Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

Introducing My Stats. If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now see detailed reports on how many people are visiting your journal, friends pages, and entries (wherever they're posted on LiveJournal). You can also view data on comments and RSS requests. My Stats is only available to Paid and Permanent account holders, but you can upgrade anytime. (FYI, an annual subscription costs less than a large pizza with everything on it, PLUS it's rumored to make you lose weight in your sleep!) For additional details on this feature, read this article in paidmembers.

Get ready to check your vital statistics!. To begin, mouse over Journal in the upper nav bar and select My Stats from the dropdown menu (Horizon) or select My Stats under Journal in the side bar (Vertigo). If you're using another design scheme, you can visit My Stats directly. You'll find My Guests on the My Stats tool bar.

Happy holiday promotion!

We're delighted to tell you about our holiday coupons, which will help you share the love with your LiveJournal friends! If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can send up to 10 LiveJournal Basic/Plus users a $10 coupon for an annual paid subscription now through January 15th, 2010. Recipients can upgrade for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25). Please note that these coupons are not transferable and cannot be used to renew existing paid accounts. If you're a Paid/Permanent user, you can send out your holiday coupons now!

Tweaks and Enhancements

1. The search is on: We've replaced our default search tool with one from Yandex, a leader in search engine technology. This means you'll get smarter, more granular results! To get started, enter your search terms and click the Go button to the left of the Find box on the upper right of the LiveJournal header. This will take you to the search landing page where you can further refine by Entries, Comments, People & communities, and FAQs. You can also access the search page directly.
2. Whitelisting: We've released a new option to help you moderate your busy communities more efficiently. If an entry contains a link to a whitelisted (i.e., trusted) site, it will be posted automatically without need for moderator approval. If a post contains a link that is not on the whitelist, you'll be prompted to approve. To access this option, please visit settings for any community you maintain and select the third option in the Community Moderation box (located in the lower left-hand corner). Click the enable link to custom-edit your community's whitelist, which has been prepopulated with trusted domains. You can manually add or delete URLs in the text box. Please note: If you're the maintainer of an unmoderated community, you may see the radio button for this setting checked, even though it's not active. This is a known issue. Please select whichever option you prefer and click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. If you're happy with your current settings, then no need to do anything!
3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!

The winter used to not be so hard for me.

Until about 4 years ago, my worst winter was the year I was depressed and laid in bed alone, watching silent films on TCM.

That Christmas is a bright spot for me now. Those memories are a safe place for me now.

Last year was pretty hard. Though no one who might chance upon this blog knows me or my family, I know my wife reads it sometimes.
Last year was hard because she was hard. She still thinks it was the right thing to do to leave me and take the kids. I think she still believes I have a compulsive hoarding disorder, that I lie all the time, and that I am addicted to pornography.
It doesn't matter that she's wrong. And while it does matter that God knows she's wrong, I don't get a whole lot of comfort right now in knowing that He knows. It still hurts. I'm still on edge.

We're all given certain spiritual gifts and talents. One that i have, that i have been developing my whole life, is the gift of discernment. The way it works for me, most of the time, is that I see a pattern or a "feeling" (my brother in law and I called this "spirit" for lack of a better term) in things.  I've sometimes tried to write these patterns or "spirits" down, but somehow as the parameters spill onto paper, it loses something.  I guess i can't just write a "how-to" book and help others enjoy an understanding.

One of these "spirits' that's haunted me in my life is the spirit of infidelity. Looking back, I guess every little cheat someone did against me has had a cumulative effect in creating a pretty solid understanding of the deception, distancing, and failures in stopping the transgression that accompanies this gross spoil of the human spirit its terrible destruction of reverent covenants.

I love my wife.  i think she is intelligent, seeks to do the right thing, and often makes the right decision.

It is she, however, whose faults have wounded me the deepest in the short time I've known her.

When i met her, she was struggling with the terrible transgression of adultery and immorality. That kind of sin had always been the most revolting to me. Not that i was pure and untainted - but I always tried to be. I was never promiscuous, and I successfully fought off a lot of temptations that sometimes later taunted me in my "loss" of a braggable pleasure. When I met my wife, I had repented of EVERY sin i had committed in my life, and was doing my best to stay clean.
My interest in her was pure - I wanted to help her overcome her terrible transgressions and come back to church.  I liked someone else at the time ... a woman who was my age with three kids & who had a lot of similar interests except the church.

My wife went to her Bishop and was soon excommunicated for her transgressions. She talked of the feeling of losing the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the lonliness she felt.  One night, I had a vision that can best be described as a small insight into God's love for all of His children - even those drowning in sin. This vision drained my physical body and I felt as if my flesh were unable to contain my spirit. I understood how to look past sin and see the "sinner" in the way that God sees them - with compassion and an aching love and hope for them, each individually.

In associating with her, I eventually fell to temptation and sacrificed the purity I'd worked so hard to receive. I was warned by numerous people not to associate with her, that she couldn't be trusted, etc. Normally I would have listened, but my vision kept me lifted up in the belief that i could have faith in her changing.  We decided to marry.

marrying her meant I could not be married in the Temple. It meant giving up a temple marriage as a goal, giving up "not having a stepchild", and giving up a lot of other hopes and dreams I'd always had for myself.
I had faith it was the right thing to do.

