So if you’re new here, welcome! A lot of my writing is purely about my own life, but i also like to review books, movies and music, rant about religion, post my photography, and correct people’s English. I’m also a bride-to-be, and i’ve been keeping track of the things that i find inspiring as i do my planing on my tumblr. Have a look around and please enjoy!

The archives have been moved to their own page and i’ve added a search bar, which was a long time coming. I’ve also added avatars back to the comments, so you WordPress users will be able to show me your lovely faces. My blog matches my portfolio website now, which i think is nice.

I don’t want to clutter up the sidebar, but i think it probably needs something. An RSS icon? A blogroll, perhaps? I’ve been learning some cool WordPress stuff at work, so the blog may be evolving over the course of the next few weeks. By and by i should be able to post some new websites that i’ve designed as well. Stay tuned.

This is a graph of how many visitors my site gets each day, and on July 2nd, last Thursday, you can see there’s a giant spike where it goes up to 32,301 visitors. Previously i’d been getting eight or twelve people a day, maybe. The total number of comments on the Tropicana post is over 150 now, and the Sierra Mist post has another 25.

Alas, i have zero new subscribers, so the number of visitors has gone pretty much right back down. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted!

…and here’s what you see when you click “find more on the Tropicana redesign”:

My blog post is the first hit! Needless to say, i’ve been getting a LOT of new comments on the Tropicana redesign post. I just want to extend a warm welcome to all the new visitors to the site, and apologize for not doing a redesign of my own before you all came to visit. I had no idea that i should be expecting a crowd.

Sorry, that’s what one professor or another used to call writing down or drawing whatever comes to mind without editing or censoring it. That’s what i plan to do now. Sorta.

The photo is of my new Paperwhites which Nathan bought for me a few days ago, for no particular reason. They’re lovely and still have their bulbs, but they get top-heavy when in bloom and fall over and stand back up again regularly. It’s quite beyond me.

Our oil painting class began last night. We’d been making bets with each other about the sex, age, and crankiness of the teacher, judging solely by the provided list of required materials. We figured male, middle-aged, fairly strict and moderately arrogant – or maybe that was just my bet. Turns out i was totally off – she’s young and quite nice. I’m definitely excited to start learning about painting technique, because although i do pretty well with dry media of all sorts, i’m clueless about paint.

Obama is President, hooray!!

Not a lot else to report. It’s still cold. I haven’t begun packing yet. I still have my job… I think. I still see English errors everywhere, but I’m feeling less enthusiastic about blogging them, because i see people whom i know damn well read my blog continuing to make the same mistakes. It’s good for a giggle at best, but nobody’s actually learning from me. And maybe that’s okay and it’s still worth doing, i’m just not sure yet.

I’d go on my own rant, but i think the bottom line is that i want you, the people i love, to know that i expect you to vote and to choose your vote based on something greater than your own tax burden. Please.

1. Get a haircut.

2. Tell her you’re going to be fine

3. Decide you’re actually not fine, and write shit about her on your blog where you do realize she will see it.

The decent ones apologize and take it down. The dicks go on writing worse and worse stuff.

I’m with my dear friend Mike Tomlinson on the whole breaking up issue–why can’t people just date for a while, have a nice couple of years together and then part ways peacefully, being glad to have had that time together?

love,

Steph

So welcome to the new blog, comments and suggestions happily accepted. I have a feeling i’ll be giving this a new look before very many months go by, and maybe adding cool details in the meantime. The only thing i’ll miss about Myspace is seeing people’s photos next to their comments. I think it’s possible to do that here, but i doubt anyone will really want to make an account and upload a photo just for my little blog. Feel free, though.

I’m excited because now ANYONE can comment! Which means you, too, DAD and DAN! And spammers… i think i’d be flattered to get spam. Not really.

I have an RSS feed. Learn how to use it–your web browser probably has “RSS bookmarks” or something along those lines. It lets you see when i’ve made a new post without having to actually come to the website to check. Google makes a fun RSS reader. Personally, i’m a big fan of Netvibes. Possible instructional Netvibes post in the future.

Here are a few photos from the Star Wars dance Dan and i performed in last weekend. Yeah, we’re that cool.

The one photo that i took (obviously the best composition). Dan as Emperor Palpatine!

Dan’s shot of me as Mara Jade!

Evil twins. Er, master and apprentice. Or something.

Fear my flared nostrils! Dan, stop smiling! (“huh? “)

Star Wars Geeks.

As you can see, my hair is lighter than it was. I paid a hefty sum for the treatment and wound up with hair that’s still much lighter at the top than the bottom. Extremely disappointing. You can’t tell in these photos, though, and actually the reddish-brown color i ended up with worked well for the costume.

Looks like it’s time for bed. Have a lovely weekend!

Color space Hell!!, originally uploaded by amidala515.

This is a screen shot of the difference in the colors of my blog between Firefox and Safari on my Mac. I’m trying to learn about why this happens. In the meantime–i posted this from flickr, isn’t that cool?!

I’ll take this opportunity to see how a list looks…

• Fix gap below header in IE 7
• Get RSS icon
• Add content to portfolio page
• Maybe figure out how to set portfolio as the home page
• Fix image map in FF
• Redesign, since it looks awful in the Mac color space.

Will someone please explain to me why anything designed on a Mac looks awful on a PC or printed, and anything designed on a PC looks awful on a Mac? Why are the color spaces so different???

I need a plan of attack for posting… i’ll post at least once a week, i promise. I’m not sure if anyone would want to visit more often than that, considering that only a couple of my readers will know how to use an RSS reader. I should also put an RSS button in the sidebar… Maybe look into some SEO, though i’ll mostly be blogging for people i know rather than the general public.

This is a lot of work, but hopefully it will be worth it!

Let’s see how a photo looks…

Here is my caption

…and another photo

Here’s hoping this works!

Now i ought to write an actual paragraph and see how that looks. So, it’s friday of VEISHEA, but it’s just about freezing outside–forty degrees, according to my weather widget. It’s supposed to snow tonight and tomorrow, but it was supposed to have snowed every day this week and we only got rain. Still, rainy, cold VEISHEA sounds super lame to me, snow or no. I looked forward to this all winter and now it’s still poopy outside. This will give me a new appreciation for the Iowa State Fair, perhaps?