Neglect, neglect, yadda yadda.

I pulled my blog up to look at some of the widgets for another site I’ll be working on soon, and realized how very out of date this thing is, and not just the posts. For one thing, one of my favorite yarn stores closed last summer, so I have to remove that link. My bio needs an upgrade, and honestly, this whole site needs a facelift.

Sadly, my life these days is way to the busy. Work is swamped, personal time is usually spent on my current freelance project, and any other time leftover I’d rather spend as far away from my laptop as possible. (Seriously, I finished four books last weekend, three of which I’d also started last weekend.)

But soon, I promise, my dear two or three readers. Of course, I also need to upgrade JaneEspenson.com…. *sigh*

Just not enough time, dammit.

And in knitting news, I’ve been scrambling away at scarves, scarves and more scarves–and haven’t taken a pic of a single one, dammit. I suck. Someday that’ll change. I hope.

Until then, a pic. No blog post is complete without a pic.

Isn’t she beautiful? I went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park two weeks ago with my sister and b-i-l, and this lioness was just hanging out on a crate right next to the observation window of the lion hangout. What a ham!

So I finally fixed the comment widths, using the following in the style.css:

#edit-comment{
 width: 430px;
}
#comments {
 width: 430px;
}
#comment-form {
 width: 430px;
}

It’s the only thing I’ve been able to fix today. I still can’t make the fckeditor stop centering while also showing the custom styles. It’s very insane making.

So I’m knitting again. Woot! I finished a (unfortunately heavy) orange and tag-yarn scarf last week, and now I’m working on two scarves/shawls (stockinette to the end, then drop every third stitch). One is sparkly red yarn (Karabella Stardust) and will be this year’s holiday scarf, and the other is a tweedy Plymouth Encore that I’m going to have to frog and restart, ’cause it’s too wide for only two balls of yarn.

I started up again because work, both my day job and my freelance projects, have been stressing me out, and after several near-meltdowns, I had a “D’oh!” moment and realized that I’d given up more than just something to do with my hands when I stopped knitting–I’d given up an important stress-reliever. I can’t believe I ever forgot how relaxing it is work with my hands and let my mind fly loose. Stupid.

Anyway, in other news, Drupal continues to kick my ass. I spent four hours yesterday trying–and failing–to beat the forums into submission. I still can’t figure out why setting a block exception for “forum” only works for the forum posts and not the other forum pages, and google was no help this time. I picked up another Drupal development book at B&N today, one more advanced and with far more customization examples than my other two books, so hopefully that’ll help, but for today I’m leaving the forums alone and working on some of the other things for the site that I might actually be able to fix. I need to get a few more successes under my belt before I tackle the evil forums again, and not just because my ego needs reinflating. I also need to have something closer to complete by Monday for the client. Yay?

And finally, because posts without pictures are just plain boring, here is a gratuitous photo relating to nothing else in this post. It’s from earlier this week at work, when the sun was setting and the fog was rolling in from two different directions. It was so damned beautiful that night I took about 40 pictures, but IMO this is one of the better ones.

I found it! The problem that’s been making me crazy for three weeks has finally been solved, thanks to FireBug! Woot!

Note for the future: When there’s a mysterious horizontal line appearing at the top of a table, in Drupal, in Firefox, go to modules/system/system.css and change the damned tbody border that’s hiding in there.

Woot! No more horizontal line!

I decided I didn’t like that last change and took it out. ‘Course, I was stupid and didn’t do it the smart way, i.e. I didn’t copy the files before I went making changes to them, so there are some other changes that ended up in there by accident when I found I couldn’t remember how to undo what I’d done before. And if you followed that, you’re a smarter person than I.

Sadly, I’m having a ‘dumb programmer’ day all around. I’ve been working on a Drupal site for a friend/client. I generally don’t do freelance because I’m afraid of being unable to deliver what they want, and surprise surprise, here I am today totally stuck on how to create and format the drop down menu the client wants. I can do it in CSS and I can do it in Javascript (or rather, I know where to find programs that can do that), but I have no idea how to merge them with Drupal so that the menu items are controlled by the CMS, without hardcoding them in. It’s making my head hurt, and honestly, when I get frustrated I can’t focus. Brilliant programmer, that’s me!

My brain is mush for today, which sucks ’cause I only have one more day to make real progress that I can show to the client, and if I mush out again tomorrow, I’m toast. Biting off more than one can chew might be a good way to learn things, but it’s got that nasty ‘nervous breakdown’ side effect. Boo! Hiss!

And since all posts are boring without a pretty picture, check out this reflective shadow that was cast from my glass dining table to the ceiling earlier today. That’ll wake a person up for sure!

