I’ve been trying to remember things, clearly remember things, from my past, but the more I try to think back, the more it all starts to unravel. None of it seems real. It’s like I’ve just been dreaming this life, and when I finally wake up, I’ll be somebody else. Somebody totally different!
– Detective Walenski, Dark City (1998)
10.29.07: I’m In Ur Browser, Blogging 4 U
Yes, my little dumplings, I am back. I have not been trapped under a collapsed bridge, swept away in a flood or caught playing footsie in a public bathroom. It might be better if I could claim any of those things, since my summer has been remarkably prosaic. I have no real excuse for not blogging, aside from the usual work-work-study-sleep-REAL-LIFE-DRAMUH!!! routine. I should probably have brought in a guest blogger, but all the good writers are either dead, busy, or have court orders that keep me from coming within a hundred feet of them, so oh well. Sorry about the Summer of No Romy; I promise I’ll be a good blogger from now on. Unless I wander within a hundred feet of Beryl Bainbridge and get tasered all to hell or something.
One of the things I learned this summer was how to be even more organized than I already am—and I am pretty goddamn organized already, what with my shirts all organized by fabric and color and sleeve length and my shoes all lined up according to season and my CDs filed first according to genre and then alphabetically and OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD this was just supposed to be a silly segue into my overly-organized list of Things I Did This Summer, but now it’s gotten horribly out of hand and more than a little embarrassing, so let’s just pretend this whole paragraph never happened and start with the listings already. (Man. I don’t blog for a few months, and suddenly all the stoopid comes spewing right out.)
Redesigned this site
This is probably the first thing you noticed when you dropped by the site (if not, blink and squint a bit—there, you see it now?). While it’s certainly not the biggest news of the summer, it’s the most blatantly obvious, so it only seems fair to mention it first. I have a style switcher and only one stylesheet (how sad!), but there are more style sheets and differing layouts in the works. They will all feature a general “featherless” theme, in keeping with my domain name. Also: please do not look at this layout (the blimp layout) and go, “Oh, it’s the Hindenburg!” It is not the Hindenburg, because the Hindenburg was a rigid airship and blimps are not rigids. THIS MATTERS GREATLY TO ME.
Here are the things I have worked on/am still working on for the redesign:
- Accessibility
Much of my study over the summer has focused on accessible site design. (Well, to be perfectly honest, much of my study has focused on watching Hawaii Five-O reruns while idly shoving nickels up my nose, but let’s just pretend for the moment that I’m a responsible adult, ’kay?) This site’s previous design, while absolutely brilliant in most respects, might as well have been created by monkeys when it came to accessibility—and it would not even be available for those monkeys to view, because it looked like cack in monkey browsers. Poor little monkeys. So, for the sake of my fellow primates, I wanted to create a site that would be friendly to all visitors. This layout, while not perfect, is a big step towards that goal. - Three-Columned Layout
For many years, I didn’t do sidebars. I felt they were distractions from the main content, not to mention difficult to fit into a fluid CSS layout. But everywhere I turn lately, people are jabbering about three-columned CSS layouts: they’re so hip, they’re so cool, they’re SO DAMN HARD TO CODE. And you know me—I can’t resist a coding challenge. So I dove in, and came up with this. It was surprisingly easy to make; all the flap about CSS columns being so hard to code had prepared me for much worse. I didn’t even break a nail!… and then I loaded it in Internet Explorer, and yea, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth. After much tweaking and testing and adding a couple superfluous divs (gnash, gnash), I've come up with something that looks great in most browsers and gives the general impression in IE.. And in case the sidebar setup confuses you:- the left-hand sidebar (← that way) is the PAGE INFO sidebar; it holds basic information about the page (summary, bookmarking links, etc.) as well as section info (section menu).
- the right-hand sidebar (that way →) is the TIDBITS sidebar; it holds weird little goodies related to the page—for instance, the Tidbits on the blog pages will tell you what I was reading, watching, listening to, and surfing when I wrote the entry, as well as giving the entries’ categories.
- More PHP
Because less PHP would mean less PHP!
