etc.

Of August. Of turning thirty-one. Of becoming a university professor (har!). Of planting Black-Eyed Susans. Of being alternately hot and cold. Of obsessing over my sensible new shoes. Of entertaining friends. Of making Sweeping Changes.

I’ve updated things a bit around here (rss-readers, pop on over): a new banner, a refreshed palette, a new tagline. I feel like I am on the verge and on the verge is a good place to be. Good, good.

Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola to-day, patron saint of soldiers and reader of worldly fiction. I know this because I am an erstwhile student of hagiography and also because I found a widget for my Dashboard that spits out saints of the day right onto my desktop. How delightfully secular!

Hmmm, did you see that weirdness? That was some weird weirdness. In case you happened to miss it, here’s what happened: this website refused to load for most of to-day. Then, about five hours ago, it loaded again, but with an odd array of mysql error messages at the top of the page. I restored to 3 day-old version of the database, and now all appears well. I think I might have inadvertently discovered the upside of not updating this blog in 7 days!

I might not have discovered the weirdness at all if I wasn’t tyring to post a book review 5 hours ago. If all goes well, that book review should appear momentarily. Anticipate!

I’ve had my mind on all things retro lately: the arts & crafts movement, art deco design & architecture, mid-20th Century pop-culture iconography. I’m not sure how this current preoccupation got started, all I know is that lately I find myself drawn to intense colours (teals, oranges, reds), clean lines, and wacky retro icons, like circles and sprockets. This is a first for me!

In the spirit of all things retro, I spent hours in Photoshop last night, installing fonts, playing with dingbats, designing suitably retro headers, and working out a colour scheme, the results of which are here. It feels ever so old school to me, as far as blog design goes that is, no drop-shadows, no rounded corners, and dotted borders even, how very 2002! I can’t stop looking at it at the moment but I know it’s one of those designs that I will become weary of quickly, so I will probably just revert back to the previous design with nary a word (this is actually the same theme, I simply updated the colours, images, and a few other CSS elements; this theme has good bones, which makes it pretty easy to tweak).

Here are a few places that provided inspiration and assistance by way of ideas, fonts and eye-candy:

• font diner (some excellent free fonts here)
• Fullmoon Graphics (great for web/graphic design resources)
• Misprinted Type
• Tack-O-Rama (a staple for free retro web design resources. Their dingbats rock my socks. And you don’t want to miss their design page.)
• Retrolounge (warning: time suck. Don’t visit unless you have a few hours to kill.)

You know, I figured out to-day that the real reason why I redesign this site so much (apart from just being a design junkie and needing a fix every once in a while) is that it gives me something to post about. Is that pathetic? It’s probably pathetic.

The truth, dear friends, is that there just hasn’t been much blog fodder lately. I’m not making anything, sewing anything, knitting much, painting anything, or watching anything. I am reading a lot, but most of that reading is research-related and therefore gets airtime on my other blog. I had intended to have a long weekend this week, complete with a trip to the art supply store to stock up on paints and collage stuff, after which there was to be at least two solid days of art-making in the studio. But, alas, there’s a workshop I need to be at on Friday, so it’s to be a normal weekend after all, with Sunday devoted to more research and library-related things, and Saturday devolving into errand-day. Errand-day does not make for good blog fodder.

I lovelovelove my job, and all the other libraryish stuff I’m up to, but it’s been busy and tiring lately, and all my energies are being funneled into it, leaving little room for much else. On the way to work this morning, I told the mister that what we really need to do is schedule things. Events, outings, something, anything, to break out of this work-all-day-to-bed-early-work-all-day cycle we’re in, and yes, I know I was just telling you how much I was enjoying this routine, and I still sort of am (the early-to-bed-early-to-rise part is still good), but we’ve got to figure out a way to work some magic into it.

I really need some magic.

Welcome to the blog with the most aggressive redesign schedule in the history of the internets! A few long time readers (hi, dad!) will recognize this theme from about two years one year ago, except then it had a little lady tossing a bowling ball on the top-right corner. Deju-vu. Speaking of aggressive redesign schedules, did you know that MIT redesigns their homepage everyday? Well, it isn’t a redesign in the strictest sense of the term, they really just apply a new stylesheet and the rest of the page architecture stays the same, but it’s cool anyway. And apropos for a technology school, I suppose.

