'Well enough' is good enough

Have you ever heard that old advice to “Leave well enough alone”?

This is the sad tale of someone who didn’t heed that advice and the trouble it led to.

This won’t make sense to those of you who read this on Vox or Blogger. It refers to my efx3 blog and specifically to my dissatisfaction with the width available to me (and my photos) to the theme I had been using. I liked the theme, but my pictures have to be cut too short to really show them, and I finally had enough of it.

So on Friday, I went shopping for a new theme, one that can show my photos in all their glory. I saw a couple and tried them out. But the preview either (A) didn’t work at all, or (B) showed things way skewed around. What the? I finally picked one, took a deep breath and hit the button. No turning back now.

I soon realized that the culprit was the customized CSS that I had “adjusted” when I first started using the theme. The customized parts were still in place, even though the theme it referred to had been replaced. So I cleared that out. Things started looking a lot better.

Then I saw another theme that I liked better, so I chose that. It was OK (came out the way I expected), but everything was green. That’s because the theme actually was done in green. Green is OK, but I like blue a lot better. So I decided to change the greens to blues, different shades.

Efx3 has a couple plugins that allow you to tweak themes–colors, typefaces, etc. So I decided to venture into that, changing greens to blues. Alas, it was a lot of work and it took a great deal of free time, which I haven’t been blessed with lately. I managed to change some of the greens to blues, but by no means all, and my frustration with the process eventually got the better of me. (On top of that, some of the blues that I changed and fiddled with and finally was satisfied with have reverted to green since then. You can imagine how happy I feel about that!)

The theme still has green headers, and I’m just going to leave it that way … until I pick still another new theme. Betcha that one will be in blues.

And when I do — I vow solemnly — I will not mess with theme tweakers or CSS customizers or anything like that. I’m just going to obey my philosophy of life: to take things as they come, to accept them as they are and not try to change them. It’s a good philosophy in life, and I now realize it’s a good philosophy to follow in blogging, too. Especially for those of us not blessed with lots of free time or infinite patience.

That’s not me. Neither of them are.

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There has been a blogging malaise sweeping the world lately, sort of like the swine flu. Maybe that’s what came over me lately. It’s not fatal or permanent.

So many topics I could have written about lately. What I’ve been doing lately. What I plan to do in the weeks and months to come. Little observations about everyday life–nothing earthshaking, probably not terribly interesting, but no less interesting than other things I’ve written about in the past. Face it, my life can get a tad, um, mundane.

But I’ve had a hard time writing blog posts about them. Don’t understand why. Writer’s block? But I don’t have writer’s block at work. I still know how to write letters to close friends. Still, writing for the blogosphere has been hard lately. Whyizzzatt?

True, I don’t like having to use the narrow pictures because of the narrow style I used, but I’m changing that now. Also, efx3 doesn’t seem to get along that well with Photobucket. But I want my photos at some public site–I’m afraid to uploading them to a blog host that may not be around tomorrow.

Remember, I’m a refugee of both Modblog and Efx2, so I know what it’s like when a blog hosting service goes belly-up on you. When the site vanishes or the guy who runs the place decides to go off somewhere and redefine his life, the stuff you put at his place is in grave danger. That’s why you don’t see me at efx2blogs any more.

But there are other reasons, and they all fall under the heading of lack of time or opportunity. Let me count the ways. (1) I’ve been writing a lot to B and occasionally to S. (2) I’ve been watching the hockey playoffs. (3) I’ve been focusing a lot on work. (4) I’ve been watching movies with my wife. (5) At night, when I sit down to type on my desktop upstairs, Charlie comes around and plops herself into my lap so I am obliged to pet her for a while. (6) Occasionally I play games and get sidetracked with them. (7) Maggie, our old (16+) cat, has lately taken to sleeping on the glider rocker in the living room that I like to use when writing on my laptop. (8) I also get tired a little earlier than I used to.

Oh, it’s a wild and crazy life I lead!

Maybe I should write a post about all the topics I have been letting get past me, touching on a few things that might have made a full post on other days.

