When you’ve got kids, it’s a given they’ll get sick once in a while. Violet has had quite a few ear infections, and though they make her kind of grumpy and we get a little concerned about the doctors’ willingness to just prescribe antibiotics again and again, they haven’t been all that bad. We feel very lucky that she’s had very few other illnesses over the past couple of years.
Tonight, though, we had one of those inevitable moments. Violet was clearly not feeling well all evening: fussing through the bath, refusing her precious children’s vitamins (they’re in gummy bear form!), and insisting on Mommy for her bedtime stories (usually that’s my beat on weekdays). I retired to the spare room to straighten up a little, and about ten minutes later heard Cheris calling my name. Kind of urgently.
When I emerged from the office, she stammered, “Um, get a towel, quick!” I grabbed a dishtowel from the kitchen and hustled over to the rocking chair where my eyes met one of those images that just burns itself right into your brain forever: my darling wife, hands cupped and full of freshly-expelled vomit, and my poor little daughter with puke all over her pajamas and her beloved Elmo doll.
So, here’s the deal: “greasy elbow” was originally supposed to be the name of a band I wanted to start. Around 1997.
Plans changed.
When we got back from Korea in late 2001 and put stakes down in Austin, I was still thinking of it as a possibility for a band name, so I registered the domain. The band that I wound up forming in 2002 voted on a different name, so I just went ahead and started setting up all of our Korea pages on the greasyelbow.com domain. Then I found myself more and more interested in web development, so soon the elbow had become a more full-fledged “personal site,” and then by summer of 2003 I went ahead and started a blog there as well.
Life has been a little too busy for regular blogging lately (hmmm, my last post was over two months ago, and even that was just circulating a goofy YouTube video), but it occurred to me that maybe I’d grown a little tired of the domain name and it was contributing to my waning interest in blogging.
That was the impetus to go ahead and register Lifford.org a few weeks ago, and a little bit of behind-the-scenes work since then has led to the relaunch that I’m communicating now. To sum up:
My own blog has moved to rob.lifford.org, and it’s sporting a brand new design (based on this photo). I’ve set up redirects from greasyelbow.com, so all old blog post links should flow over seamlessly to the new domain and design (thank you, mod_rewrite). If you have a link to me on your site, it should still work, but when you get around to it I’d appreciate it if you’d remove any printed references to “greasy elbow” and point to the new URL instead.
Cheris’ blog, “Hi, Idea,” now lives at cheris.lifford.org, and redirects from cheris.greasyelbow.com should be working fine as well.
The non-blog pages at greasyelbow.com have been redesigned (or, maybe better put, “undesigned”) into a very simple, streamlined home base for the family: that’s www.lifford.org.
I’m going to keep greasyelbow.com registered for a year or so, at least until Google has reindexed the blogs and the Korea content on the new domain, but if you know anyone who’d pay me tens of thousands of dollars for it, do let me know.
I’m not making any guarantees that I’ll blog more now that I have new online place to do it, but I also have a new physical place to do it… Tonight I moved my computers out of the home office the next kiddo’s bedroom and into the dining room, so I can listen to Simpsons and Scrubs reruns late in the evening while I peck away at the keyboard…
I just spent a little time on the terrific site NewsDesigner.com checking out the very interesting selection of of newspaper cover treatments of the Saddam Hussein execution (make sure you see both collections, mostly North American papers and international papers), and couldn’t help wondering about the executioner guys in their black ski masks. What’s the rest of your day like after getting up and hanging a guy at dawn? Are you pissed that you had to set your alarm and get up before dawn to, you know, go hang a guy? Do you bicker with the other ski-mask guys over who gets to tie the noose or pull the lever? What do you order for breakfast after work, and does it taste different?
This is the sort of treasure you find on YouTube now and again: awesome DIY projects by guys with boundless creativity (and seemingly limitless time on their hands).
I’m so grateful for YouTube and Google Video. We don’t have cable, and most of the stuff on network TV is crap, but a body still needs entertainin’ now and then. All you have to do is set up a few good linkblog subscriptions and you’ll wind up with more great stuff than you can find the time to watch. (Case in point: this was linked up weeks ago on Airbag, but I’m just catching up on a long-neglected feedreader.)
Oh, mercy, I wish I’d seen this video a long time ago. Just stumbled across it while reading Salon’s “Twenty-five years of “Weird Al” Yankovic” article from last month. It’s Al’s take on Mr. Bob — oh, and it’s done entirely in palindromes.