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Weep Not For Me

If you’re here, it’s because you tried to go to twas-brillig.com and you were automatically redirected here, to this temporary site–like the rental car the insurance company gives you when you’ve totaled your other one. 

My crazy blog issues seem to be widespread, from the server to the host to the installation of wordpress.  So, in the meantime, this site doesn’t look like much, but at least it contains all my content (and my comments!!!)–this is just a temporary site, though, so don’t worry.  I won’t be begging you to change your links again or anything.  Twas-Brillig.com should be up and running again very soon.

Thank you to everyone who has offered me help and support the last few days.  What an interesting experience this has been!

In the meantime, my brain is full of all sorts of blogposts, but they will remain safely locked away in my ever-shrinking brain for now.

BROKEN

Hi, all. We here at Twas Brillig are… broken. You can’t view (or leave) comments. And I just wrote a post (one full of lots of complicated HTML, no less) about how amazing Elizabeth is and it was very heartfelt and grateful, as I was telling about this wonderful good samaritan and how she’s spent HOURS helping me with my site today.

And then, my post was eaten. Lost in cyberlandia, never to be recovered. Hi. Isn’t this why I left Blogger?

And then, in tweaking around trying to fix things, like the ridiculous amateur that I am, I did something that broke. my. site. BROKEN. I have NO idea what.

Anyway, I’m on vacation tomorrow. I’m taking my oldest kids to Lagoon!!!! Yay!!! I’m one of those people who’s insanely in love with amusement parks. My husband is not. Which is why he will be staying home with the littlest two boys while my sister and I take my oldest kids. This is the first time that Fluffy and Bubba will actually be old enough (tall enough) to go on the rides!

Point is, my site is broken, and it will remain so for a couple more days. The timing of this couldn’t be worse, as I’ve been working on some pretty exciting projects. But, what can you do? Maybe on Wednesday I can come back and fix it. Or, more likely, I will start from scratch. Oh well. I didn’t really say anything here in the last month that’s not replaceable, right?

Oh, and you can’t comment, but you CAN email me. Here are some examples of what you can say in your email:

*tell me how much you miss me and how a blog-life without Brillig isn’t worth living and all that stuff

*tell me that you’ve copied every last one of my posts to your hard drive so you can just email them to me and they won’t be eternally lost

*tell me that black hair/green eyes is your all-time favorite combination

*tell me that you’re a famous blog-reviewer and even though my site is broken, you think that I’m the best thing on the internet

*send me pics of your facial expression when you realized that my site was broken

Or whatever. You know. These are just IDEAS. Be creative.

There’s some serious linky-love in store for the people who make me smile. That is, if I ever un-break my site.

(I’ll leave you now, before I break into a fit of “Frickin’ Brackin’)

FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’!!!!!!

That’s what my brother screams when he’s pretending to be mad.

And you may have noticed that I’m not much of a cusser (have you noticed? I notice when people ARE, but I don’t always notice when they aren’t. Anyway…) so tonight, I’m adopting Frickin’ Brackin’. But I’m not pretending to be mad. Oh no, there’s no pretending to be mad.

Mad I am.

Well, frustrated anyway. I can’t get my blog to do certain things. No, I’m not talking about world domination–I recognize that that won’t come until a bit later. Next month maybe. Right now I’m just trying to use basic widgets. You know, like Blogrolling stuff. There are various groups of which I would like to be a member and they use blogrolling widgets which, in order to join, you have to use their widgets, but I can’t. get. them. to. work. (Brace yourselves, here comes another one.)

FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’!!!!!!!!!!!!

But it’s not just blogrolling. Oh no. I can’t even get MyBlogLog widgets to work. I CAN’T EVEN GET GOOGLE ANALYTICS to work. It all gives me the same frickin’ brackin’ ERROR CODE!!! (Error 404) I would blame it on WordPress, but since I seem to be the only person on the wordpress planet having these issues (since I can’t find any info on others struggling with this stuff in any support forums or anything–plus, there are tons of wordpress blogs out there that I see successfully using this stuff) I AM APPARENTLY THE ONLY FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’ BLOGGER WITH THIS FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’ PROBLEM!!!

And I’m frickin’ brackin’ frustrated.

(But at least my blog’s still rated PG. )

So, um, should you happen to be fluent in this error code of death or any of the rest of this fun stuff, I beg you to help me. Please. From the bottom of my bloggy heart.

I think this is my Soap Opera Sunday. I know. It’s disappointing. No former boyfriends or boy-toys or anything. Do you see why I need urgent help? Who knew I could feel so much drama from javascript, php, and HTML. Sigh.

