LadyGypsy.net – the blog of Kimberly Dowd of New Jersey

OK..you caught me…it’s really Thursday. The Friday Five site publishes their questions early, so I figured I’d sleep in 10 more minutes tomorrow morning and do it tonight. Cheers!

Oh, this Friday Five was tailor-made for me! It’s called: Stupidity

1. What’s something really, really stupid you’ve done that could easily have resulted in your own death?
I’ve left candles burning in my apartment overnight and while I’m at work. I’ve also met numerous online people in person – nothing turned out badly (I vet people pretty well) but I’ve heard that sometimes online encounters go bad.

2. What makes you feel stupid?
When I don’t get the whole story about something, either personal or work-related, then my lack of knowledge is put on full display when everyone around me knows everything.

3. What’s something that’s stupid in a very smart way?
Pari!s H!lt0n. She makes money being a stupid heiress.

4. What’s an example of a stupid idea working out in a way that solved a problem?
“Let’s just duct tape it back together!” Who’d have thunk that you could tape things like furniture, cars, appliances, etc, and they’d actually stay together?

5. There is apparently a brand of packaged popcorn called Smartfood. What might be found in the package labeled Stupidfood?
Cheese puffs. They’re radioactive orange, mostly air, and just a skosh of cheese. They’re addictive, so you can eat an entire bag at one sitting and get absolutely no value out of them whatsoever.

***
What a freaking nutty week. I’m still so very thankful the layoffs passed over me. Must have been the lamb’s blood I painted on my cube wall. Of course, the rumor mill has started up already saying there will be more in December. Whatevs.

***
Wanna sneaky-peeky of my redesign?:

I’m writing this 99% from scratch, just lifting the WordPress tags from past templates and the Codex. It’s a hell of a challenge, especially continuously checking it in Firefox, IE, and Safari. My goal is to have it launch on September 1. Major challenges include: 1) How to get my sidebars to extend all the way down to the footer? 2) What to do with my HUGE list of links? 2) Re-re-recoding the hostess picture page, and 3) turning “Pets” into “Cast of Characters” page – because seriously, if you’re new to this site, how the heck will you know who WM, Coworker S, and BvP are? I’m proud of the little date block, which I saw on quite a few blogs but coded all by myself!

Layoffs started at the opening of business this morning. I’m okay, Coworker S is okay, Boss is okay. But I saw a lot of really great people go, and that was heartbreaking.

By the power of Suze, I swear I’m going to work hard to beef up my savings to get at least 6 months’ worth of expenses in there. Because I think this is only the beginning of things.

I’m so sleepy. I haven’t slept well since the memo came out last Thursday.

WM and I like to peruse garage sales Saturday mornings. We mostly look for old books, old Disney stuff, and chickens.

WM’s mother collects chickens. Rather, she hates chickens and because of that he buys her the ugliest ones he can find. They are all over her house. On one of our jaunts, we found the above beauty, and he snatched it up for $3.00. It was meant to be sent off to Michigan.

It’s been 2 months now, and it’s still sitting on top of our printer, pointed toward whoever deserves to be stared at by a Judgmental Chicken of DOOM. (Right now, it’s WM. Don’t ask.) With each passing day, the hope that JCoD will soon leave my humble abode fades even more.

And still…it just stares…judgmentally.

***
So remember when I swore off reading that blog that does nothing but scare me about layoffs? It was right. Gannett’s laying off 600 employees companywide. And the Courier-Post will be laying off 35 of its workforce early next week. We got the memo today, and now we wait until next week to see who’ll be shown the door. Will it be me? Conventional wisdom says no, because online is growing and online employees are valuable. But in the grand scheme of things, we’re no more valuable than anyone else there. The C-P has been a part of how I identify myself for so long now – I’d miss it.

Obviously, I could go on for pages about this. Won’t do any good.

Ironically, this morning I added headlines from my C-P World of Warcraft blog to my sidebar.