Still Life, With Cats

Every few years I get a yen to mess around with the layout of this site. The last time i did it was back in September of 2010, when I merged my old regular blog and knitting blog into this single location. I’d been using WordPress for years by that point, and each time I decided to poke around at it, there’d be more and more features I could play with, and fewer things where I needed Richard’s knowledge of PHP to finish things off.

This time around the part that took the longest amount of time was actually scrolling through the bazillion available themes to pick the one I liked, followed shortly thereafter by the time it took for me to install a theme, poke at it, decide it was almost-but-not-quite what I was looking for, and then go do the same with the next contender.

Way, way back when I first decided to get this domain and start playing around on the internets (January of 2000, to be precise), I did every single bit of the design and layout by hand, writing out the html scripts using Notepad. There were WYSIWYG editors available back then but I figured if I was ever going to learn how to write web code, I had to do it from scratch, and so I stubbornly clung to my arcane ways until the advent of Greymatter. Suddenly someone else did the heavy lifting and all I had to do was a bit of tweaking here and there, and by then, hey, html was a piece of cake, so why not. I moved on to MoveableType at some point, until that sort of imploded, and that’s when Richard installed WordPress for me, and I’ve never looked back. But through all of that, there’s always been bits I have had to either edit myself, or get Richard to edit for me.

But it turns out, these days, WordPress themes have these nifty things called Widgets, where all you have to do is drag and drop bits of functionality into the various parts of the page, and poof, it just happens all on its own. This is so very awesome! I don’t have to even *touch* the actual code to make it do what I want it to do. It is magic, I tell you, sprinkled with unicorn farts and fairy dust, or something equivalent.

Anyway. That’s what I did this morning – set myself up with a shiny new layout, complete with randomizing header images of our cats (either current or past) . And yes, I do see the irony in having now firmly embraced the WYSIWYG editor, 13 years on, but I am old and set in my ways and I no longer care!

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Richard has been part of a writers group for over ten years now, since long before we moved to Sacramento. Most of the people in the group have also been involved for just as long. I have gotten to know most of them over the years, through various gatherings hosted at our house, or due to the fact that a significant number of them also take part in Nanowrimo ever year.

One of the women who’s been in the group since the beginning is going to be moving soon, out of state, and it is likely that we won’t get much chance to see her again. So since tonight was a regularly scheduled writing group meeting anyway, the rest of them decided to do a little something to surprise her. And to go along with that, I decided to make a cake.

The little Meyer lemon tree in the backyard was extra prolific again, so I decided to make a lemon cake. It’s a pretty simple recipe, really – just a standard yellow cake (out of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook), but with the addition of a few teaspoons of lemon zest added to the batter. You then frost it with a lemon butter cream, which is exactly the same as a regular butter cream, except that instead of adding milk, you add fresh squeezed lemon juice. It all adds up to a yummy cake with a very light tartness, and the addition of the lemon juice and zest to the frosting keeps it from being too overly sweet.

I am not a cake decorator by any stretch of the imagination, so I decided to do something a little bit fun with the cake (because seriously, any attempts from me to decorate a cake would look more like something that should be appearing on Cake Wrecks). So instead of trying to do anything fancy, I filled up a pastry bag with tinted frosting, and then I wrote “We’ll miss you” on the top of the cake. I put my name down in the lower right corner (cleverly shortening it so as to avoid having to somehow pipe out the entire thing legibly), and then I handed the pastry bag around to each person as they came in the door, and had everyone ‘sign’ the cake as well.

It turned out pretty awesome. Watching each person clutching the pastry bag and trying to pipe out their name was pretty hysterical for everyone involved (as an aside, it is harder to pipe your name in frosting when you are laughing than you might think), and at the end, well, maybe the cake still looked a bit like something that should appear on Cake Wrecks, but a cake for a writer, from a bunch of other writers, should have writing on it, and this one certainly did. And it definitely made her smile, and that’s all I was aiming for anyway.

(picture ‘borrowed’ from the recipient’s Facebook account because I did not actually remember to take a picture of my own – oops)

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

In honor of it being Grinch week on Holidalies, here is a list of things which I do not understand, and have no desire to ever understand, presented in no particular order:

• Nyan cat – nope, sorry, not funny, not cute.
• Piano cat – also not funny, or cute. Mainly I feel sorry for the cat.
• The wearing of Ugg boots with leggings – Idiotic. I don’t care how comfortable they are. Also, unless you can measure your age in one single digit (hint  – that means you are under the age of 10), leggings are NOT PANTS.
• Pinterest – I tried. Yes, really. Annoyed the crap out of me. A sheet of pretty pictures is not an organizational strategy my brain likes. I’m happy it works for the rest of you, but if you ‘Pin’ something, do not expect that I will ever see it because…just…no.
• The current ‘paleo’ diet craze (that has nothing whatsoever to do with how they ate things back then, according to people who actually *study* that era). I find it especially annoying because we all know that the people who are the most rabid about it are only going to go leaping off into the next diet craze as soon as that one pops up.
• Kale chips – they are an abomination unto the tastebuds (actually kale in general is a highly overrated food)

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

(note – we’re messing with the theme over here, so things might look a bit weird for a while until we get it all sorted out. And by ‘we’, I mean Richard who is doing the bulk of the code poking, while i peer over his shoulder and offer ‘helpful’ suggestions like ‘hey, how come it’s doing that? can’t you fix it?’

Today I only had two uncontrollable coughing fits, which I know might sound bad, but hey, I am counting this as improvement (and no worries – when this happens at work, I either immediately gulp down a ton of hot tea, or else scurry away from the main area, because I really am trying to minimize how annoying I am to my coworkers). Yay. Amusingly, I keep running into other people who are also counting such milestones as progress, since they’re all suffering from the same Lingering Cough of Joy ™. “Wow, that cough sounds really bad.” “No, this actually means I’m getting better, I swear!”

Richard, on the other hand, is in full on wheeze mode (hooray for asthma, or something). So between the two of us, because I’ve still got the aforementioned lingering cough of joy, and he’s got the usual winter upper respiratory infection settling in his lungs (because it’s not winter if Richard’s not getting up close and personal with his nebulizer at *some* point!), if we start laughing, it just devolves quickly into a coughing fit, which then makes us laugh harder, until we’re both bent over, unable to breathe. Ah, fun times. Also, I do not recommend doing this while driving.

Anyway. Speaking of driving! Tonight we headed off to Vacaville to hear my Dad perform. This past year he joined the West Valley Chorus, which is basically a group for guys who love to sing, and enjoy doing barbershop type music. I hadn’t been sure I could make it, due to illness and the fact that all prior Monday nights have been busy with rehearsals, so we actually got to surprise the rest of the family when we showed up.

The group is a lot of fun. They were all wearing silly Santa hats and holiday scarves or ties or other accessories, and it was obvious that they were all having a grand time singing. I especially enjoyed it because as someone who sings in a group composed of only women, it was kind of fun to hear those really deep notes that only the basses can hit, and also because it makes me happy to see my dad getting involved in music again.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.