Yikers! It be gone, the music be gone, time to allocate some energy in this direction  :>

Now I remember. I lost the theme while window shopping something else, then forgot how to log back in to fix it.

Thanks heavens for google search - now I know how to get back here again 

The sun is out here, and the high fog that rolls in through the Gate and around Mt. Tamalpais is burning off. The sun is out, did I say how good it feels? To go outside and feel its warmth on my skin. Happy.

Life is still good in the fast lane. My workspace layout is not working, not sure how to go about tackling that. There is so much wonderful stuff in here . . . and it needs to be boxed and sent to storage and worried about some other time. But not today. Today I get that Spry dropdown menu up and running and looking the way I like it. Works in every browser in the world but IE. So many peeps use Internet Explorer and they have no idea it is broken and old. Oh well.

Back to work, :D)

Life is starting to get exciting around here. Looks like I have the go-ahead on Tajus.com, the boy who remembers pi. We decided his younger brother, Goo-Goo (Rohan), can be on it also. Now to find just the right theme, that his mother will love, that his father will approve, and best of all, that pleases Tajus.

I got my page back up this week. And I got the form to work today. Well, work better. Formmail.pl came in a folder with the hosting, so that is what I used. I didn’t like the way, when the user clicked send, that they got dumped on some white page, saying what they sent, with no way back.

I googled and I searched friend’s pages with forms, and I viewed the page source of so many other forms and I finally found what looked like what I was missing. And it was.

Guess I should ’splain that I took some XHTML/CSS classes last year, and repeated them a lot, and then I quit my day job, and now I am a web site designer. Oh Lord what was I thinking . . . Freedom, pure Freedom.

CodeAvid.com is a simple start. And a work in progress. Right now I’m changing the drop-down menus in the nav bar, which is missing while I work on it, to spry. I hear that is more dependable and certainly more long lasting.

February and March have come and gone.

January’s Birthday Calendar suffered a major set-back. I threw it out cleaning up my office this last time. I do remember holding it in my hand and thinking “hmmm, an extra calendar . . . don’t need that!”.  The only solution is a Birthday Book. Something too expensive to accidentally throw away. A single, central, obvious place to keep the B-Days counted. And it has to be beautiful. And maybe hold photos of the birthday peeps.

My March project, the 3-D life, went much better.  I met a web designer at  one of my coding classes and we meet now at least once a week to review our projects and talk about work. I feel so lucky to have found her. Not to mention, she understands divs. She has div-magic.

This post is short today. I haven’t blogged in awhile and was feeling overwhelmed at getting back to it again.  How nice to be getting back on track.

First, looking back at January’s Intentions, it turned out the first month of the year is a sparse one among my friends and family, for occasions that is. Fortunately, there is a birthday in February to get the ball rolling.

The biggest challenge I can see so far is assembling the ‘gift’ and then getting it to the Post Office. One of the Brother-in-Law’s has a spiffy new job and we are sending him as many books on business and selling and self-promotion as we can afford to mail - did I ever mention we have a storage unit filled with around 6,000 plus books? This will reduce the load by at least 20 ;D

So, in honor of January’s Intention to honor family and friends, I marked up a calendar with every date that I could find. And, I hung the calendar where it can be seen instead of losing it. There are more dates to add, but this feels like a good first step.

For February, I want to focus on reconnecting with my 3-D life. It is time to look up old friends that I haven’t seen in awhile. February is a short month, I think I’ll stick it at that. Check in with Laguna Beach, and the women in the city that I haven’t seen in an age but still feel as close as a sister to.

I think it is still too soon to state my ambition to have a go over at csszengarden.com.

It seems like my New Year’s Eve Intentions didn’t quite hit the mark. For me at least. I like the list of stuff I came up with, but stuff it mostly is.

What do I really want this year?

I want Prosperity, Happiness, and Closeness with Family and Friends. I want to be able to find the Positive in every situation. And I want to be able to do what it takes to support a Sharp Mind, a Healthy Body, and a Loving and Supportive Spirit.

Prosperity, happiness, closeness with family and friends, a positive attitude, a sharp mind, a healthy body, and a loving and supportive spirit . . . that shouldn’t be so hard.

Each month, I will cement this intention by setting a goal. For January, my goal will be to start remembering important dates in my family, my extended family, and my friends. Birthdays, Anniversaries, Graduations, and special milestones. My goal is to set up a system so I will remember and honor their every special occasion.  How hard can that be?

I know I can do this. I know I will LOVE doing this. I know I will BEYOND ENJOY this January task - Cheers and Happy New Years!