Of course, I am still working the kinks out of the redesigned site (a process which may take an embarrassingly long time because I am doing NaNoWriMo this month and will be spending most of my spare time worrying about character arcs and anachronistic dialogue and whether or not a man in the third stage of pulmonary tuberculosis would have enough energy to run away from a cannibal). Feel free to proffer advice, point out any broken bits, and/or come over to my home and ghostwrite all my code and content for the next six months or so.
Turning Twenty-Four, I Think I’m Turning Twenty-Four, I Really Think So (Na-Na-Na-NAH-Na-Na-Naaah!)
… which means that I’m not actually old enough to remember when that song came out, so I have no good excuse for inflicting it upon you. But anyway.
For some unknown reason, I am unusually happy about getting older this year. Normally I spend my birthdays breathing into paper bags and trying not to pass out as I think of all the things I need to do/haven’t done/did wrong in my past and future, and how each year that passes means that I’m less likely to be referred to as a wunderkind when I finally write the Great American novel or find a cure for cancer or shoot up a McDonald’s or whatever it is that’s going to get my name in the papers. But this year, I am feeling very calm and at peace with myself and my life. I have plenty of time ahead of me; life doesn’t end at twenty-four. (Unless you’re Bonnie Parker of Bonnie and Clyde fame, who probably should have been hyperventilating about her twenty-fourth birthday, considering that was the year she got turned into Swiss cheese by the cops.) Thanks to my husband, I also have a pile of iTunes gift cards that should keep me in Rammstein and ’80s pop well into the spring. (Medley time! YOU SPIN ME RIGHT ROUND BABY RIGHT ROUND LIKE A WILLST DU BIS DER TOD EUCH SCHEIDE GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE SONNE HIER KOMMT DIE GOODY TWO GOODY TWO GOODY GOODY TWO SHOES!)
Our 5th Wedding Anniversary
On August 12, 2002, Tony and I drove down to our local courthouse and, in front of a small group of loved ones, we done got ourselves hitched. That was one of the most singularly perfect days of my life. We hadn’t planned a traditional wedding; we just wanted the judge to sign our marriage license and then we’d take everyone out to Old Country Buffet for lunch. Perhaps it was this relaxed plan that made everything work out so well that day—first the judge, softened by the sight of us in our full wedding getup, gave us the full marriage ceremony without charging us extra; then the reception room at the restaurant was unexpectedly free, so we all had our own private space to celebrate in. We spent the two weeks of our honeymoon taking day trips around the state, visiting parks and landmarks and libraries and shops, coming home each night to our cozy little apartment. It all felt so right, it was almost as if we were dreaming it.
Five years on, and we’ve moved from that economy-sized ground-floor apartment to a deluxe apartment in the sky (that would be a two-bedroom flat on the third floor). We’ve gone from a bright-yellow two-door sports car to a spacious blue Chrysler; we’ve gone from second-hand furniture to bi-monthly trips to IKEA. Tony’s gone from meat-eater to vegetarian, from Alex P. Keaton conservative to ACLU-member liberal. He still opens doors for me and brings me bouquets of white roses; I still wave him off to work every day. And we’re both still so, so glad that we went down to the courthouse that day—me with my handmade bouquet, him with his new suit—and signed that license together. It wasn’t about centerpieces and bridesmaids’ dresses and the right shade of paper for the invitations. It was about love, and it still is.
