I swear, I think our weekends are getting to be busier than our weekdays! ;P Friday was pretty hectic, and add the bad weather on top of that, it made for an interesting start to the weekend. Jessie’s karate test was Saturday — she’s now moved up from orange belt to a purple belt! Jim and I took pictures and filmed, so hopefully those will be up soon. We had a chance to talk to Jessie’s senseis for a bit, and both had nothing but good things to say about our little ray of sunshine. I noted that ever since beginning taking karate, she’s shown so much improvement … both in the dojo and outside of it!

Jessie left after the test with her mother. Jim and I went over to see my folks and saw my brother Jeremy and his wife Christy. They had Ryland with them, so I got to spend a little time with my favorite niece.

Isn’t she precious?

Stupidity knows no bounds

Today Jim and Jessie took me to brunch for Mother’s Day. I got a little aggravated earlier because I specifically told her mother that I was picking her up early and that we were going out to eat. Originally it was supposed to be breakfast … I pick Jessie up and find out that her mother had her EAT BREAKFAST right before I was to pick her up!

*beats head into wall repeatedly*

I swear, one of these days I’m bound to say something to this woman that I know I will regret, but that she also fully DESERVES.

So we waited a bit and went for ‘brunch’ … Jessie was hungry enough and Jim and I were starving! There was a slight ‘incident’ with a group that cut in line infront of us and another family. When I said something to one of the party members, she muttered something about us being ‘racists’ — the party members were black.

They moved on before I could say anything else, but I was fully ready to retort with, “It has nothing to do with race. The color of one’s skin does NOT exempt one from using common courtesy and manners!”

So I fumed a bit, but got over it. We were at Ryan’s and the food and service were great, which fully made up for the inconvenience before being seated. In their defense, it WAS packed, which made it a bit hard for the staff at the front to keep track of who should be where. However, that being said, I find it hard NOT to notice the general lack of manners by people I run across in public nowadays.

To most of these people, I am dying to say, “I *KNOW* your mother taught you better!”

A heart-felt and belated “Thanks!”

If all goes well, it looks like I’ll win this round in the Lunarpages’ WordPress theme design contest. I am completely overwhelmed by the response and surge in votes from family, friends, and extended community. I emailed a few close to me, and just about every one of them emailed their friends and family, and so on and so forth; and I posted on here and you each voted and responded in kind. (thank you!!) My Cotillion sisters rose to the occasion offering support and votes (thank you, girls! I love y’all!). Jim reached out to his guild and the guys have been very supportive with votes and feedback. (thank you!!) And last but certainly not least, the gargantuan legion of members over at the Soldiers’ Angels forums were a tremendous help in attaining and keeping the lead. (thank you very very much, Angels!!!)

I first ran across this on Degree of Madness and thought to myself, “You have GOT to be fucking kidding me.”

WTF?!!? Were they high? Did they seriously think this was a good idea?

Unfuckingbelievable. You know, I love Absolut’s products but I guarandamntee you that I won’t be buying any more!

Billboard shot on SondraK’s site. More on Michelle Malkin’s site here, here, and here.

There’s treatments for all kinds of mental/physical ailments nowadays, from acne treatments to organ transplants. Why isn’t there a stupidity cream out yet!?? ;P

She’ll probably want to smack me for calling her that.

As someone who’s been victim to identity theft, my heart goes out to Raven and her family. She recently posted about her family’s findings about her grandfather (now deceased) who was being abused by his caretaker. That in itself is heinous, but to add insult to injury, his caretaker had also stolen his identity and depleted his savings, writing checks and using his credit cards. Reading her story infuriated me, not only bringing back my personal memories dealing with FuckHead, but also in thinking about how I would feel if my beloved Gramps had been treated that way by one of his caretakers.

An open call for help

Those who have been keeping up with this journal over the past week or so are already familiar with the situation I am in, for the most part. For anyone else, here is an overview. I did not put in a cut, as I really need everyone to see this.

My grandfather died at the age of 94 about 8 days ago. This followed an emergency trip to the hospital, where it was found that he had bled out through an intestinal tear. My parents decided to put him in hospice care rather than subject him to radical or invasive procedures, which was in accordance with his wishes. He died about 18 hours later.

