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It’s Sunday, and I’ve spent most of the weekend with my nose either stuck in a book or glued to a sappy movie on tv (ok, so Rambo isn’t exactly sappy, but hey.. lol).  Some days I just absolutely cringe at the thought of even looking at my computer, and it really beats the heck out of my why.  Well, to be honest, I know exactly why… too many long days (and nights) sitting in this chair trying to get things done.  Burnout - the # 1 enemy of the Work At Home Mom.

This week it’s not all burnout though.. stress and anxiety are playing a big part of my lack of concentration.  We’re waiting to hear whether or not we’re approved for a 2nd mortgage.  If we’re not, I’m not entirely sure just what I’m going to do.  I need dental work to the tune of $16,000 - yes, that is 3 zero’s behind that 16.  I feel like a hick.  I hate going out and having to talk to people face to face.  It’s downright embarassing to be honest.  My brother is about to go through a similar situtation too which has me seriously thinking that our soft teeth may be genetic to some degree.  That and the fact that our childhood dentist was an absolute butcher.

The other thing is that I had to go for an ultrasound (or sonogram for my US friends) on Wednesday and it will probably be next Friday before I hear the wonderful results.  Hopefully it will be fibroid tumors, but again… waiting absolutely sucks.

So yes, I’ve taken a good part of the day off, and what the heck - it is the weekend anyway :)  Now to get a good night sleep and I should be right back in business.  At least as back in business as I’m going to get with school being out for the summer and both my kids at home.  However, that all changes on Monday for 2 weeks anyway when my 5 year old son starts Day Camp.

For the entire school year my 12 y/o daughter has been babysitting twins before and occasionally after school.  This has meant that 2 to 3 days a week she’s had to be up at 5 am in order to be at work for 6 am.  She’s gotten very used to having her own money to spend, and it’s certainly cut down on the money I’ve had to fork out for “stuff” lol.  Now that summer is here though, Kels doesn’t have anything lined up as far as work goes, so on Thursday when I was visiting a friend at her store, I mentioned that Kels is looking for work.  Susan was kind enough to provide me with the name and phone number of a local lady that hires students to help her with her gardens.  So, I gave the lady a call, and within an hour had my daughter booked to help her for 3 hours.  That was supposed to be today, but with the weather we had today it’s been postponed until Tuesday.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been working on a new blog theme.  A good portion of the edits are done, but I’m still not 100% happy with it and will continue playing around with the CSS and templates to get exactly what I can envision in my head.   But for me, that’s the fun part.  I love the technical aspects of creating sites.  Please let me know if the site looks messed up in your browser.  I’ve fixed a few things in IE, and it displays ok.. not quite right as there should be 2 sidebars, but hey… not gonna complain lol.  Flock and Firefox display everything well though.

I hope you’ve had a super weekend!  I’ve got teenage girls descending on me tonight to spend the night in the trailer.   Should be interesting lol.

Do you have more than one website or blog that you’d like to cross promote? Or perhaps one of your colleagues has an absolutely fantastic blog, and you would like to put some of their content on your own site. There is now a truly fantastic (and easy) way to do just that - actually, there are a few ways, depending on what your blog is made of.

Feevy -

Tags: feevy, simple pie, rss feeds, wordpress, blog

Seeing the message “This Website Has Been Suspended” is definitely my worst nightmare come true, as I’m sure it is for every other website owner out there, but that is exactly what I faced when I arrived online Saturday morning.

Friday night at about 11:00 pm, I’d been working behind the scenes with another WordPress theme.  Unfortunately for me, it seems there may be a problem with the theme itself.   What occurred was a major server overload, and following that, a DDOS attack.  I’ve talked before about the dangers of 3rd party plugins, and blog themes are in this category too.

The server overload simply means that my site was using up way more than it’s share of server resources, making the server unreachable by anyone trying to access a website on it.  This can happen for several reasons (though it never should), including hacking, spam, scripts gone wild etc.

The DDOS attack is something entirely different.  DDOS is short for Distributed Denial Of Service and according to WikiPedia means that:

…is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

…One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consume its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

I’m still unclear as to whether or not Wahm Cafe was the intended target of the DDOS attack, but at any rate it was well over 24 hours before the server was back up and running, and still 2 days after that before Wahm Cafe was back online, giving me downtime of more than 56 hours which really sucks.

The good news is that I’m now back online, with a new theme - it still needs a bit of tweaking which I’ll be working on (ie:  the header image is too short), and I have to investigate the contact links in the right sidebar as they don’t seem to be working for me.  My computer has a few unresolved issues which sometimes interferes with javascript, so I’ll test that out from my laptop.

Have you ever had your website shut down?  I have enough experience with hosting that I didn’t panic about it.  I knew it was shut down for the safety of the rest of the server, but still… talk about annoying.  I’ll have to wait and see if there are any long term effects from being down for 3 days.

My very good friend and fellow Wahm, Patty Gale, has just launched a new website: Army Crossroads.

Army Crossroads is your connection to military families supporting our sons and daughters who serve our country.

Whether you’re a mom, dad, sister, aunt, uncle, brother or friend consider this your support line to stay connected to other families.

Patty is officially an Army Mom now, with one of her son’s being commissioned last week, and her other son being commissioned this Friday.

For me personally, I can’t relate to what many of my friends go through, being wives, moms, aunts, sisters or friends of those serving their country. Our forces here in Canada aren’t nearly as prevalent as in the US. In fact I only recently discovered that one young man from our town has been serving overseas (saw the yellow ribbons all over their property and a big welcome home sign). I am sure there are many more from this area, but we don’t hear about them too much.

It makes the War so much more real for me, and it touches me personally knowing how many of you are praying for the safety of loved ones, both at home and abroad. Patty has really stepped up to the plate with Army Crossroads, which will provide everyone a place to talk and find support.

Army Crossroads was created out of need to help parents and extended family members, especially those with no prior military exposure, by offering support, listening and posting prayer requests, posting brags and concerns, and just keep each other connected to lean on.

Congratulations Patty! I have no doubt that this site will fill a much needed void for military families everywhere.