Website, Blog, and MySpace Updates

My husband and I spent this weekend doing home improvements. Not the fix-the-plumbing kind of home improvements. That was last weekend.

Last weekend, a tree turned off our heat.

You wouldn't think this would be possible. But thanks to some twisted Rube Goldberg-esque chain of events, it is. You see, we have this lovely umbrella magnolia tree outside our kitchen. Its roots grew into some piping, which caused our sink to clog, which caused our dishwasher to overflow, which caused water to seep through the floor into the basement and directly onto our boiler, which caused the wiring to short-circuit, which caused our heat to shut off. Really. This actually happened. It sounds funny. It wasn't. (Okay, it was a little funny.)

We plunged. We snaked. We Drano-ed. We called a plumber. The plumber broke the pipe. We called a different plumber. The second plumber performed a sort of sewer colonoscopy in which he sent a tiny camera through the pipe, and then he bored through the tree root...

Anyway, this weekend, our home improvements were to my online home. And I am even more excited about them than I was about boring through tree roots (though, I admit, that did make a cool crunching sound -- updating my website did not, thankfully, involve a crunching sound).

Newsletter Sign-Up

See the new sign-up area over in the blog sidebar? (If you're reading this on LJ or elsewhere, you can click over here to see it.) It's also on the Contact page of my website. We were up until 3am figuring out how to set that doo-hickey up. (Okay, technically, we were up until 1am figuring out how to set it up, then until 2am watching American Idol -- we had to see the guy with the shiny cape and the white-feather hat -- and then until 3am because we both zonked out on the chair.) But armed with a combined 37 years of schooling (not counting kindergarten), a Netscape HTML instruction manual from 1997, and the power of the internets, we were victorious!

And now you can sign up to receive my newsletter!

Not that a newsletter exists yet. But once one does, you could be the proud recipient. That will be very exciting for you, for me, for your neighbor who will hear the songs of joy that you are inspired to sing... Okay, perhaps it won't inspire singing. But I still hope you'll consider signing up for my newsletter. If you don't, then I'm just going to keep signing myself up, and that will just be pathetic.

Happy Newsletter Recipient

Blog Sidebar and Header

Look up! Cover art in the header! And look to the right -- we added Out of the Wild! And cute little award buttons! Yay for cute little buttons!

MySpace

We also updated my MySpace page to include Out of the Wild. And we added a countdown to the Out of the Wild pub date -- June 19, 2008! There were three options for special effects on the countdown: glitter on the edges, glitter overlay, and glitter on the words. I said yes to all of them. I believe the end result is tasteful, understated, and non-obtrusive. After all, you can never have too much glitter.

You can never have too much glitter.

Website

New home page! And a new Excerpts page. And a page with links to all the Obscure Fairy Tales that I've babbled about (thus far) in this blog. I also added a link to Miss Erin and Traci's book trailer for Into the Wild (on the ITW book page), the blurbs for Out of the Wild (on the OOTW book page), and a bunch of other little tweaks.

What do you guys think? Am I missing anything? Are there any other features or info that I should add?

Is it a bad idea to have a tree with Swiss-cheese roots right next to my house?