The GirlAlive Blog

Rodent videos!

I got a Flip camera for myself for Christmas, cause I had earned enough on Cafepress to get one from them for free. So now I can share videos of my spastic rodents.

First, Fudge cuddling with my husband.

Spike and Elvis being annoyed with me.

Jayne with a head full of bedding, with short cameos by Dru and Fred (only a few days before she died.)

Fudgie Burrito!

And thanks to the switch from Moveable Type to WordPress, I can embed these things without problems now. Hooray!

Alana

Bad day just got worse…

It was a long day at work. Deadlines and panicking bosses and horrible work. Bathrooms shut down for construction. It was a long day.

At home I was relaxing and having some popcorn. Immediately the Syrian hamster, Jayne, woke up and started begging for popcorn. We gave her a couple pieces and put a piece in Dru’s cage and in Fred’s cage. An hour later or so, I noticed that Fred still hadn’t eaten her popcorn. I asked my husband to check on her, and she was dead. She was fine yesterday, and she appears to have died quietly in her sleep.

Fred had birth defects. She had a stumpy tail and her spine was a little twisted. Who knows what other defects she had that we couldn’t see. But she was sweet and friendly. She’d curl up in a ball in my elbow and fall asleep. She peed on me constantly, but I don’t think she ever bit anyone. I’m going to miss Fred.

Our previous Syrian hamster Binky died about a year ago. January is not a good month for hamsters.

New blog!

I’ve got the new blog software up and running, but the way it installed, everyone will have to update their bookmarks and links and stuff, cause it moved to a new URL. But other than that, everything is still here. And I also moved the old “writing” and “drawing” sections of the web site into the bowels of the blog archives. All the stuff pre-2006 is from those pages. The only reason they weren’t in the blog in the first place is because it’s stuff so old it pretty much pre-dates blogging.

I’m planning to have a few videos for y’all in a while. I got myself a Flip video camera (pretty much for free, actually) and I’ve been making short movies about mentally disturbed rodents.

Alana

CPSIA

If you have children or if you care about children or if you care about the environment or if you care about small businesses or if you care about charities like Goodwill and Salvation Army, you need to be writing to your congressperson and getting all up in arms about the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. It will destroy small businesses. It will force the destruction of all used toys and childrens clothes, and make it illegal to sell children’s items on Etsy or Ebay. It is designed to stop lead contamination in childrens’ products, but it is punishing the innocent in the process.

Go to http://www.handmadetoyalliance.org/ to read more, and then get angry. And you don’t have to be American to be angry about this. If you live in Europe or Canada or anywhere, it will be illegal to sell childrens’ goods to anyone in America.

Alana

Changes

There are a few things on girlalive.com that have been bothering me for a while. Things I’ve been meaning to change, but I haven’t had the time. Actually, I still don’t have the time, but here is a list of things I want to change sometime over the next year.

1. Move the blog from Moveable Type to WordPress. (A terrifying prospect, but I think it needs to be done.)
2. Move all the old content in the writing and drawing sections into the blog archives.
3. Move all the t-shirt designs over to zazzle.com because cafepress has been getting on my nerves.

Other things I’d like to do:

1. Start posting some videos on YouTube.
2. Open an Etsy store.

At the same time, in the next year I am, in theory, moving to a new house and possibly attempting a new career (which will involve building and designing a whole nother web site). So we’ll just see how much of these things actually get done.

Alana