Simon is in a better place now. My 16-year old Maine Coon crossed over the Rainbow Bridge sometime early this morning. I had put him in the bed with me last night and had been checking on him through the night. His last little meal was late yesterday afternoon, a bit of chopped turkey and gravy. I had taken his collar off so it wouldn’t dangle down in his dish. Robert observed that might have been, to him, a sign. I am very upset and sad, but the ravages of age were getting to him, I couldn’t deny it. Sunny got on the bed last night, twice, and licked Simon’s head. He knows something’s wrong this morning, but I’m not sure he knows what. He just seems more restless this morning than usual.

I will miss my kitty! Here’s a link to his photo gallery.

Folks in Wharton, Texas, are up to their eyeballs in water. I’ve been in their shoes myself. Back in June 2001. Tropical Storm Allison. Floodwater is not bucolic, it is not nice. It stinks. And it devastates. Reminding me again that I do have quite a bit to be thankful for. But because I was busy cooking and playing on the computer yesterday I didn’t have time to put to word exactly what it is I’m thankful for.

1. Robert. He may not be walking, but he’s here, in my life. And for that I’m grateful.

2. My cats. Both of them. Especially my old guy, Simon, who may or may not make it to Christmas. He’s old and fragile, but not in pain. Right now, he’s curled up under the computer desk. Laying against my left foot. I can feel him purring. When I wiggle my toes against him, he chirps. He’s a sweetie and I will miss him when he’s gone.

3. My job. I grouse about it quite a bit, but I really do enjoy it. I have a great, very understanding boss. She’s demanding and she’s tough, but when it counts, she’s been there for me. You cant ask for more than that.

4. I’ve got cool geek toys and personal freedom to sit here and ponder about it all. Now THAT’s something you can’t put a price on!

Rori always finds the coolest stuff! Check the clock out on my sidebar too! Go, Rori!

Robert and I survived the holiday intact! A bit fatter, I’m sure, too! On our menu was roast pork, roasted fresh turkey breast, cranberry sauce, apple and onion stuffing, yeast rolls, green beens, mashed potatoes, apple pie and chess pie. All washed down with copius amounts of Diet Pepsi (him) and iced tea (me). Hope you all had a nice holiday, too!

I just found this guy. Nice smooth sax. One particular track I like is called S North. Check out the rest of my Smooth Jazz recommendations on my Music page!

This is for all you lazy peeps out there. RedAlt has created a WordPress 1.3 Theme Builder, similar to Firdamatic’s Design Tool for the Uninspired Weblogger! Found at ScriptyGoddess.

Jeff has devised a brilliant plan to thwart spammers from dropping comments. I’m all ears since I’ve got WP Blacklist running, but for whatever reason, NO COMMENTS (not even my own) are appearing on my blog right now. Which is better than a spam flood, I guess, but I really do want my cake and I want to eat it too! I’m going to implement this and see what happens.

No sooner did I have my blog back up and running with WordPress than I got hammered with another free-online-casino.com spammer. I deleted over 400 comment notifications from my email inbox this morning. I’m disgusted with this, and not sure what I’m going to do about it. Right now, I’m also having comment issues. You can click on a comment and leave one, but it never shows up. Why the SPAMMER’S COMMENTS ARE GETTING THROUGH remains a mystery. But no one else’s is.

Not that all that many people comment. Meanwhile, I’ve installed Kitten’s Comment Killer in an attempt to keep bandwidth resources down where they belong. They spiked this morning around 3 AM while the devil was doing his handiwork. If you really want to reach me, just send me an email at joni (at) jonimueller (dot) com.

Update: Well, that didn’t work. I get a database error now. (I think because my comment was intercepted and deleted right away.) Tell you what, I’m just going to delete comments and if you guys want to discuss anything on this blog you can just email me, howzat? I’m too tired and too busy to worry about this. It’s a shame the spammers have ruined it for everyone. Why can’t they use this knowledge and energy for something constructive? Bastages.

Update: I removed all plugins except Blacklist, Backup and Restore, CG Amazon, Text Replace, Textile (not using), Topic-Icon, WP-PDA, and Alex King’s Style Switcher. I tried deactivating Kitten’s Spam Killer because it was deleting my comments (due to my IP?!). Just deactivating it didn’t work. I had to delete it from my server. I’ll try to post another comment. This is very frustrating. (Not as frustrating as being locked out of your blog, tho.)

Sara over at Floopie.com wondered what her readers’ favorite Christmas music is. I have to recommend The Gift, featuring Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel. Check it out at Amazon.com.

What a mess! This site’s been down awhile since right after I upgraded from Wuh-Wuh to WP 1.2.1. After I did that, I installed some plugins and then got to work on a couple of new skins. After that, when I tried to login, it locked me out, insisting that the password field is empty! It most certainly wasn’t! The WP Support Forum had a few isolated instances of this, but everyone else’s problems occurred on a IIS server, not an Apache server. Hmm. And this only seems to be an issue with 1.2.1. My testbeds, which are running either Mingus (WP 1.2.0) or WP Alpha 1.3, are not having this problem. I got the bright idea to just copy the wp-login.php file from the Mingus zip set over the 1.2.1 version. Voila! I’m baaaack!!!