SURPRISE!!!!!!

I popped in here late last night to check on something and nearly fell over.  Holy crap!  What happened to my blog???

At first I thought I’d been hacked, but quickly realized it was unlikely.  During my recent break, I forgot my password and was issued a new one, which I haven’t gotten around to changing.

You know how they come up with them, right?  They let the cat roll around on the keyboard and then email you the result: Here’s your new password!  Best of luck remembering it!!!

A bit of hunting around and all was revealed.  WordPress has decided to retire the Cutline theme and replace it with Coraline. which they helpfully did, without any notification to me.  And in the process, they lost all my important stuff from my sidebar, like the link to my brand-new Etsy shop, the Happy Simple Facebook page and my Daily Photo site.

The resulting barrenness was filled in with random crap:  FOLLOW ALAN ON TWITTER!!!!!  THIS BLOG’S STATS!!!!!! EVERY COMMENT BARB HAS EVER MADE ANYWHERE AT ANY TIME EVER!!!!!

Now the WordPress developers are touchingly excited about this new theme.  Telling them I don’t like it feels like telling a proud new daddy that his offspring looks like a goat.   But, honestly?  To my eyes anyway, this is not a pretty theme.  It may get the job done, but you really wouldn’t want to be seated across the table from it at a dinner party.

Of course, with the job I’ve just done of cooing over the newborn, you probably wouldn’t want to be seated across from me at a dinner party, either.

And all credit to WordPress, they responded very quickly and graciously to my pathetic bleating with offers of help with the heavy lifting as I get things sorted.  I truly appreciate that and give them full points for customer service.

I need to have a look around and see what this new theme has to offer.  I’m told it has more widgets.  And opportunities for even more widgets in the footers.  Plus, it’s customizable! You can turn the background black!!!!!!!

This is never a good idea.  Black backgrounds are the van art of the blogosphere. 

For those of you who don’t remember van art, before Facebook offered us a way of expressing our every inner prompting, people who felt the urge would buy a big old honking van and pay someone lots of money to airbrush their inner vision onto the side of it.  These visions usually involved scantily-clad women doing rude things to baby unicorns.   And if the advent of Facebook will save me from ever having to witness that again, it can shorten my attention span to noth

So I will spend much of today working on the setup here, trying to decide if I can just rearrange the furniture in Coraline, or if I need to pack everything up and move to a brand-new theme.

The pictures are just some hints of one of the stories to come, one that I’m very excited about and can’t wait to share with you!