It was in some ways a painfully long weekend, and in other ways the weekend was entirely too short.

I’m still having issues with my depression. Destroying my cell phone on Saturday didn’t help matters, not did having to plunk down $400 to replace it. But. That’s why we have savings–so when things break (for whatever reason) they can be replaced. So it’s just no new computer for me anytime soon.

The depression was incredibly frustrating. Just one of those days where I can’t stand being inside my own skin, and nothing I did really allowed me to escape myself, although I did managed to distract myself.

I kept busy by doing a fair amount of web design over the weekend, rebuilding the WordPress template for my book blog and then recreating the same style for the book pages of my website. I’m overdue a rebuild of my main page, but I don’t have a clue what I want to do with it, and abandoning the color scheme means having to create a new set of images. Since I’ve got probably 30 or so images that randomly appear, that idea is rather unappealing right now.

Speaking of images, I test drove Adobe Elements over the weekend. I have Photoshop at work, but there is no way I am going to pay that much money for a software package, and I’m one of those weirdos that refuses to pirate software or music, to Elements seemed the logical choice.

Having played with it, it seems precisely what I need, so at some point I’m going to have to cough up the money for that. But it’ll be worth it, because it’ll be nice to do image work at home (and goodbye to Corel Photopaint 10).

The predicted storms never came, so Saturday afternoon was sunny, as was today, so I got to get out and enjoy the flowers, just a little bit. And posted the requisite Sunday Flower Pr0n.

I also finally finished my review for A Short History of Myth.

Here’s to hoping this week goes smoothly.

I’ve been working on the graphics for my book blog, and also added the new design to the rest of the books portion of my site (which is not WordPress).

So there should be a mostly seamless transition between the WordPress portion of the site and the pages I created. The only issue is that there is a small margin/padding issue I cannot for the life of me work out, so the side border is just a teeny bit off. Humph.

ADDENDUM the First:
I also changed the color schemes to match the images.

ADDENDUM the Second:
And IE 6 or lower doens’t render png images correctly, so the header image will look wonky. Too bad. It works fine in all my other browsers, so you’ll just have to live with it.

So yesterday I insisted that my website was about more than my weblog–and then proceeded to talk about little but the blog.

Let’s move on today.

A major part of this site is my book blog and book pages.

This started as a way for me to keep track of books I’d read–especially after I’d sold them back to the used bookstore–and to remember what happened in a book–especially a continuing series.

It reached it’s current incarnation several years ago, although the amount of change it’s gone through seems to say that things may again change in the future.

But maybe not. It’s a lot of work to modify those pages.

First thing I’ll note is that when you go to the genre pages, you won’t get the full deal if you’re using IE. I’ll leave the rant for later, but suffice to say, IE doesn’t bother to follow the rules every other browser follows, so some of the really cool stuff I’ve done doesn’t work in IE. This doesn’t mean you can’t view the pages–everything works fine, and I have a style sheet JUST for freaking IE that ignores the really cool stuff I did. It just means you don’t get the drop down menus, which are really the heart of all the work I did.

So if you go to, say, the Fantasy page or the Mystery page, the menu at the top of the page contains various drop down menus listing every author I’ve read and reviewed. Yes, there are a lot names there. That menu stays with you as you browse the book pages, so you can quickly jump to another author.

There is little in the world that made me as happy as getting that menu system to work right, and making it easy to update.

So what if you’re using IE? You just jump down the page and can peruse the authors from there. Clicking on an author name will take you to the page. Everything works, but it’s just not as cool and useful.

Also, if you click on a book title or image, it will take you to Amazon, and I’ll get pennies for the purchase, that will eventually become a gift certificate which will eventually become a free book.

There is also a link to my on-line book database. This was my project for learning php and MySQL, and I was rather pleased with the way it turned out I must say. Unfortunately, my web host made some server changes in the past months, and my admin pages stopped working, and I haven’t had the time to try and fix them. So the database is about a year out of date. But still, it’s nice for trying to remember who wrote a book. And one day (HA!) I’d like to enter character names.

We’ll see how that goes.

So there’s another section of my site you may never have known existed.

Today I also got my loot for winning Todd‘s summer reading content!

It’s a bag of M&M’s that say Todd Wheeler, Contest 2008, and Summer Reading.

Thanks Todd!

It’s been awhile since I had a vacation.

I took of time over winter break, but that always ends up being just as busy as staying at work, only without the having to get up early bits.

Last vacation was October when I went with Michael to Florida for his conference. I did nothing, and it was good.

I’m tired.

I’ve got a vacation coming up (two actually) and people keep asking, “what are you going to do while you’re there?”

Um. Nothing? I don’t want plans. I don’t want a time table. I don’t want a to do list.

I want to wake up, and then roll back over and go back to sleep. I want to eat good food and read good books. I want to play with my camera and see if I can learn to take landscape pictures.

Of course I have things to do. After all,I’m going there to be in a wedding (Yes, yes. I’ll make sure Michael gets at least one decent picture of me in a dress. And I’ll post it. So you can witness this rare occasion for yourself.). And I totally want meet Janiece and Anne. Because they’re like totally cool (and I’m hoping some of their coolness will rub off on me!).

But beyond that? If we do something cool, that’s fine. If we do nothing, that’s also fine.

Mostly, I just can’t wait to sleep in.

In fact, I am a winner! A winner in Todd Wheelers reading contest!

And I didn’t just get bragging rights, no! I got LOOT!

Hopefully Todd doesn’t look at my library post, or else he’ll realize just how much trouble he could be in!