Archive for October, 2006
Tripping down memory lane
October 25th, 2006
On my way home from work tonight, I stopped by the grocery store to by some sorely-needed cat litter. (The pet store isn’t on my way.) While there, of course, I had to look around to see what I could possibly buy for dinner that was of absolutely no nutritional value. I was successful.
One of the items I found was a “log” of mozzarella cheese (not the part-skim American stuff, the creamy mozzarella di bufala of Italy) wrapped in prosciutto. I searched & searched for a price, but couldn’t find one. Finally I decided I’d take a chance and buy it anyway, being sure to check the price at the check-out. Turns out it was only $5.00, not a bad price for a little piece of heaven.
As I was slicing the cheese tonight, I though back to my Naval tour of duty in Naples, Italy; and how a loaf of crusty bread, a “ball” of mozzarella di bufala, and a bottle of white wine made for an easy & tasty (if not well-balanced) evening meal. Good times.
The other memory the evening evoked was the Christmas four of us (two of my friends and a helicopter pilot from one of the ships in port) went out in search of something to eat and a good time. The plan was to stop at a road-side chicken stand whereever the afternoon took us. We even had the foresight to bring along a cork screw for the wine. Turns out we didn’t need it. All the wine bottles had screw tops.
A year or two ago, I told this story to my friend Dave. Dave owns part of winery and has learned quite a bit about the business. (Dave also drinks all the profits, I think. heehee ) He told me that “they” (I guess he means the wine industry) are finding that screw caps are just as effective as corks. And indeed, tonight’s wine, 4 Emus shiraz, has a screw top. And it’s pretty darned good.
I just hope I can keep enough around for tomorrow when I get to play my Supernatural drinking game. (Gosh, I love that show!)
Posted in Military, Musings | Comments (0)
Going on a WordPress treasure hunt
October 22nd, 2006
Since I’m just starting this blog (again), I figure this would be a great time to try out the Blogging Challenge Treasure Hunt from Lorelle on WordPress. Lorelle is my WordPress hero(ine). I try to follow her blog as much as possible, but I’ve gotten behind in the last few weeks. She started her Blogging Challenge a couple months ago, but I haven’t been doing any of them because, quite frankly, I’m lazy. (Plus, I was having a real crisis of how to organize and manage my blogs & websites.) But it looks like I could learn tons of WordPress info by doing the treasure hunt, so I’m going to try.
I debated whether to do it here or on my WordPress sandbox. Since I’m trying to learn how to create WordPress themes, I created a separate blog where I could play without disturbing others. I decided to put it here because right now the sandbox is not very legible. I finished the sidebar this morning, and it’s looking nice, but the content still isn’t styled and there are no margins in key places, so everything sort of runs together. Consequently, the treasure hunt will be done over here.
The challenge is quite extensive. There’s a list of 100 items that relate to WordPress that we’re supposed to research and read (but not necessarily write about). I’m thinking about taking the list and working on at least one treasure item per day. That means it will take me ove 3 months to finish, but I figure by then it will have become a habit. And who knows, maybe I’ll get so inspired I’ll do several term each day.
Since the list is so long, I’m going to make it into its own page here. That way I’ll be able to refer back to it easily, without having to dig thru’ my archives. (Of course, right now there are no archives to speak of, so the point is rather moot. Still, I think a separate page makes good sense.)
Posted in Blogging | Comments (1)
A new blog, once again
October 20th, 2006
Yes, indeedy. One of the these days I’m going to stop deleting my blogs when they just quite aren’t the way I want them. I guess the problem is I now have so many blogs, I’m not sure what to do with them all. And every now & then I try to pare them down.
Right now I have a blog on WordPress.com, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I don’t want to delete it because I finally got the username “gailann” when I signed up for it. And if I delete it, I can never get the name back. Right now it’s home to a few posts about the TV show Supernatural. I was going to make it my place to review episodes and comment on the show in general. But I found that most of the show’s fans hang out at LiveJournal. So once again I created a blog there. At first it was mainly to comment on a particularly entertaining blog there. But since there’s a whole community of Supernatural fans over there, I’m trying to move all SPN related stuff over there.
So, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the WordPress.com blog. Nor do I know exactly what I’m going to do with this one. Maybe I’ll use this site to test my burgeoning WP theme skills (or lack thereof). I actually have another blog where I was doing that, but I managed to booger it all up. It looks like crap now and I can’t figure out how to fix it. (I know where the problem is, but it’s fairly PHP-intensive, and I know next to nothing about PHP right now.)
In the meantime, I’ll be playing with different themes here, trying to see if I can either find the perfect one, or tear them apart to learn from their construction and create my own. So don’t be scared if you come back & find that everything looks different. It’ll still be me.
Posted in General | Comments (0)