After making the decision, we had some rough bumps. She was still seeing the man with whom she'd been having an adulterous affair. She always had an excuse to keep in contact with him ... he had an amazon account so she could order hiking books through him. he was a co-worker also of our faith, so she could share her feelings on the repentance process with him. She "had" to see him in certain meetings, and communicate with him on certain projects. She convinced me time after time that "it's just work", but sometimes i felt that spirit surrounding her, and i knew otherwise. I didn't want to believe it, though ... and it is easier to disregard a feeling than concrete evidence.

We married and raced to the hotel to go on a honeymoon trip to Mexico.  The night was awkward because I kept remembering a conversation we'd had about how she'd told her therapist she didn't think she could enjoy sex with me. It made me more self-conscious than i would have been otherwise. I didn't enjoy it because of the emotional awkwardness.
In Mexico, we had a moment where we prayed together as a married couple. Things felt better after that, and on that trip I felt good about our marriage and the things we had in common. We got into one fight ... she wanted to go have sex in a part of a park that was off-limits, and I didn't feel right about it, so we fought over that. 

Less than a week after we returned from our honeymoon, I was waiting for her to come home from work & she quit answering her phone.  It was late, and I picked up her son at preschool and took him to McDonalds. I remember sitting therein the play area, and suddenly being overcome with a very specific feeling that she was cheating and that she'd lied about her reason for not being able to pick up her son. I wrote about it in my journal.
around 9pm she finally came home. I don;t remember how things played out, but she lied numerous times, telling me she hadn't talked to him, and then she finally admitted she had, but it was about work, then she admitted it wasn't about work, and eventually that she "gave him a hug". To this day she swears that's all it was, and to this day i don't believe her. After all, what are the chances of one small truth in the center of a blossom of falsehoods?
She finally showed me some of the emails and I accessed additional ones. She's been writing in this "junior high creative writing" voice and talking about all sorts of inappropriate things.  She specifically talked about how she didn't want to hurt me but she "needed" him. 

It ripped some pieces out of me that have never come back. Even after her "repentance" and my attempts at forgiving her, there's still a voice where the happy innocent wife should be. There's a voice where the trust should be. The warts of suspicion and "covering my butt" and "sleeping with one eye open" grow on me and weigh me down.  I try to trust her, and sometimes i convince myself that i do, but i'm always reminded that she is not a person i can trust. There's always some sneaking around, some plan of attack(ing me), and a certain continued level of dishonesty and distance on her part. Last year it was her sneaking around and renting a place, then calling my friend's wife to help her move. Sometimes the sneaking around is her calling an older friend for advice (advice that always borders on flattery and which my wife uses to "justify" herself).

She was re-baptized eventually, and put in papers to have some other things taken care of with the church. I thought she'd worked past the transgressions, and figured the reason she was still so easily misled is because she has some other things to work through.

Lately she has been distant again. She's gone on a witch hunt a couple of times recently to find things to nag me about. She's sneaked around - both in trying to find something to accuse me of and in (i guess) talking to church leaders. She is pretending to be nice, but it's fake. She doesn't want to communicate with me ... instead she works, leaves the house, or watches television.

The pattern is very similar to last year. And to other times. And to other people.  Something has been telling me to "watch out", so I haven't been sleeping much lately.

Today she left to do sonmething, and I had to print out something on her computer.  I wish i hadn't, but I discovered a series of emails she'd been sharing with an ex-boyfriend on a social networking site. His wife left him and took their kid when he went into the military, and he is desperate for female attention. My wife has been writing to him in her infidelity voice, putting out feelers to see what he'll say. She is preying on this poor guy, and there were hints that he was falling for it. They swap compliments. She says things to makle herself sound like a needy and helpless girl, trying to appeal to his masculine side to give her compliments. She's even identified the risk of empotional infidelity in the conversations, yet instead of talking about the pain it causes, she ends her sentences with a sly over-the-shoulder eyebrow raise like "but maybe we can ...". 

I guess I have to face the fact that my wife, even as her case is being reviewed by prophets of God, is indulging in the very activity that lost her membership and blessings in the first place. It is my understanding that you can't be re-baptized twice.

I was robbed of a temple wedding. I was robbed of not having to share my kids. i was robbed of a happy beginning to my marriage. I am robbed of emotional security, of having my wife be my best friend, and of the pleasure of feeling "wanted" by the one person it's ok to sleep with. I don't have a happy, content relief-society/martha stewart housewife. I don't have an attentive housewife. i certainly don't have a "lover". My wife doesn't know me. My wife would be thrilled if I died. She's even spent time thinking about what she would do with the money (she told me so).  My wife doesn't know my mind. She might know a few details about my life, but she doesn't relate - and it's not because of our incompatibility ... it's because she doesn't care. She's never cared about me. She takes me to task for "neglecting her" or "being too hard on the kids", and complains about how I don't want to sleep with her. She is always quick to point out my duties as a husband and father, but i don't know of a time she's ever sought to improve herself as a wife and mother. I am nagged or outright reminded how insignificant I am far, far more than i've ever been complimented.

I didn't even get a father's day card this year. 

taste_buds
Holidays provide a built-in excuse for indulgent entertaining. This all-purpose foodie community covers everything from homemade hangover cures to dinner party menus. Need quick advice? Get five-minute snack suggestions, low-fat ingredient substitutes, and even measurement conversions. Delicious recipes garnished with humorous advice. Yum.

naturesbeauty
Always on the lookout for compelling images, we were delighted to discover this flourishing community of artists who share a love of nature. Honoring the subject with photographs, paintings, sketches, prose, poetry, and other creative works, you'll be simultaneously riveted to your monitor and inspired to run helter skelter towards the nearest wooded dale.