KirstenL4W

New Boy started working with us today. I think he makes a fine addition to the group. Of course, he is a supreme sucker-upper. He brought each of us girls a white rose. I told Mad Scientist that New Boy is never allowed to work anywhere else. If he can charm the people we do business with the way he charmed us, he has a very wealthy future ahead of him.

Usually when we have a new person start, we close the office for lunch and all go out to eat. But there was too much going on today, so at noon when my stomach was yelling at me and I was starting to get shakey from too much hunger, I ate the lunch I brought with me, and burnt my tongue in the process. About half an hour later, my poopy-head boss Mad Scientist said, “Hey, let’s order out!” so not only did I not get free lunch because I was already full, I suffered by smelling all the wonderful food and feeling the pain of my burnt tongue. To soothe it I stopped and got some ice cream on my way home.

I’m really happy with my new template. Of course I still keep looking for all sorts of other cool stuff, but I’m really liking this. I’ve got a few other tweaks I want to do, but as you can see from my timestamp it’s well passed my self-imposed internet curfew. Whatever. Tomorrow is Friday and I get to be tired on Fridays, especially since I don’t have to work Job#2 later. And with it being a holiday weekend, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I get out of work early (as the admin I usually have to stay until everyone else is gone or 5pm, whichever comes first).

I still have to pay bills tonite, since today was payday. Joy. I just love paying bills. But looking at the time and knowing how bill paying is not something that helps me sleep, I think I can wait until tomorrow after work. I’ll do it first thing when I get home.

And I got some interesting news from my mom today. She sold her house. She sold it in a week in a rather soft market, and got asking price for it. It was in no way underpriced, but being on a dead-end street in a quiet neighborhood that will not be developed any further due to conservation land being right next door, and because she listened to the stager and me regarding advice to make it sell faster, she sold it quick. I bet the neighbors down the street are jealous - their house has been on the market for 3 or 4 months. Now my mom has to look for a new house, but it will be in a town with much lower taxes, and she’ll be able to get the same sized house and the same amount or more land for $100K less. It will be weird having my mom in a new place. Even though her current home is not my childhood home, the town she’s moving to is about 40 minutes away (I think) and I’ve never been there. Visiting will be weird because I’m not familiar with the area at all. I needed some serious help finding this town on a map, and I’m really good with maps. I’ve dealt with her moving before, but it’s always been to towns I already know or at least the next town over, so the learning curve wasn’t that bad. This is totally new. A good thing about it though, she will be about half the distance to my Grandma than she is now, which will be convenient. Grandma doesn’t get out much and my mom spends every other weekend there to help her out. (Uncle Caboose takes the alternate weekends, and she has a nurse visitor during the week.)

Well that’s it for now. I have a serious urge to check Limewire iTunes to see if a song I’m craving is available, then it’s off to bed, hopefully before the sun rises. Till tomorrow….

My comments are properly formatted now. I guess it took awhile for the rest of my blog to catch up with the changes. Now I just wish I could delete my own because of the silly test comment I have in the previous post. For some reason the comment moderation didn’t seem to work, but the settings are all correct. I’ll play with it later. For now I’m gonna go lay down for another 20 minutes.

WOOHOO! I did it! I changed my template and got my sidebar the way I want it! Yeah! I’m so happy! Of course, I’m not stupid (see this post), I did back up my old template just in case something really bizarro happens. That kind of foresight is invaluable. But for now I’m just really happy I have a template I like. Except for one little thing: the comments pages show on the old template. I’m thinking something in the code got left out. I’ll play around with that some more to see if I can fix it.

I found a template I like. Actually, I found it some time ago but didn’t want to put forth the effort to get my sidebar the way I want it and edit the other stuff. Now I’m just working on it in Notepad bit by bit and pasting it in my template without saving, just to make sure it all works. Once it’s done I’ll post it. It’s much nicer than the one I have now. Not that I have anything against the Blogger templates, but like I said in the previous post, I want endless choices. Hopefully when the new Beta version is put into full effect, there will be many many more choices, along with the ability to edit the template without losing all the sidebar customizations. That’s the most frustrating part of changing templates. But for now, enjoy some new sidebar content all the way down at the bottom.