At this point my parents started trying to put his affairs in order. As they filled out the death certificate, a nurse took my mother and her sister, my aunt, aside to tell them that she believed my grandfather had been severely abused by his caretaker, and if they had been able to save him, she would have personally intervened to keep him from being sent back to his caretaker to spare him a great deal of pain. He had bruises in several stages of healing all over his body, and possibly worse injuries as well.

The hospital records, over 100 pages corroborated this abuse pattern over the past few years. However, Texas, the state where he resides does not have a mandatory abuse reporting policy apparently, so no one bothered to report it to adult protective services. Then, as my mother tried to continue putting his affairs in order, she was stunned to realize that this same caretaker had used my grandfather’s credit cards to make purchases and drained his entire life savings to the point where he did not even have any money to live on. Even two days after his death, this woman was still writing checks in his name, obvious forgeries of his signature on each.

This explained to us several references in his letters about being tired of living and wishing God would take him away from his pain. None of us knew this was going on, and apparently even my grandfather’s financial advisors noticed the pattern but did not see fit to notify the rest of the family for whatever reason.

My family contacted the Lubbock, Texas police and were told flatly that they refused to get involved at all and would not pursue the case or try and find the caretaker. They contacted adult protective services and found out that the police should have suggested an autopsy to prove abuse, but it was too late as my grandfather had been cremated. Apparently they can only intervene if there is a live person to question or an intact body. The attorney they found also basically told my mother that this was not a winnable case. After contacting the credit card companies about the theft of my grandfather’s identities, one company told my mother that they too refused to get involved at all.

At this point, we just want to see the caretaker prosecuted for her fraud, have the bills in my grandfather’s name cleared and make sure the woman does not do this to anyone else’s loved ones. The money, my grandfather’s savings that he had been building since just after the Depression, when he first started building his accounting firm is probably not retrievable, though it would be wonderful if it was.

This is an open request for help from me and my family. If you have any suggestions at all of how we can at least get someone to help us on this, we would be very grateful. Please re-post this to lists and pass it along, as any help at this point would be welcome. We are drowning in bills that were run up by this caretaker, and the police, lawyers, and credit company will not help us. The only people who have aided us are the hospital staff, who have come forward with statements. However, this does not really help since the police will not listen and my family does not know where else to turn.

I can’t pretend to know how Raven is feeling. I know it has got to be frustrating as hell when local authorities, credit companies, and legal venues are not helping in even pursuing possible prosecution of the caretaker! That woman took the old man for everything he had (and physically abused him on top of that!!) and left a mountain of bills in her financially destructive wake for the family to sort out.

Anyone with ideas or advice for Raven and her family, please take a moment to leave a comment on her post.

When I picked Jessie up at her mother’s yesterday, the house seemed a little dark and quiet. I didn’t think anything of it and once Jessie and I were in the car and on the way home, she mentioned that the power had been cut off to her mother’s house earlier in the day. (Biting my tongue very hard at this point!) She said it in such a nonchalant way, you’d think she thought it was something normal that happens to everybody. Last night I told Jim about it and my concerns about Jessie staying over at her mother’s house with no power. It’s cool enough weather now that it’s not a health risk, but I won’t allow her to stay over there in the summer if it happens again!

I swear, her mother is the poster child for irresponsibility. She has the mentality of a twelve year old and can’t keep track of her money worth shit. Her phone is constantly being turned off for non-payment, as are her utilities from time to time, her truck has been repossessed before (a family member helped her get it back), … yet she promises shit to Jessie all the time that she really can’t afford and SHOULDN’T be promising to her. For instance, she keeps telling Jessie they are going to get a dog … she has a cat already and can barely take care of it. She used to have 3 other cats beside it, and she had to get rid of them because she couldn’t care for them or afford the cost of their care (all three needed fixing, and two had health issues).

She’s now promising Jessie a cell phone for her birthday. Jim and I have been adamantly against this and I’ve voiced my concerns repeatedly (not to mention she is NOT supposed to have one at school!), and yet she thinks she can afford everything she has now AND pay for an additional cell. The woman can barely keep HERS on. Jim and I have agreed to get Jessie on our cell plan when old enough, but that’s a few years off.

I stress and rant and bitch about Jessie’s mother … I know anything that woman does shouldn’t surprise me, but I swear she keeps surprising me by constantly reaching new lows.