(But, you know, speaking of Soap Opera Sunday, we have big news coming up this week! Woohoo! Stay tuned!!!)

Sister Brillig

Flashback Friday, friends!

I’ve mentioned before that I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I was 19 (yes, that’s not a typo. I was 19). I was assigned to the Argentina Buenos Aires North mission, which included much of Capital Federal (downtown Buenos Aires) along with some of the northern suburbs and even into some rural area (what we called the barro–the mud). Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, I was assigned a companion (another female missionary, and in this mission most were American, Argentine, or Chilean) and an area. We would stay with one companion, who we were required to be with constantly, until one of us was reassigned to a different area, at which time a new companion would arrive to take the place of the departing one. So, after a year and a half, I had traveled all over the mission and had had many companions (usually about two months with each companion).

I loved my mission. I had so many wonderful experiences. But due to the nature of this forum, I will not share the more tender or spiritual ones. But just because I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of that.

No, instead I’ll share some of my social adventures. Or, in today’s case, adventures in socialism.

I was assigned to the barro with my sweet companion Hermana F. And yes, you always called your companion by Hermana (sister) and her last name. So, Hermana F and I worked in the barro. We met lots of people, taught people, served people. The barro was always interesting–it was called the “mud” because you were literally walking in mud that was several inches deep all day long. No paved roads, no sidewalks, nothin’ but mud. And since we were required to wear skirts or dresses at all times, you can only imagine how lovely we were!

Hermana Brillig, in authentic “sister missionary” garb (meaning, the ugliest dresses at the ugliest possible length, my crooked name tag–whoops– and big black bag* full of scriptures, food, water, and anything else I might need during the day because we didn’t want to waste time by going home during the day–not even for lunch) in the barro on a blessedly dry day (otherwise, there would be giant rubber boots on my feet… which went GREAT with my ugly dresses and skirts)

(and… hi. Is that the crappiest scanned picture you’ve ever seen? oooops)

*in other missions, they use backpacks instead of the black bags, but in Argentina we were required to carry the black bag and only carry it on one shoulder–that way, when we were robbed, which we were constantly, we could hand over the bag without a struggle. Many a missionary had been shot or beat to a pulp in the past because they hadn’t handed over their backpacks fast enough, so they had to make a rule about the easy-to-give-away black bags. But that’s a different story for another day. Still, though, how disappointed do you think the thieves are when they find that the bags are full of Books of Mormon?

(Here I am with Hermana F, wishing some friends a Happy Birthday via photo)

Hermana F was from Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost part of Argentina (practically Antarctica) and she was… delicate. I loved her dearly. However, the kind of work that we did was exhausting and grueling and you had to be strong to do it every day all day long. But she wasn’t. She was sickly. And so we spent a lot of time getting to know the Rural-Argentine health care system.

We’d been in and out of various (terrifying) free clinics, never once really helped, but often “reassured.”

“Oh, you have a fever, a cold, the chills, vomiting, racing pulse, and seizures? Here’s some penicillin. Just take two tonight and you’ll be fine by tomorrow. And then just save the rest of the package for the next time you feel sick.” Um….

Very late one night, she just stopped breathing. Understand, there were no telephones in this part of the Argentina. Basically I just had to grab her and haul her to the Emergency Room which was, thankfully, about a block away. At the ER, they took her in immediately and left me out in the waiting area, which was outside in the freezing cold. Again, I’d been a missionary for over a year at this point and I’d never been by myself, except while bathing and potty-ing, so it felt very strange to be companionless in this large waiting area full of people. (With socialized medicine, everyone ends up at the ER for the slightest twinge of a sore throat, doncha know. Waiting “rooms” are always packed.) It wasn’t just the being alone that was awkward–it was the staring and the gawking and the exclamations–exclamations that the exclaimers assumed I wouldn’t understand, since my looks were clearly foreign. I was, of course, completely fluent in Spanish so I understood every word that was being said. And I was feeling a bit threatened. Being female, American (and therefore presumably “rich”), and green-eyed in a place where people have only seen brown eyes makes one a target in certain parts of the world–especially in the middle of the night and all alone. Of course, it wasn’t really my style to be a shrinking violet, so I march up to some hospital personnel and said, loud and clear and in perfect Spanish (so that all those who’d been talking about me could hear that they’d just made complete fools of themselves) that I would like to be able to be with Hermana F now. Obviously I’d asked this before, but had been told that I couldn’t be back there with her. This time, it wasn’t really a request so much as a command, and I was taken right to her.

