If you happened to visit this blog yesterday you may  have gone blind with the fonts changing any time you clicked anything and blaring hideous colors blinding your retinas and been confused at random things appearing and disappearing.  That’s because I’m using a different theme now and it allows for tons of customization and has sucked me into the weird purgatory between the world of complete css ignorance and programmers.  A place where you start learning just enough to have some customization power to give you a thirst to control everything.  I entered into font hell and learned all about line padding and container padding and column width.

I read an article on the optimal font size and line height and line width for reading comfort – the idea is that if you aren’t comfortable reading a blog you’ll leave it.  Makes sense.  Sometimes we don’t know what is turning us off we just know we don’t like something about something and avoid it.  I get this.  It’s the holy grail of design: elements all purposely made for ultimate consumer comfort and attraction.  But it’s easy to get sucked into a black-hole of details and go completely mad.  I tried so many fonts yesterday that my eyes started hating them all.  I’ve settled on Georgia for now but I’m not at all certain about it.

At the end of the day – the main thing is that I’m learning new tricks on the computer and I’m enjoying having more control over how my blog looks.  I may make many changes over the next few weeks as I play around.  I’m having a lot of fun.

Meanwhile – I have been in a grand state of chaos as my job has been implementing some new systems which take adjusting to – so I’ve been behind for two weeks now.  At the same time I’ve had all these food projects going on that I’ve had trouble keeping up with.  Max’s birthday is this week as is Thanksgiving and my mom’s birthday happens shortly after that and then Philip’s birthday.  It feels like chaos around here.  But it’s not so bad.  For the first time in forever I just paid all my bills on time and there weren’t that many of them.  As I’ve mentioned before – we owe thousands of dollars to the IRS and hundreds to the Oregon Revenue Service – so we’re a long way off of being solvent.  Our last house is still floating in that weird non-forclosed-on state and it’s okay.  These things will take time.

Yesterday was great.  I have finally gotten my olives in their second brine and they SMELL like unseasoned olives – very cool!  I am almost ready to put batch two in their first brine.  And today I’m going with my friend Sharon to pick some of my dad’s olives in Sonoma.  These are the kinds of things I like to do for fun.  If you want to hear more detail about my olive curing adventures you can read about them HERE and HERE on Stitch and Boots.

I was thinking this week about how I used to write on my blog every day.  It was the public diary of my various adventures.  At some point I started feeling obligated to only write posts when I had something meaty to write or late at night after several beers when caught in the quagmire of a particular song.  I think I’m going to return to my old habits because I find it more cathartic and healthy to empty my budget every day or at least a few times a week.  So with the new blog theme I think I’m going to be writing more frequently.

The state of things around here is good.

How are the state of things in your world?