Right. So, if you’re reading this via RSS, pop on over and have a peek!

When your charge for the day is to dismantle the Christmas tree and put away the decorations (yes, we’ve kept it up this long; yes, it’s been nice & festive in here while grey february rages on outside our windows; yes, we’re lazy;) but what you really want to do is noodle around your websites and server and neaten up a bit, what do you do? Why noodle, of course! And redesign while you’re at it!

So, another redesign here at etc. hq. The theme is Ambiru, a brand new theme from Phu Ly over at If..Else. I wasn’t ready to abandon the single-column layout but have been despairing a bit lately at the relatively low number of single-column options available out there in the WordPress theme world, until I stumbled upon Phu’s “theme a day” feature this morning (I installed another one of Phu’s lovely designs on my other blog, too).

For me, the main draw of this theme is the header image, love a decent amount of headspace devoted to a striking image. The image above is one of my pictures from Cuba (here’s the unadulterated version), this cold, grey month brought on the sudden need for a bright, warm image. I went a bit dizzy in Photoshop this morning, cropping and saturating like crazy, adding noise, and finally a lens flare. I had no idea that this was the look I was going for until I got here.

Also, a new tagline, for which you can thank a recent Bowie spell.

Let me know if any of this is broken or just plain horrible on your monitors, would you? I know you will, you’re all so good like that.

I’ve spent a goodly amount of web-noodling time, lately, in search of a fetchingly striped header for this here space and not having found such a header, resorted to creating one myself. It was easy! And fun! I think I’ll do it again! To mark the occasion, I also refreshed the tagline. There, then. Time well spent.

Some films recently enjoyed and not:

• Garden State ***
• The Aviator ****
• Into the Blue ***
• Fantastic Four **½
• Skeleton Key **
• Dark Water **½
• Four Brothers ***
• The Exorcism of Emily Rose ***
• Mean Girls ***
• Red Eye *½
• Brokeback Mountain ****½

I’ve found it necessary to institute the half star; Brokeback Mountain, for example, was a brilliant and lovely film, certainly worthy of more than four, but not quite five stars.

I was bored of the old tagline, so I changed it. And I came up with so many alternative taglines (smart! witty! taglines!) that I have decided to put them into rotation. You won’t know when the next one will appear! OK, yes you will. I’ll point it out.

Because I am the master of subtlety.

I haven’t said much about this but I’ve been feeling a goodly amount of librarian angst over the subject categorization I have going on on this here blog. It has seemed to me, for quite a while, that I had too many categories and that my choice of categories wasn’t always meaningful. So I’ve been reorganizing and weeding, I’ve added a couple of categories and deleted some others, bringing us to a net reduction of 6 categories. Ouf, how bloated we once were! Categories now live on the archives page, in case you’re wondering.

In other news, unrelated entirely, I have to-day completed a few household tasks (cleaned the kitchen, done the laundry, paid the bills) in the company of 339 of my favourite songs. I have a new gadget and I love it dearly. So dearly!

To-night, I am sorting through my basket of temporarily-abandoned knits (with Win Butler humming in my ears) and to-morrow I will tell you about them. There is an alarming number of them and it is incumbent upon me, isn’t it, to tell you about them in order to embarass myself into action? Yes, I think so.

So much for Fall colours, eh? I am quite literally obsessed with the brown/blue colour combination at the moment (also redesigned the other blog for this purpose too. That one is also still a work in progress) and squidfingers has some exquisite patterns that cater to this pallet, so I gave in. A few more things to tackle:

• get the blog title & description to show up in the header space (I’m almost stumped. Any ideas? Later: OK. Figured out the php. Now I just have to beat the css into submission to get the description to line up. One of these days I’m going to learn css good & proper; this trial & error method I’ve been relying on heretofore is not cutting the mustard anymore) later still: blatant cheat. I added the tagline to the title </frustration>.
• create a template for static pages check
• make it all play nicely with IE Safari & Firefox? No problem.

And if you could post a quick comment if anything looks broken on your screen, I’ll be your friend forever.