Hosting, Tweaking and Living in Sin!

Wow! The last two weeks have been a flurry of activity! I decided to make the move from wordpress-hosting to self-hosting and I felt all adult and stuff.  The decision to move was akin to moving out of my parents’ house - home cooked meals vs self-cooked meals and possibly dying of food poisoning. Laundry service (aka maid) vs doing your own damn laundry and possibly shrinking all my clothes. Paying for my own stuff and possibly going broke (you mean I am actually going to have to pay for all this stuff now?!) - so many considerations to take into account! In the end I came to the same conclusion about self-hosting (sounds so much like self-medicating) as I did with moving out - it was time to grow up!  Nothing like a good few months, surviving on salty crackers in a ground floor hell hole of a flat infested with roaches to make a woman out of you!

So once the decision was made, the spending began. Domains needed purchasing, hosting needed purchasing, re-directing needed purchasing.. lots and lots of purchasing!  Then the searching began - searching for a theme for my blog, searching for an image for my header (something that represented the domain name, but as you can see that plan fell through), searching for cool font types to use, searching searching searching!  Finally, the tweaking began!  And boy did I tweak.  I must say, I really enjoyed this process despite the sessions of uncontrollable rage and urge to murder the person who came up with the idea of css.  During these sessions, TD was my rock - he would swoop in, fix the problem which was usually a case of missing a stupid ‘;’ after a line of code, and swoop back out again, with a dramatic cape flare.

Gush Alert! I love TD - anyone else asking him why their header doesn’t show up on their site would be on the receiving end of a death stare (you can almost feel the words “Do I look like I care?” piercing your soul like death rays), but with me, he is patient a la king! He will take his time, spot the problem, smack me on the head (with love of course) and fix it! Every.single.time! Did I mention that I love this man? Alright, enough gushing, moving right on!

And tada! My site is finally up and running, I am pretty chuffed with myself and the way it has turned out.  Of course it will be a work in progress - for the rest of my life - but I love the current look!  To give you an idea, here is the theme I started off with - Copyblogger theme and what you see in front of you is what I turned it into.

So by now you are wondering where the heck the ‘living in sin’ bit is - patience my little padawan! All this spending and searching happened in the midst of a mild mental turmoil.  My parents were coming down for a visit and I had decided to tell them that the white boyfriend that they were introduced to last time they visited was also living in the same flat as me. I might as well just say that I am bisexual and pregnant with my sixth child, the effect would be the same.

The decision was partly mine, but mostly because now that my parents knew about TD, they wanted to meet his parents and I am pretty sure I did not want “TD has been living with your daughter, you didn’t know??” popping up anywhere in the conversation.  That would be awkward, not to mention life threatening for me.

I was hoping that my parents would have forgotten about the whole ‘meet the other set of parents’ deal, but after 9 hours of solid driving, my mother’s second sentence to me after hugging me and telling me she missed me was, “So when are we meeting TD’s parents?”.  So much for that idea.  So last Friday, I sat my folks down to lay it all out.

“Mom, dad, so you know that I am dating TD right? Well we’re-also-sharing-a-flat-and-we-have-been-for-almost-four-years”.  There was a moment of silence, and then my dad goes, “so what happened to your flatmate? The chick you always talk about?”.

My response, “she is a ‘he’ called TD”.  My dad tried hard but failed at keeping his face from cracking at my attempt at rhyming humor - I am sure I didn’t imagine that smile which was quickly brought under control!

What followed was a very mature, adult discussion about the whole situation.  The only thought going through my mind during the whole conversation was, “MY PARENTS HAVE BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS.  THESE ARE IMPOSTORS!!”.  Followed by “Wait, this whole situation hasn’t hit them yet, any second now the light bulb will go off and I WILL HAVE TO START RUNNING FOR MY LIFE!”

I was still reeling from the calm, serene pool that was the discussion between my parents and I, when my mom goes “My dear, if there is ANYTHING else you need to tell us, please get it over with now.  I can’t take coming to visit you again wondering if you are going to drop another bombshell on us”.  I considered telling them something made up, like that I was pregnant, just to see their reaction, but I didn’t want to be cruel, plus I prefer my head on my shoulders, not rolling across the floor.  So I confirmed that that was it.  No more.  This was all I had to say.  I don’t think she believed me!  It will be a while before my parents come to visit me without wondering what will happen next!  At least they can never accuse me of being boring!

By the end of the evening, my parents seemed to have digested the news pretty well and they were still looking forward to meeting TD’s parents.  I was very happy and amazed at my parents and their willingness to think beyond their culture and see me, TD and our relationship with an open mind.  I love them both dearly and I am really proud to have them as my parents.

One hurdle down, one more to go - the meeting between TD’s parents and my parents, so look out for my next post about how that went down!