After all, this is the woman who was turned down by those “We Buy Ugly Houses” people. For the last couple months she has tried to feed us some cock and bull story about how some cash for settlement place that she talked to. Apparently she received a flyer in the mail from some guy saying he was a buyer of structured settlements and now she’s convinced that some inheritance she had lost years ago they can get for her. I asked her if she understood the concept, and read the flyer saying something about cash for annuities and promotional products. I don’t think she even knows what any of it means … I swear, this woman will fall for just about anything!

*Proceed to beat head into desk repeatedly*

A friend of mine listened to me rant on and on about her one day and laughed. She said, “Not the brightest bulb in the pack, eh?”

Understatement of the freakin’ year.

Anyways, other (more interesting) stuff going on: I ran across a nice WordPress plugin this morning called AWSOM Uninstaller. It’s basically an uninstaller plugin for all of the AWSOM plugins. While I don’t use any of their products, I love the concept and wish many other plugin makers would follow suit!

It would be nice if once in a while, you could uninstall (rather than ‘deactivate’) a plugin and have it remove its files, directory (if applicable), and any tables created in your WordPress database!

And last but not least, I’m feeling pretty special because I can do three of the things on That’s Fit’s “10 Things Most of Us Can’t Do” list.

Update: Please see this recent post regarding this WordPress function.

I wanted to help out a friend earlier tonight by importing a blogroll from a hobby site (running the latest version of WordPress) to hers (also running the latest version of WordPress). For the life of me, I could have sworn that WordPress had the ability to export to OPML.

Boy was I wrong! Not only did WordPress NOT have the ability to export blogrolls to OPML, it had absolutely no blogroll exporting capabilities at ALL.

I got the bright idea that maybe I could just export directly from phpMyAdmin. After looking at the structure of my WP tables, I decided that I didn’t want to sit and have to go through the exported data and re-structure by hand.

This was quickly becoming a lot more complicated than I needed. “OK,” I thought to myself, “No problem, I’ll just find a WordPress plugin to do this for me, no biggie.”

Google to the rescue! Or not …

After about an hour of searching and finding absolutely nothing — or rather, nothing helpful — on the topic in the WordPress support forums, in the WordPress Codex, or on the web in general, I decided to broaden my search from exporting blogrolls in WordPress into OPML format to just “export blogroll in WordPress.”

The first and pretty much ONLY helpful hit was for a plugin to export a WordPress blogroll for del.icio.us. It wasn’t exactly what I needed, but after looking at the plugin’s code, I decided that the quickest way to get to where I wanted to be was to hack up that plugin.

It’s pretty simple and I’m surprised that there aren’t more out there like it. It has one configuration option: whether to export all links ‘as is’ or export by a specific category or public/private links. Of course, the last version of WordPress that it supported (listed on the website) is WP 2.2, and the links/categories structure has been redone recently so exporting by category was not an option (and didn’t work at all).

I would have to re-categorize by hand once they were imported — not the solution I wanted, but by this point I would be happy not to have to add each link by hand!

Put on your coding hat

I had to re-design the plugin’s output format, as del.icio.us’ format was nowhere near OPML-friendly (and by this point I had wasted over 2 hours on this crap). So, this is what I did:

I made sure that the export option was set to export all links:

/* ********************************* */
/* [ THIS IS THE VARIABLE TO EDIT: ] */
/* ********************************* */

$option = “”;

Then, in the “DO NOT EDIT BEYOND THIS POINT” section, I modified the export_blogroll_admin() function to this. (could not post code in here, click the link to view .txt file!)

Afterthoughts, FYI…

I snagged the OPML formatting from one of my blogrolls on Blogrolling.com. (If you login, go to “Get Code”.) The ‘lastmod’ time is of course VERY off, but it doesn’t matter once it’s imported into WordPress.

Of course, any URLs with ampersands in them WILL NOT import, so remember to convert those &’s to & — also, look out for any link titles with odd characters in them, those will not import either.

It’s more complicated than it needs to be, and honestly I’m surprised that this capability is not already available in WordPress. While I had to go a round-abouts way to do this, it’s a bit overkill IMO. Think: Fat guy in a little coat meets midget in plus size clothing. (RIP Chris Farley)