The Household COO

Welcome to my blog. These are the memoirs of an undomestic goddess who went from a high flying corporate career to stay-at-home-Mum. Join me as I learn about Chinese culture, how to cook and decorate a home. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’ve been a Sherlock Holmes fan ever since I read Arthur Conan Doyle’s first book “A Study in Scarlet“.  Naturally, when I saw the poster for a new Sherlock Holmes movie starring Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr, I was ever eager to watch it.

Hubby brought home the DVD and we just finished watching it.  Suffice to say that it was the grossest bastardisation of characters ever.  I should have figured that something like this would have happened when I spied that Robert Downey Jr was playing Holmes.  The new Holmes is typical of the characters that we’ve come to associate him with.

After getting over the initial shock, I must say that as far as entertainment value goes, the movie serves its purpose.  As long as you can put out of your head your expectations of what Holmes and Watson are supposed to be like, you should enjoy the movie.

You never truly realise the benefits of an experience until you experience what it’s like when you don’t have it…

After my first pregnancy, I agreed to have this Malay massage called “urut” done.  The purpose of the massage is to expel the wind in your body which is believed to be the cause of all your ills when you grow old.  There are supposed to be ten sessions and the “urut lady” comes everyday.

I don’t really believe in this stuff but I figured a daily body massage would be a nice treat to have after enduring nine months of pregnancy culminating in a delivery that took some thirty-five hours.  Well, that was before I really understood the purpose of “urut”.  Suffice to say that after my first session, I was ready to tell the “urut lady” to never come back again – ever.  It was the worst torture I had ever willingly agreed to subject myself to.  All through the massage, I was counting the seconds until it would all be over – it was an hour long massage, by the way.

Perhaps I ought to clarify at this point that my idea of a massage is one of those that you can fall asleep during.  Let’s just say that there is absolutely no way you could fall asleep during an urut session.  By the end of the session, I had tears squeezing their way out of my eyes.

So when my MIL proposed the idea of arranging urut sessions for me after my second delivery, I begged her not to.  She seemed disapproving about leaving all that nasty wind inside me but she complied.  Seven weeks after the delivery, I’m wondering whether I should have endured the torture and accepted that gift of “urut”…

I don’t know if it was the urut sessions or because Gavin was a smaller baby and my first, but I do recall having a relatively “flat” stomach by the time Gavin was a month old.  I could wear many of my larger pre-pregnancy clothes and actually looked semi-decent in them.  Now I’m seven weeks post delivery and I still look like I’m at least four months pregnant.  The rest of me looks okay, but my belly is quite a sight.  I have the stretchmarks from hell and the skin folds of a Shar-Pei, not to mention that nothing, absolutely nothing in my wardrobe can hide the fact that I still look pregnant.

I honestly thought I’d stopped caring how I look after I’d discovered that inner confidence in myself but I guess that was back when I didn’t have a four month pregnant belly that could not be attributed to a pregnancy.  Funny how we’re always so keen to show off the bump during the pregnancy and eager to hide what’s left over after the delivery.  Up until the delivery, I was quite happy to wear snug fitting shirts that hugged my belly and told the world what I was.  Now, I’m looking for my baggiest shirts to disguise the fact that my belly still sticks out far enough to hide my feed from view when I look down.

So here’s my advice to the pregnant mothers out there – go get the urut.  It hurts but if you want to look anything like your former self after the delivery, you’d better consider it.

If you want to achieve your goals, you need to be clear what your target is.  So here are my resolutions for 2010:

Family

1. Spend more time doing cool stuff with Gavin – ever since I became pregnant with Gareth, this part seems to have gone downhill.
2. Start dating hubby again – ever since Gavin was born, this part seems to have gone downhill.

Children’s Development

1. Tools of the Mind program.
2. Right Brain training.
3. Fun Start activities.
4. Physical development – Gareth.
5. School applications – Gavin.

Writing

1. Complete Writer’s Bureau Writing Course.
2. Write more articles on Helium.
3. Develop my blogs.
4. Write a story.

Work

1. Helium sub-channel steward duties.
2. Accounts for SIL’s cafe.

They say that there is a silver lining to every cloud.  Perhaps there is…  For in times of trouble, what unites us is a common front.

Although I have always felt lucky to have an amicable relationship with my MIL, I would be lying if I said we had the kind of relationship that every MIL and DIL dreams of.  That said, considering the number of antagonistic MIL and DIL relationships there are out there, I certainly wasn’t about to start complaining.

In recent times, I have discovered a new common ground between my MIL and I which has helped to forge a stronger bond between us – motherhood.  Sometimes there are things that a mother experiences that only another mother can understand…

Recently I discovered that several of my blog sites have been hacked.  To be honest, I never really considered myself to be a target for this sort of thing because it’s not as if I’m a high profile blogger.  Based on what has happened to my blog sites, I reckon there are at least two, and possibly three, different hackers involved.  What are the odds, huh?

Or perhaps you don’t have to be a high profile blogger to get your site hacked.  Perhaps you just have to be unlucky enough.  Although I managed to clean up the problem, it has left me wondering what I can do to protect my website to make sure I don’t get hacked again.

I have noticed one thing though – the blogs that I don’t update regularly are the ones that get hit.  Is there a correlation there?  If I’m regularly checking on my websites, does that mean I won’t get hacked again in future?  Who knows?

I did a Google search on preventing hacking on wordpress blogs and found some useful articles on the topic.  Because wordpress is one of the the most popular blog platforms for self-hosted blogs, I guess that is what makes it a target for hackers.  I’m not sure if these tricks work, but I will definitely try them out…

Thechetan recommends changing your user name to something different from the default “admin”.

Holy Shmoly recommends keeping updated to the latest version of wordpress to protect against hackers.  In addition to that, you should also change your passwords, remove any other users, change your wordpress config “secret key” and delete any malicious codes left by the hacker which may allow them to get in again in future.  If you’re like me and have no idea how to find malicious scripts, Holy Shmoly also explains how you can identify and remove them.

SEM Labs offers some useful tips on how to prevent hackers from finding your blog.  I guess the idea is that if they can’t find you, they can hack your blog.

Findable Blogs offers a little rundown about hackers, why they do what they do and what you can do to prevent getting hacked.  This is a good article to read if your Google ranking is important to you as your ratings can be severely affected if your blog has been hacked.

Just from reviewing these few articles (there are plenty more), it appears that there is a lot you can do.  Whether it is all necessary or effective, I don’t know, but I’m sure it is worth it if it keeps the hackers away…

Are you a webmaster or self-hosted blogger?  Have you ever had your website hacked?  What happened?  How did you fix it?  What measures did you take to prevent it happening again in future?  I’d love to hear from you.