I was brought into a teeny tiny room, where I found her (conscious, thank goodness) hooked up to an oxygen tank. Again, no one had any idea what was wrong with her–nor did they seem to care very much–but she was receiving oxygen and thriving on it–well, surviving, anyway. Because of the oxygen mask, she wasn’t able to talk to me. Instead, we played “count the cockroaches.” She would point to the cockroaches, I would count them out loud for us. We reached over forty before she was discharged.

Good times.

Hermana F. ended her mission early–I think it broke her heart, but she clearly wasn’t physically able to keep up and she knew it. So she went home to Tierra del Fuego and I haven’t heard from her since. I hope some doctor somewhere figured out what was wrong with her and how to help her…. but I doubt it.

Oh, so many fun mission stories. We’ll have to revisit this topic again sometime. I mean, I KNOW you want to hear about how I bathed out of a bucket for two months because we didn’t have running water. Or that time that someone brought me a drink of water that turned out to be white vinegar. Or… well, let’s save it for another Flashback Friday, shall we?

Meet the Fuzzles

All right, Gentle Readers, we’ve all had a great time discussing double standards and over/under generalizing and sometimes agreeing, but mostly disagreeing. It’s been a raging party here at Twas Brillig. Thanks for all of your comments. While there were some vehement disagreements, I think in the end we all still like each other. At least, I still like all of you!

So, good crap. Let’s not talk about it anymore. (Okay, if you must, you’re welcome to continue the conversation below… I just mean that I won’t be POSTING about it anymore.)

Moving on…

I’m the youngest child in my family. I have three older sisters and two older brothers. My siblings are good people and I admire them all. (Though, of course, only ONE of them actually has the link to this blog. The others are blissfully unaware of its existence!)

Being the youngest had its perks. I got to travel a lot more than some of my siblings did, and by the time I was a teenager my parents had real money, instead of doing that “barely scraping by” thing that they’d done with my siblings. My parents began spoiling themselves, and I suppose I was “spoiled” (according to my siblings) somewhere along the way.

Of course, it also had its downfalls. My oldest siblings were each given cars as teenagers. Thanks to their total recklessness and irresponsibility, I wasn’t even allowed to touch the family cars. Plus, all those years of being alone with good ol’ mom and dad after my siblings had left home were… tricky. What my siblings call “spoiled” I would call something more like demanded, scrutinized, attacked, and constantly berated for not being quite perfect enough… There was no one to distract them from the magnifying glass they had centered right above me–and it was frying me alive.

The other big downfall of being the youngest, of course, is that by the time you come along, your parents are bored with taking pictures. You can kind of understand this. I mean, I was the fourth daughter, sixth child. They’d wasted all their film on my oldest siblings. When I came along, I was nothing new. So while there are hundreds, nay, THOUSANDS of pictures of my sister Laura, I can’t seem to find any of me.

Too bad, cuz I bet I was one gorgeous baby. I weep for a world that doesn’t have pictures of me readily available.

So, how can I make it up to the universe? Well, I can start by not repeating the sins of the fathers. And so, I present to you MY youngest–who from this day forward, I solemnly vow to feature prominently in photographs!

Here he is–my 10-month-old Fuzzles, helping me with the dishes last night. SUCH a helper…

He looks a lot more like his dad than like me–they all do. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any of me in any of them. (And yet, I distinctly remember squeezing them forth from my loins.) I’m okay with that, though. I mean, their dad’s hot, so how lucky for the kids that they all look like him!

Other memorable photos of Fuzzles include this one, where he was having his chest x-rayed when he was hospitalized for RSV. Have you ever seen how they do x-rays on teeny babies? They shoved him into a little tiny plastic tube and strapped his arms straight up. Let’s just say that he wasn’t thrilled with this arrangement. Brace yourselves…

 

He had a pretty nasty case of RSV and was in the hospital for a week. Here he is towards the end of his stay (clearly the end, because he’s no longer attached to IV’s and oxygen tanks and monitors–I have pictures of that stuff too, but it’s still a bit too horrifying to me) in his hospital gown. I still can’t get over his little baby hospital gown!

 

Obviously we can’t forget his first Halloween, right? He wasn’t quite 2 months old at this point.

And, okay. Just one more. Here he is when I was setting him up to be the new monarch of the family (as explained here). He’d really make a lovely monarch, don’t you think?

 

And there he is, Gentle Readers. The most gorgeous baby that ever crawled the planet. And I can say that because, naturally, I’m completely unbiased.

Now, of course, I won’t be ignoring the other kids. But I can’t feature them all today–I mean, the brain can only process so much gorgeousness before it becomes overwhelmed and begins causing twitching and seizures.

Really, I’m only looking out for your well-being, Gentle Readers.