I’m still frustrated with trying to edit my code. My biggest thing is being able to change the background. I figured out how to change the colors of my header, footer, profile box, post boxes, etc. But the main thing is that when I try to change the background, the round corners don’t show up correctly - the corners still have the old color. So something in the code needs to be done to show the rounded corners in the new color, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. Can anyone help?

As for other blogger templates/hacks/widgets/add-ons etc, I am bored with the stuff I have found already. I have some idea of what I want to do, but every time I try to search either through a regular web search or by check out other people’s blogs, I keep coming up with the same stuff. I’ve even dug 10 or more pages into google and I’m not finding anything new. I want cool new toys for my blog and I want to be able to do the things I want. Some of it is just knowledge (see above paragraph) and the other part is my impatience with limited options. I want LIMITLESS options for cool stuff to do to my blog because I’m still infatuated with this blogging stuff and I’m hungry for more.

Turns out I will have Labor Day off. With 2 jobs, one can never count on getting time off, especially in retail. But we actually have staff now, and besides wanting to give me a day off, the rationale is that I cost more on holidays since I am eligible for holiday overtime and the new people are not. I need the money, but I also will appreciate a day off. Maybe I’ll get something done around the house since on work days I tend to spend all my spare time blogging.

I went for a massage tonite. This wasn’t a massage in the traditional sense, it was a super fancy version of those massage chairs you see in the mall. See, I got a call at work last week from a salesperson, which I usually hate because I don’t have time for that kind of crap. But before I could hang up, I heard the words “free massage.” Ok, now you got my attention. I signed up, and was promised a month of free massages if I went. So I did. Turns out the month of free massages is a huge sales pitch to get you hooked on the massage bed. It’s pretty nice, a bit better than those ones in the mall because it actually senses your body size and weight and adjusts itself accordingly, and there are a number of settings for different programs. I have a card that lets the staff mark off when I’ve been, and I can go whenever I want for the next month, every day if I want. No way am I gonna buy one of these things since they cost as much as a used car, but for the next month I’ll enjoy my free massages.

Well I’ve spent far too much time on the computer here, as usual. Time to eat dinner, and I’ll attempt to get to bed before midnight tonite. One can only hope.

I’m thumbing my nose at all of you right now. Ok, most of you. I may not have the self-discipline to do basic things like get my ass to bed on time, but I am smarter than the average duck.

So there.

But check this out - a site that lets you list, by logo, all the metros in the world that you’ve been on:

Got at b3co.com!

Pretty neat, eh? I have to admit, it might be a few more but I left out the ones from cities I know I’ve been to but can’t remember if I’ve actually been on their subway systems.

FINALLY, Dr. Grandma has come to her senses and come back to work with us. She even brought donuts in this morning for everyone. I still think she’s not herself after her employment-elsewhere adventures. See, the Dr. Grandma I know would not go near a donut with a 10-foot pole. She’s totally carb-o-phobic. But I did enjoy the donuts, and I’m even happier that Dr. Grandma is back with us. Now our group is complete once more.

I worked at Job#2 tonite. It was miserably slow today, but for some excitement my coworker Ashes came in with a couple of classmates from her film class. They’re shooting some sort of PSA regarding proper walking techniques in high heels, or something like that. Shoe boss was kind enough to let them use the store for filming. I was cast as an extra in the how not to walk in heels. It was pretty easy, really, since I hate heels and always wear flats. I’m being adventurous in a 1 inch heel, really. So they got shots of me wearing these:

…and I lived to tell about it. It’s a 4 1/4 inch heel, the highest we have in the store. I asked Ashes if it was possible to upload it to YouTube so you can all see my film debut. I’ll let you know what she says.

