Big Announcement and 200 posts

Hi Everyone, this is Barney's mom and well, I have been naughty about keeping things up here, and I appologize for that!

But first, I have to say that this is our 200th post - most of them being me saying I haven't had a chance to do badges, and blah blah, I am busy, blah. I am excited we made it this far though!

So as most of you already know I am terrible about getting badges done - it is so hard to do at home with the cats and my tiny screen, and it has been tough at work because of the busy, and then I get behind on everything, try and catch up on visits and blamo, badges end up MONTHS behind, as they are now. So I have to step back from the badges - I will be contacting everyone who requested to join and setting them up, but the badges will be a while for the ones I made. SO because of the badge issues, I thought it was time to make a change to them - a more generic, no cat picture badge that everyone can receive immediately (that will make it a lot easier - I seriously am at least 6 or 7 months behind on requests). I will do the picture ones some day, I promise, but I want everyone to have at least something!All the badges in the sidebar will be disapearing, and my work on the members page will continue at some point - but I will have a list of all the members in the sidebar so don't worry about that. Just not the picture badges right now.

And that is where the announcement comes in. I am going to have a contest for the new badge design. For those of you that don't have a login, because I haven't sent the email to you, or for those of you who I sent it but it got old and deleted or whatever, let me know in the comments. For those of you who can post already, well, that makes it easy. Just create your design, and post it - be sure to include the label "Badges" on the post. I am going to keep it open for a while because I know that since things got quiet here a lot of you probably won't see this right away. So, lets see, How about lets make it November 1 as the cutoff. So design a badge that can go to members that doesn't require me to do a ton to it - the current badges have a lot of steps because I am not good at photoshop, and take a long time to make (at least 45 minutes because seriously I am that bad at it on my smaller screen at home). Post it here and then on November 1 I will put up a poll for everyone to vote on the entries.

I am really sorry I have been so bad about keeping up things here - I really do plan to get better - and with all your help that will happen sooner than later!!

Thanks for being so awesome everyone - again, please let me know if you need to be set up to login to the blog!!

Amy