29
Me - July 31
J.K. Rowling - July 31
Dean Cain - July 31

Any more July birthdays?

I woke up this morning and found a comment from Fred, alerting me that WBA no longer existed. Yesterday, I received a very angry email from a visitor, stating that he had spent 30 minutes trying to post a comment to a post and kept receiving a message that his site was invalid. Have any of you ever experienced this when trying to post a comment to that site?

At any rate, the Absolute Write nightmare flashed before my eyes. I thought he’d complained to my ISP and that they had shut WBA down without any notice to me. As it turns out, that wasn’t what happened. My domain had expired and now they have to renew and propagate it.

What a way to start the morning.

Update: It is up and running again.

I finally got past the sex scene last weekend. It turned out to be emotionally-based rather than a play-by-play, which worked better for me. I’m noticing that a lot of published writers are beginning to take this route, which I’m glad because I’m tired of reading bad sex in books.

I’ve been taking advantage of Ask.com a lot because of the time period of GLT (1918). For instance, I needed to know if there were private investigators during that era. I’m getting to know my main character a lot better the second time around. She’s still quite whacked, but this time I gave her some intelligence.

Today I Googled “love obsession” and and found a profile that fits her so well that it unnerved me a bit. Up until this point, I’d drawn from my experiences both directly and indirectly. Click on the link below, if you’re interested.

Love Addiction and Its Characteristics

This came in the mail yesterday from a publicist I work with on The Writers Buzz. Before now, I’d never heard of the popular blog, Anonymous Lawyer. Or maybe I did and blocked it out because I thought it was an actual law blog (or blawg). Whatever.

The synopsis caught my attention right away with its snarky tone. I haven’t gotten very far into it yet, but I’m enjoying what I’m reading right now. Amazon reviewers are calling it “laugh-out-loud funny.” I’m not quite at that part yet, but am looking forward to the ride.

Have any of your read this book yet? Or his blog?

I ordered this book in mid-May and just now received it. If you are new to WordPress or are thinking about migrating from Blogger to WordPress, get this book. It will help you learn the basics, from how to set up and customize your site to adding podcasts and webcams to your blog.

As an intermediate user, I have learned WordPress via trial and error and many hours trying to decipher their monstrous Codex. I liked how the authors explained The Loop and the file components of the Kubrick theme in layman’s terms.

The only thing it doesn’t teach you is how to build themes from scratch, which is what I was hoping to learn. Thankfully, there is a new book due out in October called Pro WordPress Development, which I’m hoping will be as good and user-friendly as this book.

Kevin at LexBlog Blog has a good debate going on right now about what turns readers away from your blog. He believes that formatting your links to pop up new windows will annoy readers and turn them away. While that issue may be valid with some, the majority of his commenters have stated ways that they work around this.

Having your links open to new windows in order to keep your readers isn’t a big issue as it once was, thanks to the tab feature in browsers like Firefox. In fact, I like having the links formatted this way so I can continue reading the blog that I landed on, once I’m finished reading the article that they referred me to. Oftentimes, I’ll shrink the new window so I can finish reading the blog entry first.

How about you? Are you annoyed when a link opens up a new window?

How do you guys like the new look of this blog? I’ve always liked the 3-column themes because I can organize them better. But if you liked the desert theme I had before better, let me know and I’ll switch it back.

I’ve decided to revert WBA back to its original theme for the time being. A link is broken somewhere and I can’t figure out which one it is.

I don’t know how the rest of you are making out, but we’ve been having record heat in the Bay Area. Yesterday and today saw 103-degree temperatures. I stepped into my garage at around 5pm to have a cigarette, and it felt like I was in an oven. So I opened the garage door to get some ventilation.

The air was stock still. Even weirder, I didn’t hear any noise. There were no birds chirping and no sounds of cars driving. It almost felt like I had stepped into the Twilight Zone.

Just now, I went out into my backyard. The birds are chirping, and I did hear some cars drive by. But everything is still hot to the touch, including the concrete. My pool is a very comfortable 80-degrees right now.

Are you experiencing record heatwaves?

How many of you saw last night’s episodes? On the chance that you haven’t seen them yet, I won’t post any spoilers. But I will say that these episodes were a big improvement over last week’s. I have to warn you that they are depressing.

For those of you who did see them, what did you think?