Lizzie’s Home has returned to its Blogger roots!  You can find us here: www.lizzieshome.blogspot.com

Please be advised that my ‘dot com’ hosting plan has now expired and there is no guarantee that this blog, or even this post, will be visible for much longer.  I still own the domain name, but for the time being will not be hosting a blog at this address (the fact that I’m able to post this message at all is rather strange actually, LOL)

Ninety-five percent of the posts which have appeared here since March 2008 (and 100% prior to that) have been transferred to new address, so if you’ve arrived here looking for something in particular, you’re bound to find it at the above address :)

If you are still accessing lizzieshome.com and were suddenly cut off last week with no warning, rest assured this was a web host error and I apologize for any inconvenience.Please update your feed readers!  I miss you guys!

Nothing is working, nothing is where it should be, my feed is haywire and I’ve developed a bald patch but by gosh, I’m gonna do it.

This marks one of the last posts here on www.lizzieshome.com.  I really, really hope it makes it out to the feed readers because, um, I think I’ve fudged something behind the scenes…

From here on out, I’ll be posting more or less exclusively at www.lizzieshome.BLOGSPOT.com - those that have been reading this little o’ blog for more than a year will recognise it as my old URL.  It’s broken, tired, and in need of some serious TLC but the longer I leave it, the more stressed I get, so here it is.

The ‘dot com’ version will remain viable through till around the first week of March.  I’m jumping early because I wanted to leave a notice up here for as long as possible.  And now, here’s the begging part:

I love ALL my readers.  Every one of ‘em.  I would dearly, dearly love for you to subscribe to the new URL in your feed readers.  I know there is a way you can transfer feeds so that nobody needs to do any more subscribing but do you think I can figure it out? That would be a BIG FAT NOPE.  Mind you, if anyone feels the burning urge to help me, I am all ears.  Important: IN CASE I BREAK THE INTERNET, please keep this subscription as well (please, please, please!) until I can be certain everything is working as it should be.  If for some reason my feed isn’t working I need to get news out somehow.

Eventually, I will fix all the broken links, posts etc over at the new (old?) place.  Content is fine from Jan 1st onward (I’m missing a few posts done here in the last couple of days, but that’s easily rectified) and prior to April 2008.  May through December 2008 is completely missing - for now.  These will slowly be reposted.  It takes a looooong time to manually repost 200-somethin’ awesome snippets-o-Lizzie.  If I waited until they were all done before switching back, nothing would ever get done.

There will be a period of adjustment, both on my part and on the blog’s part.  There are further changes afoot (one massive blogging disaster at a time kind sir) but I’ll update everyone as they go ‘live’.  I’ve given up trying to aim for a specific date.  “Soonish” is about all I can offer you at this point but if you are still getting posts on a semi-daily basis you’ll at least hear what’s going on.

So that’s it.  I’m taping up boxes.  If you are one of the kind (delightful!) souls who have previously linked to a post of mine on the ‘dot com’ these will continue to work until the first week of March.  However, as I will be duplicating all the posts on the Blogger version, when that date gets closer you might want to do a little tweaky-poo to reflect the new links before the dot com goes kaput at the end of my hosting plan - but remember, I’m slowly adding May to December’s posts so don’t be too hasty.  I will post an update when the posting is finally re-done and a few reminders about the demise of the dot com when that gets nearer.

Show me some love folks.  Come back to Blogger with me or I think I may cry. 

Oh - and there might just be an incentive.  I may just be doing a Bloggy Giveaway on the new site in a couple of weeks :)

Smootches!

Now, the above-mentioned blog usually hits the nail on the head with the witty but mortifyingly funny posts.  Take this one for example.  Laughed till I cried.  Then went online to browse Victoria’s Secret from afar because hello? It is another American Thing we Aussies don’t have down here.

However, today’s post, God…You Are Such A Sly Guy! is only half the truth.  That ‘week of bliss’ of which she speaks?  Not one iota mentioned about the flip side to the coin!  The one or two days every month that you would willingly carve your own eyeballs out with a rusty spoon if it kept you from having to get up and, you know, actually do stuff.

My tum-tum hurts.  Sigh.

And! Everything in my house is WRONG, just WRONG and must be fixed immediately!  The spare room we have been ‘cleaning out’ for Boof for two years needs to be attacked today!  Right this instant!  And why is it not done already! And the laundry I’ve been cleverly stupidly ignoring since we returned from our trip almost two weeks ago needs to be obliterated!  And why isn’t the darn iron working! And God? What’s up with this heat?  AND WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS CRUMB DOING ON THE BENCHTOP!!!

