isoglossia — pending reconstruction

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That’s it. We’re pulling the plug on isoglossia.

Okay, not really pulling the plug. It will continue to occupy some MBs on our provider’s server, and the archives will be just that. But content, which had dried up to a trickle since our departure from wonderful Slovenia, will no longer be forthcoming.

Here.

Our drive to continue providing the internet with defeatist screeds and potty training stories, while theoretically doable on Twitter and The Book of the Face, really requires the macroblogging platform in order to provide full service. That drive has been dormant lately, but now it resurges! From the ashes of isoglossia arises a new blog. From now on, please direct your browser to:

www.comefriendlybombs.com

To all who have enjoyed and/or supported isoglossia we offer our thanks, and our hope that you’ll join us again over at Come friendly bombs. It ought to be fun…

Yeah, don’t get too excited. Last night I started fossicking around again under the hood of this thing and found that with a minimal amount of fooling I could finally restore the old Slovenicentric theme to this blog [EDIT: for ten minutes]. This does not make it any less out of date, but it does make it slightly less unlikely that I’ll eventually update the look, which means content. The idea of building a new Bulgarian theme from scratch, particularly when I had no clue what about the old theme had broken the Wordpress install to begin with, was just too much on top of everything else this fall. Laying new paint on top of the old theme? That I can handle [EDIT: scratch that].

And if I’m ever going to handle it, this would be the week. The flu epidemic has shut the school, and maybe the country, down for the week, and while that doesn’t mean that I’m not behind in nearly everything, it does mean that I’m somewhat less behind than I would be if teaching, grading, and prep were still going on atop everything else.

What else? Pictures. Not happening. The fall has seen the camera come out almost not at all, and on those rare occasions when it does, any keepers are lucky to make it to one of the dusty computers, let alone to Flickr. Thanks for nothing, EyeFi.

Speaking of dusty computers, old Crashy seems to have really taken to his second new logic board, as everything’s been silky-smooth since that (free!?) repair took place back in September. Which means that somewhere around here is a crumpled envelope containing exactly how many leva it would have cost to purchase a new MacBook Pro with matte screen, which I was sure, sure, sure was going to be necessary.

Today marked six months and a week since we embarked on what at the time seemed a modest project, a project whose scope did not seem too ambitious, a project whose architects should not have been scoffed at, mocked, and hounded from public spaces had they mentioned in passing that the undertaking’s goals should be met within a month or two. Six months and a week later we are proud to announce that finally, FINALLY, FINA-MALKOVICHING-LY, turd has kissed porcelain.

Then half an hour later Alek shat his pants again just to celebrate.

Okay, so I spoke too soon regarding the Wordpress upgrade, as is visually apparent to any regular visitor. ‘Failed’ should read ‘managed’, ‘a’ should be ‘every’, and change ‘more’ to ‘never’.

Enjoy isoglossia’s personality-free default theme while it lasts.

To be fair, the custom theme that has turned out to be responsible for all the breakage was three years, one time zone, and a country out of date. Maybe — maybe — this will be the impetus I’ve been needing to finish the new, location-appropriate theme I’ve been working on for nearly nine months. Stand by.

With apologies to those who follow our Twitter feed, and/or the whole damn Book Of The Face thing, here’s a well-belated digest of our drive back down from Poland to Bulgaria, more or less, as it appeared, more or less, in stuff you’ve already seen, more or less.

We made the Bulgarian border around midmorning and were home before noon. A few days of intensive moving-in to our new place before Magda’s parents arrived for a visit and then off to Greece for a week in the sun before the hammer of the school year slamming down again.

In a good way, right?

Summer is here. The segue from work to vacation was intensely busy, irritating, complicated, and exhausting, capped off with a frantic drive from Sofia to Toruń. Magda did 95% of the driving, leaving me to dick around with a small camera in the front seat during the times I wasn’t sleeping (badly, but still). I took 50-odd dreadful pictures through the windshield, which I share with you in a sort of step-by-step travelogue of our 24-hour, six-country, 1,700 km ride, during which the word ‘divorce’ was never once mentioned, at least not while I was conscious.

I am not embedding a slideshow because the pictures are not good but they are captioned. Two even have funny titles!

Yes, certainly, take me to the photo-travelogue post-haste!

Hell no, I would rather look at pugs than blurry windshield pictures.

• Potty training update — peepee potty:peepee pants ratio roughly 12:1. Poopoo potty remains a total shutout. God damn it all. #pottytraining #
• After watching ‘The Great Gatsby’ with my sophomores 100,000 times I am determined to start calling people ‘old sport’ much more frequently. #
• .@erikras: no, my “too lazy to write real posts” aggregator will pull in non-dot-prefixed @replies. This dot defeats Twitter’s dumb new rule #
• .@OrganizedLifeSF: two words: jail. Break. Easy. Okay, that’s three words. #
• Given what’s coming out of the WWDC, it is a full-on frickin’ miracle that I didn’t buy a new laptop last week. #