Crossing the Bridge to the 21st Century (and Having It Fall Out From Under Me)
Despite my love for all things tech, I am generally resistant when it comes to change. I like my corded phones; I like my bulge-screened TV; I like my dial-up internet. If it were up to me, I would wash my laundry in a river and ride a horse to the grocery store. But, alas, time marches on, and even Luddites like me must be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Here are the technological advances this summer has brought to me:
- Cable Internet
… which means that, while I’m uploading this entry, I can be watching Mr. Rogers committing seppuku and people getting punched just before eating, downloading bad ’80s songs from iTunes, updating my Goodreads account, and gabbing away over the telephone—all at the very same time. Plus I don’t have to worry about my screechy-loud modem dialing at all hours of the day and night (and my husband doesn’t have to put up with me twitching nervously and hissing neighbors! when he dials online at midnight). Plus I don’t have to worry about using up our ISP-allotted 150 hours per month (I know, I know—it was like living in the Stone Age, except the cave paintings would have taken eons to download). - Cell Phone
OMGWTFBBQ I has a mobile! Except not really, because it’s just an emergency phone to keep in the car’s glove compartment, so my husband can can call me if he’s got a flat or running really late or sees a UFO or runs into Rachael Stirling and wants to ask my permission to have sex with her. (Not, for the record, that he actually needs to ask, since she is on his Official List of Five Celebrities He Can Have Sex With, and I completely understand that the List requires neither questions nor permissions. I mean, if Kiefer Sutherland showed up on my doorstep, I wouldn’t have a hand free to dial the phone because I’d already be squeezing into my giant Christmas tree costume and inviting the man to tackle me.) - Laptop… Er,
Laptop
… and this is where my happy jaunt along the Bridge to the 21st Century turns into a screaming death plunge, and it is all my fault because I am an idiot. Fortunately, my idiocy is of a fairly harmless brand—it’s only when you give me a screwdriver or let me poke around computer hardware that I become dangerous. And when you combine the two things, you get this: a dead laptop screen backlight, a girl who’s done a little Google-searching and thinks it might be a fiddly inverter and that removing the screen and jiggling a few wires will set it all right, and a plan that went horribly wrong somewhere around the let’s pry the screen off the plastic casing and ignore those loud cracking sounds, because loud cracking sounds are totally NORMAL when repairing delicate hardware part. As it turns out—raise your hands if you see this coming, kids—when the laptop lid says CRACK, it definitely does mean CRACK. So now I have a laptop with no backlight, a screen that fits a little crooked, and a lid with a jagged split at each plastic hinge. Go me and my l33t r3p4ir skillz… or not.
And Speaking of Bridges…
Obviously, the big local event in my town this summer was the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse. This took place not very far from where I live; fortunately, though, nobody I know crosses that particular bridge very often. Still, it’s indescribably bizarre to turn on the television and see what looks like a major disaster zone—I was flashing back to the 1989 California earthquake and subsequent Bay Bridge collapse—and then realize that these events aren’t taking place Somewhere Else, but are happening right in your own back yard. Pretty scary—especially considering that my husband crosses the Mississippi twice a day on his commute to work.
Also: Hobbehs!
(… that’s hobbies, for you non-LOL-speakers out there.)
Over the summer, I’ve picked up a few new hobbies that are worth noting here, since I may babble about them in future posts:
- Neuropsychology
Blame this on Dark City, which piqued my interest in brain function in general and memory in particular. I’ve spent the past two months reading about wetware and epistemology and scotophobin (no link, sorry) and the various parts of the brain. Now I want to be a brain surgeon when I grow up! Unfortunately, nobody I know will let me cut open their skulls and poke around their leetle gray cells. I keep telling them it won’t hurt, but nobody believes me… - Songwriting
What’s the only thing worse than bad poetry? Bad poetry set to music. Yes, I am now coming up with terrible tunes to match my rotten rhymes. So far, I have written two full songs, one about a kidnapping gone wrong (Jamaica Farewell) and one about blowing up the Queen of England (Blow up the Queen). (They’re both happy and up-tempo, natch.) If I ever get the proper software and actually learn how to coax a tune from my guitar, I’ll put the songs up for you to listen to. - Wargaming
… and my mother, reading this, is right now spitting her coffee all over the monitor, because she did not spend the sixties marching in the streets so that her daughter could PLAY AT WAR!!! Calm down, Ma; it’s just playing with toy soldiers, really. I didn’t really know much about this hobby until—no laughing, all you serious wargamers out there—I watched an episode of Callan. I got interested, read a couple library books on the subject, joined a few online groups… and now I’m hooked. I’m particularly interested in naval wargaming (surprise, surprise); I haven’t found much info on aviation wargaming, but that idea tickles my fancy, as well.
… Wow. That turned out to be a long entry, didn’t it? I should probably finish writing this and go shove some more nickels up my nose (my record is seven so far). Now it’s your turn: what did you do over the summer? Use the e-mail form to let me know. :)
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