A Guestblock! I’m beta testing, so hit it all you like.

‘B’ being for Blogger, of course.

Yesterday’s WSJ included a piece on the bloggers who’ve been deemed worthy to do their thing from The Garden next week as Dubya and his cronies displace all New Yorkers who can afford to evacuate for a week.

I spent some time today looking through their profiles and scanning their blogs, and while I tend not to agree with the positions that many of them are taking, the only one who just makes me want to slug him (based entirely on his WSJ profile) is 22-year-old Ben Domenech, proprietor of redstate.org. (No link - I just can’t do it. If you must see for yourself, you’ll have to type it directly into your browser - I will not facilitate.)

Anybody who uses the word ‘homiletical’ in an otherwise (mostly) intelligible sentence ought to be taken out and beaten with a wet noodle until he screams for mercy.

I know that the cachet has worn off these invites in many circles, but there are still an awful lot of people grovelling shamelessly around the net in the hope of being deemed worthy. If you’re one of those who’s still looking for an invite, you can certainly try your luck on gmail swap. Invites are still being given out there, and I was lucky enough to get my first invite that way. Call me cynical, but it does seem like the bulk of the successful offers now are offering ’stuff’ - webhosting, domain registration, etc. The truly creative offers seem to be going ignored more often than not.

I have discovered though that it’s a whole lot easier to do a keyword search on Feedster, or Intelliseek’s BlogPulse and find a recent post where somebody is offering invites in return for comments, or to the first X people who ask via email. It seems as though google has been flinging a new wave of them around in the last couple of weeks.

Brennan offered some spare invites on his self-titled blog and was kind enough to send one my way yesterday in response to a comment I had left. I used that invite to hook up El Jefe, but should I come into any more, I’ll be happy to share them here.

Scriptygoddess rocks! After living with Breadcrumbs for a few days, I came to the conclusion that it just wasn’t sufficent navigation, especially for readers who aren’t familiar with the typical stucture of a blog. I wanted date archives as well as categories to give readers the ability to a) easily find their way back to the main page, and b) be able to surf through a series of single posts.

First, I found this thread. That let me add previous | main | next navigation to single-post pages. Yippee!

Then I activated the Next/Previous Date Archives Plug-In (which worked beautifully), and immediately started getting all kinds of ugly error messages when I tried to compose a new post - even though everything already on the site displayed just fine. Of course I had saved the plug-in file with a extra space at the end - it’s generally a good thing if you read the instructions

And finally, I found the plug-in for Next/Previous Post in the same category.

With some minor tweaking, wandering around onesmartwoman.com just got a whole lot easier! Don’t you think?

And so, following the directives of Western Medicine, our heroine discontinued the antihistamines on Monday in an attempt to determine whether the Full-Body Itch of a month ago would return without them. And too, to see if taking them out of the equation would reduce the amount of Coumadin required to reach the Holy Grail Therapeutic INR of 2.5. It’s taken six weeks and a whopping 15mg per day dose to get there while taking Zyrtec. … but it sure fixed the Full-Body Itch.

With some trepidation (but no itching so far), our heroine reported early this afternoon for the requsite fingerstick. And, presto! Less than 48 hours after dropping the Zyrtec, the INR had popped from 2.5 to 3.9. While this is a very positive development, and proves that the Zyrtec was interfering with the Coumadin absorption, 3.9 is NOT where this particular number is s’posed to be (this is way over-anticoagulated and must be corrected before Bad Things happen).

The fix is twofold: We adjust the Coumadin. (downwards. duh.) But that takes a couple of days to impact the actual clotting mechanisms. So, off to the grocery store for the fast fix: a great big spinach salad. Yum. Vitamin K.

And then we repeat the whole thing on Friday. What fun!