I’ve still been oversleeping a lot, which has absolutely got to stop. I’ve been looking at a couple of habits that contribute to this: caffeine and blogging, or the internet in general. Since I’ve been so tired, and soda is available at work, I’ve been sucking it down like there’s no tomorrow. New rule is that I don’t drink any caffeine after lunch. And internet - gosh, it’s so easy to lose track of time on these internets. You think you’re only spending a minute or 2 checking email and a quick rundown of a couple favorite blogs, and next thing you know the boss is calling asking if you’re seriously ill because you haven’t been in all week. It hasn’t gotten that bad with me, but I have been up till the wee hours with bloodshot eyes staring at my computer screen. So now, no computer after 10pm - 11 on weekends. As of this writing, that means I only have 25 minutes to finish this post and check my other blogs before shutting down for the night. We’ll see how that goes.

So, in the interest of time, I must be going now. Tomorrow night I don’t have to work so I’ll have more time for you all. Till then…

First of all, something weird is happening. I signed up for a WordPress account, and they have this neat feature that allows you to import another blog, so I decided to try it. Now I see that all my previous posts have absolutely no paragraph separation. The only way to fix it that I know of is to go in and edit the html of each and every post. This is my 102nd post, and I really don’t need yet another project. If anyone has any other ideas, let me know. (ETA: I figured it out. My publishing settings got changed, I had to change it back to convert the line breaks. Phew!)

I do have a few blogs, 2 are inactive, 1 is kind of active (I go on mostly to check out what my friends are doing), the WordPress one is too new to know how active it will be, and of course this one. My Blogger blog is my baby. It was the first one I had, and I have the most control over the page design and content. The others you have to pay for to get that kind of control, and I’m all set with that. I don’t pay for anything online, except to actually have access at home. I see that Blogger is upgrading things, which they currently have in beta at the moment. Personally, I like things the way they are, but I’d just like to see a few things added. More templates would be awesome, along with the ability to change your template without having to go back and edit every darned thing in your sidebar (WP has this ability). I’d also like to see tags directly on this site, simply to keep my own stuff organized without having to go through a 3rd party (no offense, Technorati). And photo albums - it would be great if every picture was placed in an album on our blogs, with a link to it in the sidebar, and when someone is browsing through the album, if they click on the picture it will bring you to the post it’s in. Just a thought.

I’m hesitant to try beta because it’s just that - beta. A lot of people consider me to be web-savvy, but I don’t always think so. And I never want to be among the first people to use a new release of something. I’d much rather wait until the bugs get worked out by the brave people. And Blogger Beta doesn’t allow html formatting in the template. I like the idea of making it user friendly for the uninitiated, but let those of us who do know a thing or 2 about html mess around with our code. I’ll most likely wait until the final release, when I’m required to change over.

I also signed up at Technorati today, because I have discovered the joy and genius of tags. So that’s another project, to tag all my posts. Like I don’t spend enough time online as it is. And you can all see the results of me going nuts over buttons, as of this writing I have 9 in my sidebar. Trust me, more will be going up as time goes on.

In other news, I went out and ran some errands, but I don’t know where my mind was. My main goal today was to get my car smogged and get an oil change. Didn’t happen, so now I need to try and find time this week to get it done. I did get some grocery shopping done, and did laundry (which I just finished moments ago). I also managed to clean my kitchen, with the exception of the floor. That will be done at a later date - a much later date if I can ever pull myself away from the computer.

And it looks like the apartment complex is painting the buildings. They are currently a dingy beige with dark brown accents, and terra cotta tile roofs. The new colors have terra cotta colored accents. I hope they change the dingy beige to a brighter cream color, that would really brighten things up around here. No idea when my building will get done.

Time to go now. It’s after 10 and I still need to eat dinner, which I haven’t done yet because I’ve been spending so much damn time on these internets!!!!!

Even though I keep saying I need to step away from the computer, I’m not listening. I did finally get that button. If anyone wants it, just go to View–> source and copy and paste it that part of the code into your own template. I’m assuming that those who would want the button have an inkling of knowledge about this sort of thing.

If you can’t figure out the view source part of it but have a handle on copy and paste, and you know where to put it in on your template, just leave me a comment with your email and I’ll send it to you in a notepad document, and you can copy and paste it from there. I won’t publish any comments with email addresses in them, so you won’t have to worry about spam.