Hello 2008

This year I would like to make some resolutions. I think I might have set about to do so in past years, but I can’t remember anything specific. So this year, I’m putting them where they can’t be lost. I’m putting them where they can be ignored, but not forgotten. I’m blogging this year’s intentions.

This year, I intend to learn how to structure a two column, header footer, web page, and then write elegant style sheets for viewing on a monitor, for printing, and for viewing on a handheld.

This year, I intend to aquire a handheld, as in iPhone, to view those fiiiiinely styled pages.

This year, I plan to explore photoshop, to the point where I can get a better result than I do using iPhoto.

This year, I plan to volunteer - not decided where yet - as part of my ‘make a friend’ campaign.

This year, I plan to walk the Tennessee Valley trail 10 times, 5 with a new friend.

This year, I will finally commit to a digital SLR. And lens. Which lens?  Which lens?  Which lens?

This year, and this makes me nervous, I want to get a grip on time. A - grip - on - time. As in noticing where the minutes go. This year. And not forget the looking up at the sky, on a warm summer day. Looking, looking, looking.

GTD. This year I need GTD . . .

Oh, and steps. Average 7 thousand steps a day first half of year, average 10 thousand steps a day the second half of the year.

There must be more. This is New Year’s Eve. I’ll revisit this New Year’s Day and see how I feel about this list so far.

I was reading the reply Auriela McCarthy posted on her blog to a comment I had made to her post about Irene’s dating dilemmas
and it suddenly triggered a string of memories.

Suddenly, I was back in Newport Beach, in my mid 20’s, talking with a friend of a friend I had met up with at a Newport Beach nightclub.  We were talking about the jealous feelings we had for our respective boyfriends at the time. Consuming jealous feelings. Jealousy so intense, it was euphoric.

We compared the constant attention paid to the details of ‘his’ life, looking for clues of infidelity.  Laughed about never being able to drive anywhere without a constant eye out for ‘the’ car, and then, dodging like mad through traffic because we thought we saw it, only it wasn’t.

Or, if we did see the car, driving like a loon, trying to see who was in the passenger’s seat. Feeling a huge let down if the seat was empty, knowing in our hearts it was probably still warm, the passenger only recently departed and we had missed our chance to find out the truth! Again!

Which was what had started the conversation, I had cut her off in traffic, never even seeing her, speeding diagonally through the intersection and disappearing into traffic as I wove around the slower moving cars. She said she recognized the grim look on my face.

I confessed that I was pretty sure my boyfriend cheated on me, she was too. I said her boyfriend wore a suit and didn’t look like a cheater. Mine did, and hers was so, that kind of petered out.

My boyfriend had slept with all of the barmaids in Newport Beach and hers had bedded a large percentage of the female population of corporate Irvine.

We both laughed at how crazy we were and had another drink, looking around the club, one eye out.  Somewhere about now she said, and I can still hear her low, level voice, that she thought she ‘was addicted to being jealous’. That was the only reason she could come up with for continuing on under such painful and unhappy circumstances.

When she was in a jealous rage, make that alone and in a jealous rage - a direct confrontation would have ended the affair - she felt a surge of emotion, a rush of excitement, powerful feelings that she found herself going to any length to achieve.

I don’t remember how the evening ended, but I do remember the vague discomfort of what she was saying. She was describing what I had been indulging in for some time.

There was no epiphany that evening. Both of us felt powerless to change our boyfriend’s rotten behaviors. Both of us felt we had no other choice but to continue chasing cars through traffic, trying to finally find the ‘truth’ that would prove us right and somehow set us free.

My addiction was the same as Irene’s. I would say more exciting, but I haven’t talked to her about the charge she gets from being unhappy so I don’t really know. I still have the occasional relapse, but today I recognize it for what it is, and I slow down, turn my vision back to myself, and enjoy the drive.

My heart goes out to Irene, who still thinks she has no choice, and that only when she finds out the ‘truth’, will others change and set her free.

I really want to thank Auriela for bringing this topic up, it has been awhile since I thought of my handsome English boyfriend and how rude all the barmaids in Newport Beach used to be to me.  ;D

I have been browsing images in some Asian image CDs we bought at a MacWorld some years back. These appear to be the out-takes, the stuff that wasn’t good enough to sell individually. So, I ran this one through the iPhoto software, and increased the exposure setting just enough to bring out the hidden details. What a nice shot this is after all. I love the ocean, especially these close-ups of the rocks that are hidden under the sand most of the year.

These rock images are so fascinating because there are always secondary images, things hidden in the smooth shapes and textures of the rocks. Here I see a serpent’s head, a giant Anaconda carved out of the sandstone by the ocean waves. Couple that with my Color Quiz results, and I wonder what we get? ;D