Technology: Grrrrrr!

I'd like to say technology and I get along, but I'd be lying.

Behind the scenes, I'm the member of team "some things looming" that puts together the blog and changes the content on the website. It's almost laughable, as I'm also the member of the team with probably the least amount of computer savvy. So, I'll apologize now to you Internet Explorer users for the blog header sticking several pixels out of alignment. I'm a little bit OCD, so I can truly appreciate how bothersome that is. I found it's not a problem in either Firefox, nor Chrome. And when I tried to 'fix' it for IE, it was still off-centered, no matter what I did to the template. Not only that, it totally messed up the alignment in Firefox and Chrome! It's a CSS error, I'm told, by my programmer husband.

"CSS?" I asked.
"Cascading Style Sheets," he said.
"Cascading what whats?"
He blew out his breath. "Cascading. Style. Sheets," He said, patiently. "It's what they use to generate their templates."
"So, uh, how do I fix it?"
"I'll have to look at it later. I'm sure I can find some IE specific code to plop in there that will solve the situation." he said.

I'm not sure when 'later' is, as I've discovered through the years 'later' could mean today, or next millennium. But bless the man, he does eventually get around to it. I'm sure there's a quota for how much computer-help a wife can ask of a husband, and since putting up the 'stl' blog and website, I'm sure I've gone over my allowance ten-fold. Not only is he still patient with all my questions, but he's still in love with me. Go figure. So I'll beg a little patience from you loyal IE users while "we" (hahaha) try and figure out what's going on in the code.

~Melanie

Studio 301, 302, in progress...

The week between Christmas and New Years was a tough one. Not only was my Grandfather ill, and dying, but I was trying to get my studio painted. Unfortunately, we didn't get as far as we'd like. For one, the place was filthy nasty dirty. The whole building is, as a matter of fact. It took us an entire day just to scrub it. Then it took another day to sand everything. The rooms are rather decent in size: 12x16x9.5 ft, and 11x13x9.5ft, so it was time consuming. And it was not a huge sanding, just enough to prep so the paint will stick. Joshua, my son, did most of baseboards using his mouse sander. I went in behind him and got the curved edges by hand. I also sanded one of the windows in the second room. Jeremy, my husband, sanded the two huge seven foot windows in the front room.

Josh tore up the carpets weeks ago, revealing baby poo brown painted wood floors. Not nice wood floor, as in I could sand it down and refinish into hardwood floors, no, these are rough hewn planks that are typically painted. Very common in this part of the world in homes/buildings from this era. My own house has this same kind of floor in the attic, where we have our bedroom. So before we primed the walls, we figured it would be best to sand the floors a bit, since the baby-poo brown paint had a high gloss to it.

After Jeremy sanded the floor, we painted a layer of primer on everything, except the floor. We'll take care of that after we paint everything else. Then we painted the first coat of color. It's a mixture of a bunch of different colors I had leftovers in the basement. Yeah, I know...maybe I'm crazy mixing up my own wall color, but it worked. I do it all the time.

As of this writing, I have put the second coat on the walls. Next time I head over there, I'll prime the closets and painting the interiors an accent color. Then I'm going to paint the trim (bright white) and finally the floors, an off-white with a yellow undertone. I'm not certain about the floors. I might end up re-painting them. The color cards looked good with the wall color, but you know how that goes.



Until the next update...

Melanie