THE GOVERNMENT

ALREADY RUNS

MEDICARE,

AND ALWAYS HAS!

SINCE 1965!

LOOK IT UP!!

Good freakin’ lord.

In helping my sister set up her new website/blog, I’m learning some new stuff to help my own site. Or is it hindering? As you can see, my latest “improvement” is changing the homepage so it shows excerpts of new posts instead of the full content of each. I thought it would make the page more manageable and less like a 12 story building, but I’m not sure the execution works like I pictured it. I don’t know if the images are to small, or the excerpts are too short, but there seems to be too much space everywhere. Unfortunately my PHP skills are still in the baby-steps stage, so I’m not sure I can change it to the way I want. Phoo.

This place definitely needs an overhaul, regardless. The design, the content, the architectural structure (or lack thereof)…. Sadly there are at least three other websites in line for my spare time before this one, and two of them are paying gigs.

Nancy and Paula

I’m back from my fabulous 40th birthday celebratory cruise to the Caribbean. There was much snorkeling (that’s my sis and me in the pic, in Grand Cayman) and swimming and walking and kayaking and shopping and sweating (lordy was it hot and humid!) and drinking and singing (karaoke and piano bar FTW!) and eating and relaxing and reading and laughing and not nearly enough dancing (my knee and ankle just didn’t cooperate) and celebrating in general. And perhaps best of all, I only gained two-tenths of a pound-?!! Woot!

For those so inclined, pics can be found here (that’s the edited-for-quantity set).

I need more kayaking in my life. Good exercise combined with zero strain on my weakened lower extremeties = general awesomeness. More snorkeling would be awesome too, but to be honest, the Pacific scares me a bit. (Sharks!)

ION, I need something new to look forward to. Too soon to start planning for next year’s Disney trip? Hmm…..

I suck, I know. Moving on….

19 days away from my birthday cruise, and I can hardly wait. I’m spending way too much on accessorizing my trip (two new cameras, six new tops, three new bathing suits, two pairs of sandals…), and I’m not finished yet, if my list is any indication. Good thing I have one freelance project in progress and another waiting in the wings. I’ll be travelling with nine others, and yes, in case you were wondering, we’re going to have a BLAST.

I’m going to Drupal Camp L.A. this weekend. I hope. I’m planning on it, but new situations sometimes trigger panic attacks. We’ll see. My two projects are both in Drupal, so it would be very helpful to learn some of the basics, and network with the experts so I’ll have someone to beg for help when I break something.

ION, my department moved from one building to another last month, so that’s been an adjustment. Like any change, there are pros and cons, and one of the pros is getting so many opportunities to wander the campus when there are no museum visitors–in the morning before the museum opens, in the evening when the visitors all leave, all day Monday when we’re closed to the public. This place is so quiet, peaceful, serene, and a dozen other words that all mean the same thing. Walking across the plaza after work and not seeing another soul, hearing only birds and maybe the soft whisper of the wind? It’s a special moment that I cherish every night it happens.

And speaking of, I should get going. It’s supposed to be a gym night, but I’m sooo not in the mood. I’ll go Thursday, and make up for tonight by walking down the hill to the parking garage (another perk, although it’s hell on my bad knee and hip).

I’m thinking of changing the name/focus of this blog. Sadly I’m not longer as obsessed with needlework as I was when I first started Polgara Knits. I still knit and crochet, but not nearly as often, and yarn purchasing is no longer an irresistable force for me.

Right now my focus is more on two other things–JuNoWriMo and learning PHP/MySQL.

The JuNoWriMo is my mid-life crisis, I think. I’m turning 40 in three months, and want to have something tangible to show that I’ve accomplished something. I don’t have a family (and have never really wanted one), I don’t own anything (except debt) and while I have wonderful friends and a wonderful job and two wonderful cats, I feel I’ve lived a life of stasis. A 50,000 word novel, crappy though I promise it’ll be, is at least something I can hold forth and say, I made this. It’ll probably take me longer than the month of June, unfortunately (see next paragraph), but I should be able to do it in three months.

The PHP (and the sudden division of my focus from must JuNoWriMo) is due to two opportunities that look to be headed my way (one more likely than the other) for freelance web development this summer. Both projects will pay well, and both will require back-end database management, so I’m studying up on the PHP so I’ll be ready to hit the ground running when things are more definite.

So yes, knitting and crocheting is no longer all I think about or all I do with my spare time. I’m a little sad about it, but new things are good (and are the opposite of static!), so I’m choosing to think positively. And I haven’t turned my back on the needles and hooks, they’re just no longer the center of my life. It’s all good.

Now if only I had time for a site redesign…