(and trust me, if you knew me personally, you would realise how insanely opposite of my normal demeanour that last sentence is)

I’m not normally this crazy-obsessive, probably because I’m not usually one to suffer ‘that time of the month’ too badly.  Most of the time I barely pause.  Today though, I’m actually feeling just about lousy enough to say to heck with it all and sleep the rest of the afternoon away.  I can plead the ‘my uterus nutured YOUR babies’ card with Talented Hubby.  I’ve calculated I can use it approximately 1.4 times per year and I’m well overdue.  But I’m nice, so I won’t.

I’ve done two loads of laundry and about one-seventeenth of the room clean-out.  I’ll make sandwiches in a moment for The Horde.  And later on today I may even get domestic enough to make a menu.

Maybe.

• This morning we finally secured a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy.  Woot!  But we have to fly it from interstate which left us a bit apprehensive.  We made round after round of phone calls, spoke to references, and were reassured.  Apparently flying puppies happens quite often - who’d have thought?  Pup due to arrive at the end of the month.  Kids are suitably thrilled.  Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong.
• After MUCH thought, I’ve decided to return to Blogger.  Originally the idea was to simply shift over when my hosting plan ends at the end of February.  And then in my research I discovered um, no, the longer I leave it, the more comments I’ll lose in the transfer.  Losing all the comments over the past year is maddening but it would be worse to lose the posts themselves, so I’m grinning and bearing it.  Apparently there’s a program out there that will do a ‘reverse transfer’ from Wordpress to Blogger but I am too technophobic to work it out, so I’ve resorted to manual transfer.  Yes folks.  I am copy/pasting EVERY POST since March of last year.  It works, but it’s SLOW going.
• I am clone-posting here and at the new site.  At some point in the next week I will officially anounce the move.  Until then, carry on as normal.  But the sooner I restart over at the new/old digs, the better, as the comments thereafter will stay put.

More updates soon…

WARNING: Your backup directory does NOT exist, and we cannot create it.

Using your FTP client, try to create the backup directory yourself: /home/lizziesh/public_html/wp-content/backup-8e518/

WARNING: Your backup directory is NOT writable!

I have absolutely no idea how to create my own backup directory.  Halp!

The reason for the backup is kind of paramount.  It is looking increasingly likely that Lizzie’s Home will be moving back to Blogger (and therefore will change to www.lizzieshome.blogspot.com as it was originally) when my hosting arrangement expires toward the end of February.  But before I make that final decision, I am trying all possible avenues to export FROM Wordpress TO Blogger (there’s millions of articles out there on how to export Blogger TO Wordpress, but almost nothing in reverse)  I have, however, stumbled across a program which will (in theory) let me at least attempt it, but before I try it, I want to back things up in case my world (ie, the blog) collapses around me.  I just don’t feel comfortable laying 513 posts on the line if this ‘might work, might not’ program chooses not to work.  The only alternative I have is to manually copy/paste the last 12 months of posts (approx 200) and I want to do that about as badly as I want to stab myself in the eye with a rusty fork.  Which I will gladly do as collateral if someone….anyone!…could help me!

So if you have ANY tech-y expertise, I implore you to put your hand up.  Or rope your bloggy husbands into the mix.  I will sing your praises forever.

Because I cannot TELL you how stressed this has made me…

As predicted, the boys started to go cross-eyed about three-quarters of the way in but my very ‘girly-girl’ Miss Moo stared wide-eyed at the screen the entire time.  I do believe we have a convert, folks!

And then - good grief - we had to sit through the DVD’s special features, including the dance moves.  That’s when J jumped back into the fray.  Boof, turned off by the obvious romantic interest between the two main stars, and who had began rolling his eyes since about sixteen minutes in, declined to join in the impromtu show.

For that I am grateful because, um - Master J cannot dance and two children attempting to do so would have just multiplied the horror, LOL.

It’s a fun kind of movie but THOSE SONGS ARE STUCK IN MY HEAD.  I am hoping some of you seasoned HSMers will have tips on how to get rid of the endless loop of “Bop To The Top” now playing inside my brain.  At eleven. 

Disney, you slay me with your saccharin-sweetness.  Sigh.

Frustrated, I finally went in search of my Panasonic Lumix TZ11 (TZ4 outside of Australia) manual.  Because everybody knows you can’t officially read the manual until after you’ve tried everything else, right?  And then, right at the bottom of the box, I spy a disc.  It’s a software bundle.  It includes a media whatsit designed to help you create slideshows with music.  I am bored so I install it, then play around a little.

Wouldn’t you know it, the program is simple enough for even me to understand AND it compresses the files to around ten percent of their original size! Woot.  I therefore give you my first home video attempt:

She can’t be seven already.  She must be three still.  No, really.  Sigh.

Um.  This morning it hit 169.  And that was after I’d unsubbed from five.

Okay, so I have a problem.  It stems from the fact that I love the entire realm of Bloggityville and there is SO MUCH GOOD STUFF out there.  But I am determined.  I will get down to 100.

