I got nothing.

So that means it’s time for a game of word association. Remember, to get around the spam rules, old word = new word.

snow

Somehow–and although I know how it happened, it still doesn’t make any sense–we ended up watching the Neighborhood Inaugural Ball. (Let’s just say it was Grandmom’s fault and leave it at that.)

I saw quite shocked by the song that was selected for President and Mrs. Obama to dance to: “At Last.” This was the song that Michael and I had our first dance to at our reception.

So what? you say. Lots of people choose, “At Last” as the song for their first dance. True. But how many also choose to have “Simple Gifts” played at the wedding?

“Simple Gifts” was the only song I actually selected to be played at our wedding. (Seriously, I don’t have any idea what else was played–I didn’t care.)

If you aren’t familiar with “Simple Gifts” it’s a Quaker song, and Aaron Copland based “Appalachian Springs” upon the song (and if you’re not familiar with “Appalachian Springs” then you quite obviously are not from West Virginia.)

Thus, I was quite surprised to hear the two most important song from my wedding day played today for the Inauguration.

But for those of you who don’t know the song, or would just like a reminder, here are the lyrics to “Simple Gifts.”

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

May we all come round right.

I got loot from Anne today!

No, I didn’t take pictures yet. Grandmom has been watching Inaguration stuff all day, and I can’t do anything while TV is on. (In fact, it’s taken my about 15 minutes to write this pathetic post.)

…and it makes me happy every time I read it.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

I would like to point out that eight years ago, the depths and horror of the Bush administration were predicted in “Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’“.

But today we can begin the reversal of the losses of our civil liberties.

Today we are taking the first step in the right direction to turn the country from the darkness of the Bush administration, an administration that allowed banks to run a muck by placing profit in front of the security of investors and investments. An administration that violated civil liberties after Bush declared that the terrorists hated us for our freedoms (obviously the solution was to curtail those freedoms, so the terrorists would no longer hate us). An administration that believed the environment existed solely for the extraction of natural resource. An administration that fought advances is medical research.

Today we turn the page on that dark past and start the hard work of moving forward. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be pretty, but we can do it.

Yes we can.

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
–Abraham Lincoln

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
— Benjamin Franklin

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
— William Faulkner

Today is penguin awareness day!

…
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus, and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters of life. At points he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew and throw him off base….
(more…)

Michael is an enabler.

I mean, he actually allowed me to convince him that I needed a netbook before my Dad’s surgery on Friday.

After all, I need something to distract me while I’m waiting, right?

And not only is it running Linux (which I really want to become comfortable with, so I can get away from Windows), it also has Open Office, and bluetooth, so I can use Michael’s phone to access the internet.

Wheeee!

And I had a couple Amazon reward certificates hanging around, so that makes it all better, right?

Michael made some comment about, “our new computer.” Sure thing, dear. Keep believing that.

Books went out today. So if you’re a recipient, keep an eye out.

I still, however, have plenty of books in the basement, so if you want more, here’s what’s left:
(more…)

The Monday before Christmas, in a long and convoluted manner, doctors discovered a mass in my father’s abdomen. It was relatively quickly determined to be outside the alimentary canal, but behind the source of his digestive distress for the past six months. After a whole bunch of tests, they have finally scheduled his surgery.

Friday the 23rd he goes in for surgery; the difficulty of the surgery and the length of his recovery will be determined partially by the amount of scar tissue in his abdomen from his prostate surgery a decade ago, and his radiation therapy last summer.

Although I hope the surgery is fast and has a quick recovery, the procession of events leading up to this point has been chaotic to say the least, so I am expecting a difficult surgery (for the surgeon–Dad will be out through the process) and a lot of time spent in the hospital waiting for his bowels to wake up.

For my own sanity, I’ll be twittering from the hospital, so you can check my twitter feed to see when he comes out of surgery, but I won’t actually get twitter updates on my phone, so if you’ll want to reach me you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way and either txt or e-mail. :)

So if I’m not around much, check my twitter feed (conveniently located in my sidebar) if you’re curious what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I’ve still got a week’s worth of posts to come up with. :)

So…

I modified my css to run the following:

#content a {
margin-top:-9em;
padding-top:9em;
}

#content a:link {
margin-top:0em;
padding-top:0em;
}
#content a:visited {
margin-top:0em;
padding-top:0em;
}
#content a:active {
margin-top:0em;
padding-top:0em;
}
#content a:hover {
margin-top:0em;
padding-top:0em;
}

To work in Firefox and Seamonkey, but not Opera or Safari. (Have I mentioned that I dislike both opera and safari? Why is it so hard to find things like “clear the cache”? Grr!)

IE 6 & 7 work because they aren’t using the fixed positioning or CSS menus.

I’ve got some other things I’d like to try though, and we’ll see from there. I’m still trying css first, because I really don’t want to change all the pages that use those style sheets (and there are a lot of ’em).

ADDENDUM the First:

Found a different fix for Firefox that doesn’t work in Opera and Safari.

<a name=”A” class=”anchor” id=”A”></a>
with
.anchor {
margin-top:-9em;
padding-top:9em;
}

in the style sheet.

Sorry Kat, we still see you. You’re just not that stealthy.

STANDOFF!

Not sure what it is, but Kit and Kat haven’t been getting along as well as they used to.

So cute! All curled up in front of the wood stove in the basement.

Just got back from seeing Ricky Scaggs and Bruce Hornsby.

It was an amazing show and several times I was simply blown away by the music. Very high energy performance, and they were quite obviously having a lot of fun playing it.

They did a version of “That’s Just the Way It Is” that was incredibly good. Well, actually everything they did was incredibly good.

And their backing band was amazing as well, with an excellent banjo player and a simply amazing fiddler, whose fiddle blended perfectly with Bruce Hornsby’s piano.

And to make it better, we inadvertently had perfect seats. We were towards the front and way off to the side, which meant that we had a perfect view of Bruce Hornsby’s hands on the piano keys.

But mostly–holy cow that was just an awesome show!

So I’ve got a technical question. That means most of you should wander off and go write Nathan some Vogon Poetry.

So here’s the question:

On my books pages, specifically the main page for each genre, I’m using fixed positioning to allow the content to scroll while the header image and navigation remain in place (yes, yes, yes, I have a separate style sheet for stupid IE that doesn’t freaking work correctly.)

My problem is that I have anchors throughout the document. So if instead of selecting an author from the drop down menus you click on a letter of the alphabet, you jump down the page.

The problem is that the content jumps *under* the header. Although, with the author menu the way it is, I’m not sure how many people use the alphabetical menu, it would still be nice if it the content viewers wanted to see didn’t scroll under the header image.

I found one or two suggestions, neither of which worked properly for me.

Does anyone have a good solution for this? I’ve got three separate fixed elements (header image, alphabet navigation, side navigation), and am using ems for my positioning of the content section, but I don’t think that should make a difference. I tried playing with positive and negative margins, and ended up with a mess–probably because I was doing it wrong, since the idea of positive and negative margins seems like it would work. Except that it didn’t. When I applied them to links, it screwed up regular hyperlinks. When I applied it to a specific style, things were screwed up in a different manner.

Anyone?