Every little thing is gonna be all right

Some of you may have noticed several weird things going on with this website — some code errors here, things not working over there, that not-so-accidental picture of my dog in maternity underwear over in that corner — and there is a very solid reason as to why all of this is happening, and it’s not that I’m trying to screw with you. Although one paranoid and probably schizophrenic reader thought this was exactly what was going on, said that I had hacked into her computer and changed her desktop wallpaper to a picture of a decapitated moose. You have no idea how badly I wish I had that superpower.

Jon has been working tirelessly the last couple of months on a huge new portion of this website that is scheduled to launch at the beginning of next month, and this project includes upgrading the infrastructure in such a way that one or two things may have gotten wedged up the butt of a server. He is grateful for your patience, and I should probably tell you how cute he is when he is stressed out as much as he is these days, because in order to deal with things going haywire he grabs at his own hair, much like a three-year-old who is throwing a tantrum and doesn’t know any other way to demonstrate his frustration.

I used to call it Movable Type Hair back when that was the content management system we used to run this site. Now that we’re using Drupal I guess I could call it Drupal Hair, but that sounds like something contagious or deadly. These days I usually don’t call it anything, I just ask him if he’s looked in the mirror lately, and when he asks me why I say, oh, I don’t know, maybe because the animal sitting on top of his head looks like it may be dying, and should we intervene?

So we’ve got that exciting launch to look forward to, and in the meantime I’ve got a boatload of deadlines causing me to do what every writer does best: procrastinate! I really hope my book editor is not reading this (hi, Patrick!) because he’d be thinking, wait a minute, why is she working on that when she should be working on that other thing? First of all, PATRICK, shouldn’t YOU be working instead of READING THIS? THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.

There is no second of all now that I think about it.

Except maybe to say that the other reason I brought all this up is because I deliberately took a break on Saturday knowing what the next two weeks were going to be like, walked away from my computer and spent a few hours on the kitchen floor trying to beat my five-year-old at several different card games. While listening to Bob Marley. And Leta is just sitting there, her legs folded over one another, her wild hair hanging partially over her face, and she is totally kicking my ass.

And I remembered that one time many years ago when Jon and I got stoned on some very bad weed, and oops, I just forgot that my Dad reads this website. Dad, I promise that was the last time we ever did that sort of thing, and not just because that stuff makes me so paranoid that I sat there for two hours thinking the FBI was about to send helicopters and surround my apartment building with a heavily armed swat team.

Oh wait a minute. That trip to Amsterdam. But that was legal.

Anyway, I remember sitting there trying not to freak out, focusing every molecule in my body on the task of NOT FREAKING OUT, and I may have said something out loud about how I wanted our children to understand the magic of Bob Marley. And since Jon was totally relaxed and experiencing what normal people experience when using such substances, he started laughing uncontrollably, because how ridiculous is it that I would say that while smoking pot? Bob Marley? Really, Heather? I mean, that right there is the script of a play featuring a Mormon smoking weed for the first time and trying to make it seem like she has any idea what she is doing.

So Leta looks up at me through a few loose tendrils of her hair, draws a winning card from the pile, and says, “Mom, I love this music.” And I don’t know, it was just one of those moments when I was like, I cannot wait to tell the Internet about this.