Twas Brillig

If you’re here, it’s because you tried to go to twas-brillig.com and you were automatically redirected here, to this temporary site–like the rental car the insurance company gives you when you’ve totaled your other one. 
My crazy blog issues seem to be widespread, from the server to the host to the installation of wordpress.  So, in the meantime, this site doesn’t look like much, but at least it contains all my content (and my comments!!!)–this is just a temporary site, though, so don’t worry.  I won’t be begging you to change your links again or anything.  Twas-Brillig.com should be up and running again very soon.

Thank you to everyone who has offered me help and support the last few days.  What an interesting experience this has been!

In the meantime, my brain is full of all sorts of blogposts, but they will remain safely locked away in my ever-shrinking brain for now.

Hi, all. We here at Twas Brillig are… broken. You can’t view (or leave) comments. And I just wrote a post (one full of lots of complicated HTML, no less) about how amazing Elizabeth is and it was very heartfelt and grateful, as I was telling about this wonderful good samaritan and how she’s spent HOURS helping me with my site today.

And then, my post was eaten. Lost in cyberlandia, never to be recovered. Hi. Isn’t this why I left Blogger?

And then, in tweaking around trying to fix things, like the ridiculous amateur that I am, I did something that broke. my. site. BROKEN. I have NO idea what.

Anyway, I’m on vacation tomorrow. I’m taking my oldest kids to Lagoon!!!! Yay!!! I’m one of those people who’s insanely in love with amusement parks. My husband is not. Which is why he will be staying home with the littlest two boys while my sister and I take my oldest kids. This is the first time that Fluffy and Bubba will actually be old enough (tall enough) to go on the rides!

Point is, my site is broken, and it will remain so for a couple more days. The timing of this couldn’t be worse, as I’ve been working on some pretty exciting projects. But, what can you do? Maybe on Wednesday I can come back and fix it. Or, more likely, I will start from scratch. Oh well. I didn’t really say anything here in the last month that’s not replaceable, right?

Oh, and you can’t comment, but you CAN email me. Here are some examples of what you can say in your email:

*tell me how much you miss me and how a blog-life without Brillig isn’t worth living and all that stuff

*tell me that you’ve copied every last one of my posts to your hard drive so you can just email them to me and they won’t be eternally lost

*tell me that black hair/green eyes is your all-time favorite combination

*tell me that you’re a famous blog-reviewer and even though my site is broken, you think that I’m the best thing on the internet

*send me pics of your facial expression when you realized that my site was broken

Or whatever. You know. These are just IDEAS. Be creative.

There’s some serious linky-love in store for the people who make me smile. That is, if I ever un-break my site.

(I’ll leave you now, before I break into a fit of “Frickin’ Brackin’)

That’s what my brother screams when he’s pretending to be mad.

And you may have noticed that I’m not much of a cusser (have you noticed? I notice when people ARE, but I don’t always notice when they aren’t. Anyway…) so tonight, I’m adopting Frickin’ Brackin’. But I’m not pretending to be mad. Oh no, there’s no pretending to be mad.

Mad I am.

Well, frustrated anyway. I can’t get my blog to do certain things. No, I’m not talking about world domination–I recognize that that won’t come until a bit later. Next month maybe. Right now I’m just trying to use basic widgets. You know, like Blogrolling stuff. There are various groups of which I would like to be a member and they use blogrolling widgets which, in order to join, you have to use their widgets, but I can’t. get. them. to. work. (Brace yourselves, here comes another one.)

FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’!!!!!!!!!!!!

But it’s not just blogrolling. Oh no. I can’t even get MyBlogLog widgets to work. I CAN’T EVEN GET GOOGLE ANALYTICS to work. It all gives me the same frickin’ brackin’ ERROR CODE!!! (Error 404) I would blame it on Wordpress, but since I seem to be the only person on the wordpress planet having these issues (since I can’t find any info on others struggling with this stuff in any support forums or anything–plus, there are tons of wordpress blogs out there that I see successfully using this stuff) I AM APPARENTLY THE ONLY FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’ BLOGGER WITH THIS FRICKIN’ BRACKIN’ PROBLEM!!!

And I’m frickin’ brackin’ frustrated.

(But at least my blog’s still rated PG. )

So, um, should you happen to be fluent in this error code of death or any of the rest of this fun stuff, I beg you to help me. Please. From the bottom of my bloggy heart.

I think this is my Soap Opera Sunday. I know. It’s disappointing. No former boyfriends or boy-toys or anything. Do you see why I need urgent help? Who knew I could feel so much drama from javascript, php, and HTML. Sigh.

(But, you know, speaking of Soap Opera Sunday, we have big news coming up this week! Woohoo! Stay tuned!!!)

It’s interesting how sometimes after you write something, hours go by, and you look back over it and think, “wow! I hope that didn’t come across that way!” And then you mull, and you stew, and you fret–at least I do. And then I wonder who I might have offended or who got the wrong impression of me.

So, I’m throwing in yet another little disclaimer about this post here.

I’m a faithful and devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I refrain from talking about my religion very much here, mostly because I don’t want to isolate anyone or to come across as preachy. But it also means that I leave out a huge chunk of who I am. THIS is who I am: I believe in God, that He is my eternal and loving Heavenly Father. I believe in His Son, Jesus Christ, and that He is my Savior. I love Him with all my heart and I try to serve him as best as I can. I want to love everyone, the way He loved everyone. I make a lot of mistakes, but my ultimate goal is to be like Him. I believe in the Bible. I believe the Book of Mormon is also the word of God. It is Truth. It brings me closer to my Savior. I read from it every single day. I go to church, every single week. I can hardly bear to miss it–sometimes I have to, due to illness or other circumstances–and I feel a great loss when I’m not there. The Gospel has brought me true happiness and I would be completely lost without it. I am grateful for it every day of my life.

That last paragraph describes me better than anything you’ll read about me anywhere else. And yet, sadly, it mostly goes unsaid.

And so, when I bash on BYU–something I’m prone to do without thinking through it very clearly–I forget that someone could mistake that for Mormon-Bashing which, as you now see, never what’s intended. Because I grew up in the shadows of BYU and both of my parents were professors there, I was intimately familiar with both the good and the bad things about it–things that are NOT in harmony with my beliefs as a Mormon. There is corruption and silliness everywhere, and for some reason I was in a position to see a lot of it at BYU. But BYU isn’t the Church, it’s simply a private university run and attended mostly by Mormons. They try to keep a high standard there, a strong moral base in an attempt to help students find themselves, as opposed to losing themselves as they do in so many other environments. I commend them for this, but I’ve seen where it goes way too far. The crucial thing to remember is that universities are run by people, the Gospel is run by God. I believe that people are, in general, trying to be the best they know how. But they are, alas, people.

It’s a tricky thing, because I want to keep my writing honest. If something’s screwed up, I wanna be able to say that it’s screwed up! But I also don’t want anyone to misunderstand my rantings.

I don’t think I was offensive earlier–no one has said as much, anyway. But I was afraid that someone might read something I didn’t intend to be read. For my own peace of mind, I needed to get this off my chest.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…