I will! Stop laughing!

We missed seeing my Dad over Christmas and New Year’s and just found out he is arriving this afternoon.

THIS AFTERNOON.

At least my dishes are done for a change.  Sigh.

For those not familiar with the Aussie school year, we (generally) break for summer around mid-December (sometimes later in states other than my own, I hear) and return for a new school year in the last week of January, a vacation of (roughly) 6 weeks.  The school year is divided into four terms, each about equal (slight deviations depending on things like when Easter falls) at 10 weeks.  At the end of each term, we have 2 weeks of holiday before returning for the next term and then the school year ends in December, as mentioned.

So we’re pretty much smack in the middle of Crazy Town right about now.

I love, love, love the fact that I do not have to worry about such mundane Mummy chores as making school lunches or making sure uniforms are clean.  I love hanging out with the kiddos.  And I especially love the fact my alarm clock doesn’t go off at dawn o’clock (this night owl don’t get much sleep during the school week, you see).

But GOOD GOLLY I am exhausted!

Vacations are funny things.  You have to time them right.  Too short and you might as well not bother.  Too long, and you wind up feeling more tired when you return, instead of the ‘relaxed like jelly’ deal you were hoping for.  Our recent trip away over Christmas was a bit like this.  I loved doing the trip, I really did.  But there came a point - I believe it was sometime on Day 10, driving along the highway between the second and third sets of relatives - where I was just OVER IT ALREADY.

And it was hot.  And I was stinky.  Yeah, I’ll own it!  If I was home, I could shower all day long if I needed it and then loll about under the aircon.  You can’t do that when trying to corral 4 adults and 6 children aged between 4 and 10 into whatever activity is planned that day, and the fact that it was in the low thirties most of the time (that’s around 90ºF for you northern hemispherans) did not help.  (I still maintain that I was born on the wrong continent.  I’m still planning to move to Canada, LOL)  I hate being sweaty.  And um?  Six children, three of whom were, uh, less used to rules than our kids are?  It made for a SUPER peaceful end to our break away.

Coming home was bliss.  I will say this though - Talented Hubby has one of the silliest car rules imaginable (made tolerable only because he didn’t throw on his music and allowed me to hook my iPod up instead - although his caveat was, nothing from the ‘Romantic’ playlist, sheesh!).  I, as front seat passenger, am not allowed to sleep in the car.  My job is therefore to be his ’talking companion’ so he doesn’t get too tired on long car trips.  Have you ever tried to exist for twelve straight nights in a sleeping arrangement where everyone is at arms length from everyone else?  There wasn’t a lot of sleep going on.  To then get in a car, where everyone kind of pipes down, the kids tend to fall asleep anyway, the road undulates in the heat and your eyes get lower…and lower…and lower until suddenly you’re fightin’ the Sandman and deciding you don’t care because at this point, sleep - even the sort where you’re sitting upright in a bouncing seat, using the seatbelt strap as a pillow - feels like a little piece of Heaven and –

POKE!!!

We made frequent highway petrol station stops for caffeine-based beverages and chocolate bars, my friends.

I am supremely grateful we made it home in one piece (there were several holiday deaths over the two states we travelled in) but I would be lying if I said I missed being away from home.  Home is WONDERFUL.  I shall never complain about home again!

We’ve done not much of anything since returning home on Saturday night.  Today was the first day we planned an actual ‘activity’.  We saw Bolt at the cinema - which the kids loved and will be, no doubt, pooling their pocket money to buy on DVD in a few months - using a free double movie pass for the adults and paying for the kids’ tickets (still not cheap, around $11 each - how I long for these ’second run/dollar ticket’ cinemas I keep hearing about in the States!)  We then stopped off at Blockbuster on the way home.  We grabbed Beethoven’s 2nd, Beethoven’s 3rd (how can you resist a blue eyed little girl’s pleas?) The Princess Bride (which, amazingly, I have never seen), High School Musical (we are so late on this fad…but Master J was gifted HSM 2 for Christmas and we’ve been holding off watching it until we got through the first one) and Willow.

We watched Willow this afternoon.  It must have been fifteen years since I last saw it, and yet I remembered it nearly word for word - it was one of my favourites as a kid, repeatedly watched on an old VHS we taped off the TV one time.  I remember being so petrified of those weird warthog creatures and when Moo jumped out of her skin when they were on screen I secretly congratulated myself on exposing her to yet another of my best childhood memories, LOL.  Hey, Talented Hubby gets to play-wrestle and do the whole Lego/Star Wars/Flight of the Navigator deal with the boys.  I get the Jane Austen period dramas, Anne of Green Gables and Care Bears!

Hopefully, if I can get my butt into gear after all this Post Holiday Meh, there’ll be something cool happening tomorrow - so stay tuned!