New Thing
This week is the 10 year anniversary of my website.

Obviously, I've been aware of this for some time and have (had?) big plans for a site redesign and returning some archived stuff to the site. All this Photoshop learning was supposed to pay off. Geez, I am a slow learner. I vastly scaled back my ideas and then scaled them back some more.

I worked on the new design all day and it's still completely farked up. I only have the faintest grasp of this CSS stuff and I can't make anything look like like I want it to look. Plus FRODO (my computer) spent the past week in his "I don't do colors correctly" mode) which has added an additional element of difficulty to the routine.

I got frustrated this afternoon and the sun was beckoning. I took a break and thought I'd pull some weeds and do some yard stuff as a nice brain cleanser. It must be spring because I had to do one of my most hated spring chores which is to attach the backyard hose to the faucet. The forktard who built the deck built it abutting the house so that the faucet is almost impossible to reach. Almost.

Last year I think I managed to do it in under a half hour but today I was not so lucky. I spent close to an hour on my belly on the deck trying to get that forking thing connected. If the man who built the deck ever shows up at my door I will first, chain him to the deck and force him to connect and unconnect a standard garden hose to the faucet until he begs for mercy. When he uses bad words I will flog him with the other end of the hose. Then I will rip his still-beating heart from his chest and eat it.

This ninja writer guy I saw at a writing conference (long story) said that it is impossible to do that and surgeons use saws and stuff to get to the heart and that all the aortas and stuff that are attached to it are tough cables -- but that won't stop me. I'll go through the belly and root around though his entrails until I can grab the thing and I'll be angry enough to tear it out. And it should be perfectly legal. No one should be allowed to build something with such complete stupidity and not have committed some sort of crime where heart extracting is acceptable punishment.

Once I got the hose on, since it was warm and sunny, I decided to prepare the walls-o-water so that when I get my tomatoes I'm ready to go. I didn't even get the walls out last year because they were designed by a sadist and you can't fill them without getting yourself wet and making a lot of mud. But I think they would have helped so I decided to buck up and do it anyway.

So now I have my hose attached, my walls up, my pants wet and muddy and I've said every bad word in the book at least 100 times. Time to go back and tackle CSS. Let's open another bottle of wine. That's always a good strategy when you're trying to figure out a technical thing and have two web browsers and about 10 windows open.

I'm sure I could find one of these kids to take mercy on me and help me out but I can't bear the idea of them sitting around guzzling Mountain Dew and playing Ghostbuster Dragonslayer Warfighter and laughing about some lady they're helping who doesn't know the difference between margins and padding (do you get it?) for her stupid website with pictures of pumpkins.

I'll get it straightened out. I've got a lot of wine. Maybe next weekend.

Meanwhile, the rest of the weekend was decent. I made a killer gumbo on Saturday. I think I finally have the recipe down so it's not an all day affair. I also made a pumpkin streusel cake which was excellent and I had a tiny blob of pumpkin left and I put it in the cornbread I made tonight.

Take THAT! gameboy.