Ohhhhhh, y’all, if you had been here yesterday afternoon you would have seen me absolutely beside myself. I had just finished lunch and was doing a last email check before I toddled off to the living room to cross-stitch while half-watching those crazy OC Housewives, but then I got an email that my site was down, and THEN I got an email from my web host letting me know that, hey. We’ve suspended your Love & Hisses account, mm’kay?
Oh, was I irate. SO IRATE.
Yesterday Google Reader linked to the Love & Hisses entry about Maggie birthin’ those babies, and unfortunately when I signed up for service with my current web host, when it said I had “unlimited” bandwidth, what it actually meant was “not unlimited” bandwidth. And the huge traffic spike from Google Reader caused a lot of drain on the bandwidth and was making the other sites hosted on that machine go super-slow and in fact I think my web hosting company briefly thought they were under attack.
UNDER ATTACK FROM THE KITTEH LUVAHS maybe.
(Please note: it was the huge influx from an unexpected source that caused the crash/ suspension. You guys who came back several times to look at the baby pics? Trust me, it wasn’t you. You guys keep on coming back and look at those pics all you want!)
The problem is that for at least the last year – maybe longer – I’ve uploaded all my pictures to the Love & Hisses domain, and linked to them. And I post, perhaps you’ve noticed, a LOT of pictures.
When Fred got home from work, I was frantically looking at other hosting companies, but as he pointed out, due to the large number of pictures, with any kind of shared hosting I’m going to come up against the same issue. My web hosting company offered to upgrade me to a VPS Service account (I think it was called), but those start at $50 a month, and come on. All these sites I have are really hobby sites and I just can’t justify spending that kind of money on a hobby site, you know?
I know someone out there’s going to suggest putting up a Paypal button on this site, and you are very sweet, but I’m not willing to do that – I absolutely will not accept money from you guys for this, please don’t go sending me money I AM NOT KIDDING. I also don’t want to put up ads, though that’s something I might consider in the future if I absolutely must.
Luckily, after some brainstorming, we realized (and I asked the support guy, to be sure) that if I use Flickr – I have a Flickr Pro account, after all – to host my pictures, that will lessen the bandwidth used on the server, and I don’t have to move my blog. Yet. When I signed up with this hosting company, I paid for a year in advance because it was cheaper that way. That year is up in August. At this point, I’m not planning to stay with this company past August, but I’m not going to move out of desperation if I don’t have to, before then.
What this long and boring epic means to you guys: pictures will be hosted at Flickr, and it will take a few days to change the links on my posts to point to Flickr. I expect that Love & Hisses will be up and running before the end of the week, but until then welcome to our temporary home!
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Our boy Rufus has clearly made himself at home.
“What?”
Rufus has found himself a hidey-hole somewhere in this house, and we can’t figure out where it is. We thought Sunday evening and again yesterday afternoon that he was gone, but then he showed up in the laundry room, all sleepy and stretching like he’d been curled up taking a nap somewhere. I canNOT figure it out, and it’s kind of driving me nuts!
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Maggie is such an awesome little mother. I go into the room several times a day to spend time with her, to rub her back and her ears and tell her what a great mom she is. Yesterday, Susan the shelter manager and Richard stopped by to see the babies. Susan sexed the babies, and decided that we have at least four boys, one undecided, and one definite girl. Unfortunately, I’m not sure which was which (still working on identifying them, though I’m starting to get a handle on it), so we’ll have to look again.
Maggie was okay with strangers in her room, and okay with us handling her babies, and as soon as I put the babies back into the kennel, she climbed right in to comfort them.
I’m not having much luck getting a shot of her with her babies, because she does like to greet me at the door. I think today I’m going to go in there with her and just set up camp ’til the babies need feeding and I can get some good momma-and-babies pics. They’re not going to stay this tiny forever, I know.
The squirming pile o’ stripes.
Little white face says “I’m on top of the pile! I’M ON TOP OF THE PILE!”
Okay, I got their face pics, but I am a bad, bad foster mommy, and somehow even THOUGH I took pics of all six of them, I got overzealous when I was deleting, and I must have deleted the pic of the sixth one. When Fred gets home tonight, we’re going to use the fancy colored markers I bought yesterday to dab a bit of color inside their ears, and then I’ll snap face and body pics of each of them.
Little White Face. This one right here? Destined to be a heartbreaker (in a good way, of course). And my favorite.
Look at the stern little face on Black Nose! Black Nose is my favorite.
Awww, little Pink Nose. You know you’re my favorite.
Oh, wait. Maybe it’s Black Nose With Pink that’s my favorite?
Dark Face From the Nose Up. Are you my favorite? I think so.
Aww, White Face, how’d you get on the bottom again??
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“Meez Poo luff yew.”
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Previously
2010: Maura and the Bookworms.
2009: The Seven.
2008: No entry.
2007: “Behind you! A serialkillerstalker!”
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.