I’ve thought about writing a post about this before, and had some reservations, but it’s something going on in my life right now, and something I had some good news on today, so I thought I would write about it.  I takes a little bit of storytelling.

In 1985, I got together with a couple of friends after school for a game of football.  It was a half-day of school, we had an actual field to play on, and it had just rained, giving us some nice, muddy ground – all in all, perfect.  In the course of the game, I got whacked in the eye.  The injury caused the lens and iris of my eye to fill up with blood, and I lost vision in my left eye.  After a week in the hospital, my vision slowly returned.  It took another month before my pupil undilated. After assorted follow-ups, the eye doctor said that everything was fine, but that 20 years from now, I may have some problems.

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This weekend we had a fun getaway at Skytop Lodge, a remarkable historic resort in the Poconos.  Both Kiersten and I have taken ballroom dancing lessons at Vince Brust Studios (in particular, for our first wedding dance), and a few times during the year Vince organizes a dinner/dance at Skytop.   The lodge has its own big band – the Skytop Orchestra – and it’s  a rare treat to swing dance to Glen Miller music played live.  The resort is amazing – the grounds, gardens, and architecture are breathtaking – and I look forward to returning there for the next dance during warmer weather.  Here’s a few of my favorite pics form the weekend:

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Last weekend Kiersten assembled a plant light stand, and it’s new home is in the laundry room of our basement (at the end of last year we finished our basement and turned it into an art studio. In the process, the laundry area was upgraded from ‘damp medieval dungeon’ to a nice, finished laundry room). Here’s a photo of the new stand, with a few happy plants basking in the full spectrum lights:

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One of the things that I’m a bit envious about with Google Blogger is the sense of community.  Part of this is because everyone can comment on everyone else’s blog using their current credentials, and don’t need to create a new login and account for each new site.  This is a bit harder to do in WordPress, but the Gigya Sociable plug-in helps by allowing you to login using your existing Blogger/Facebook/Twitter, etc account and comment.  You’ll notice the new links to the side.

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After a last ditch snowfall a few weeks ago, winter finally gave way and suddenly it was sunny days in the 70′s.  Perusing our yard, the daffodils are in bloom, the bushes are sporting some green, the birds are munching away at the feeder, and splashes of color are emerging everywhere.  Six years ago the house was a new construction and had no landscaping.  Everything which has come since then was planted by me and Kiersten (and Kiersten’s really the green thumb – before we met I was lucky if I didn’t kill a house cactus).  I was thinking about all of the funny things that we learned along the way, and decided to compile a list:

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After visiting Janet Pantry’s site, I noticed the artist blogroll was live – it had the most recent post of each blog along with a thumbnail.  This appears to be a standard widget in Blogger, but unfortunately in WordPress it’s somewhat hard to do.  After a bit of tinkering with plugins and code, I’ve updated the list on my site to follow suit (like all computer tasks, this was strangely harder than I expected).   I like that, instead of a static link list, it’s a dynamic list of current content.  Hopefully it will generate some more clicks to the sites of the artists I’ve linked, and give them a bit more traffic.  Of course it’s also nice for me to log on and see the latest from all of my favorite blogs at a glance.

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I was tempted to run some fancy find and replace function to delete all the rouge Â’s that have peppered my blog since the WordPress upgrade, but through some unforseen technical glitch I probably would have deleted all the real A’s too, turning my website into “The rtwork of Shwn Flchetti”.  Since I don’t want to be an ‘rtist’, I decided just to safely (and maddeningly) delete them one by one.  Ah, now back to some rtwork.

I’ve developed a Pavlonian twitch every time I see the alert on my blog “A new version of WordPress is available, click here to upgrade”, since every previous upgrade has resulted in a subsequent “Woes of the Web” post, usually after a week of banging my head against the keyboard in frustration as I tried to figure out where exactly all of my posts had gone, what a “fatal error in line 62″ was, and how on earth to undo it all.

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Happy Halloween!