This week, I read a post from DeeJay, which mentioned how few people are writing now and how the old “community” seems to have fallen on hard times, with refugees moving to many other places or just not writing so often. I can relate.

I’m still here. Pretty soon, I’ll break out of this blogging malaise and get back to writing about this and that. Maybe I’ll even do better with pictures after I find a new theme I like. For right now, this is what I can manage.

Squirrel in the wheel

See this photo?

It’s a pretty picture, but I almost didn’t see it. I did because I did something I haven’t been doing lately–I took time and looked up.

I saw these clouds as I was driving back from a boys high school golf tournament last Thursday morning. I had enjoyed being on the links, zipping around on a golf cart, trying to find some of our local kids. I don’t get out on golf courses too often–never have been a golfer. I enjoyed the sun and breeze and singing birds along the way, but I was too busy to be really aware of them.

Until I turned the corner on my way back to the office, when my eyes fell on these clouds, and I felt compelled to pull over and get out my camera for a photo or two. The squirrel escapes his wheel for a moment.

Otherwise, he has been in the wheel and running very hard for very little that seems meaningful. Work on the summer tourism section is over, and now we are in the crazy May spring sports season. It’s just one month long in the U.P., since spring usually is slow to arrive and everything has to be wrapped up by early June. That means lots of events are crammed into four poor little weeks, along with the graduation runup, special editions, Memorial Day previews, early deadlines and all that. Run, run, run, run, run. In June, we can exhale and get into summertime mode.

Plus the other stuff in my life, away from the job. Driving back and forth to visit my mom. The Stanley Cup playoffs, which I find entertaining but which sure can suck up many space hours. A bunch of other things. B and I have been writing back and forth a lot, and we even tried out Skype a time or two. A face-to-face, so to speak, thanks to the webcam on my laptop. The countdown to our first-ever meeting now stands at less than eight weeks.

Today, of course, is Mother’s Day. My wife and I decided to go out to a nice lunch and then take a nap together. Naps are fun! She got her flowers yesterday, at the same time we got my mom some–we drove down and visited her for a while. Then, on Monday, I go back into my wheel.

I’ve got one other thing in my life right now. It is a very major thing, one that would be great and wonderful news if it comes about. I’m not superstitious by nature, but maybe if I say nothing about it, it may enhance its chances of coming true. That’s how I’m playing it for now. It it comes about, you’ll know about it. Definitely.

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I can tell you about a major project my wife recently finished. She was in charge of things for her church’s fellowship dinner last Sunday. It involved plenty of time on the phone and, during the week before the dinner, a special mission to ***-mart, where we raided their frozen food chests. Frozen green beans, to be specific. For a dish she wanted to make (100 servings), she calculated she needed 15 pounds of frozen green beans.

They didn’t have large bags of frozen green beans, as we had hoped, but they did have 28-ounce bags of beans. Hmmm, says my wife, let’s see. How many 28-ounce bags of frozen beans equals 15 pounds? She remembered that my phone has a calculator, so I converted 28 ounces to 1 3/4 pounds, then divided 15 by 1 3/4. Turns out we needed 8 4/7 28-ounce bags to get 15 pounds. But ***-mart only had seven bags, so we bought out what they had and got the remaining 2 3/4 pounds from one of our local stores.

We also got mushrooms and tomatoes. A bunch of other stuff. The final thing we got was frozen sherbet. Six half-gallon containers of that. All that stuff was taken to the church basement over several days.

Sunday came. It was a nice day, they had a big turnout and lots of food to feed everyone. The beans were very good, and so were the mushrooms and things other people made–ham, casseroles, salads, desserts, cakes, you name it. They even opened one of those six half-gallon containers of sherbet. But people were sort of stuffed by then and didn’t have much room left over for dessert. Don’t know what became of those five other half-gallons of sherbet (some rainbow, some orange).

This last week, I noticed, my wife was observed relaxing a bit more than usual. Deserved it, don’t you think?