Left Brain, Right Brain

I love when Jon and I are talking and smiling at each other and our eyes are just shining and everything feels bright.

Inga came yesterday!!! She drove into the cities on Tuesday night, and then yesterday after work she came to my house! We went out and had yummy Thai food at the Royal Orchid (here in Roseville - go there, you must), and I got to take her to my work and show her my new office, and we talked and talked and talkedandtalkedandtalked - it was WONDERFUL! Then we had a nice slow morning, some tea and orange-cranberry bread and chit-chat, and then I had to go to work, but she took a shower and has probably left my house by now. I'm sad that we didn't get to spend more time hanging out, but she has a full schedule of visits to people all over the cities this week - it sounds HELLA busy! But fun, and refreshing, and good for the soul, as travel can often be. And I think she really needed this trip. It seems to be doing her well.

Love you Inga! Miss you already! Can't wait to get together again - maybe we should plan a trek up to Devils Lake, ND and see K & S's new house and ruby red kitchen/dining room. ;)

Hope you have a safe trip, and a nice day off when you get home. Blog more - it's good for all of us! ^_^

I have this tea called Bengal Spice by Celestial Seasonings... Actually, I have a LOT of teas, but right now I want to talk about this one.

IT IS THE BEST. Seriously.

Just today I decided that this is one of my favorite teas to date. The actual "tea" part of it is roasted chicory and roasted carob, which gives it a lovely rich dark color, and it has a wonderful roasted aroma and flavor, PLUS, I tend to find chicory gives just a hint of a chocolaty-caramel flavor, and of course carob has a lightly chocolatey flavor, and when you combine all that with cinnamon and dates and vanilla and all those other beautiful spices, it's actually very sweet! I like to brew it nice and strong, and then add some milk to really bring out the creamier caramel and vanilla flavors, plus it balances the spiciness very nicely - and this is a good spicy tea if you like them that way!

Speaking of which, can I just say how much I hate coffee shop "chai"??? They make it like a fricking dessert latte. Bleh. My favorite chai is one with LOTS of good strong spices (especially black pepper), a good smooth Assam tea under them, and milk & sugar - but not enough to make it a frothy sticky sweet mess!! Yuck! You can't even taste the actual FLAVOR of the tea under all that sweet - unless the flavor most coffee shops are going for is "BORING-FLAVORED".

OK, so back to the Bengal Spice - I love it. The best part is that it is 100% caffeine-free (which is a good thing for me) since it is technically an herbal tea! There's no caffeine in chicory or carob! (Or roasted barley, either, which is another good coffee substitute!) It sometimes seems too good to be true - that something with such a rich, spicy, roasty flavor would ALSO be caffeine-free.

I have been greedily rationing my Bengal Spice, but no more. I've now decided to become obsessed with it for a while, and drink it every day. I can always buy more. Mmmm.

Hah - it's kind of funny to be blogging about the status of my other blog, but that's what I want to do. Last night I started uploading a few knitting pictures into my Flickr album (which will be for dedicated knitting images, and I will keep other random stuff in my Photobucket). I added some links from my knitting blog, and I even threw a clickable thumbnail into one of the entries for good measure.

Now the only thing I need to do is keep knitting, blogging, and taking pictures!

We had our annual "Holiday Party" this past weekend. It was RIDICULOUSLY huge - we have 470 employees at this location, plus their spouses/significant others... That's a big party, even if not everyone came. I was kind of nervous about being in such a crowd with all that free booze flowing. I don't like crowds and I don't like drunks and I get especially uncomfortable around crowds of drunk co-workers and superiors and mostly strangers all dressed up to the 9s. So it was tough.

There was a WONDERFUL dinner though, so that was nice. We ate very well. It was a buffet with the following:
( Mmm, food )

( Other activities )

OK, this is about knitting, and yes, it IS in my knitblog, but I am just pissed enough to want to write about it here, too. ( Ranting about missing knitting stuff behind THIS CUT. )

What a quandary. The café here at work is serving Reubens w/ those awesome potato wedges that I love, AND Chicken Kiev with Wild Rice. Both are favorites of mind. Gah.

WOW - I can't believe what a loser I am! Do I have NOTHING better to think/talk/write about right now? Thinking.... thinking.... ( Read more... )

Ahem. Sorry, I turn into a 12 year old AOLer when I get happy.

Anyway.

I did something fun to the CSS on my knitting blog! I made it so that the sections don't have set widths anymore, so they fit correctly in ANY size browser window on ANY monitor. YAY!!! I know, I know, big deal. Well, it is to me. I didn't like the way the original template just SET the widths. First off, they were too narrow, so I widened them. But then, I realized that not everyone has a super widescreen monitor like mine, so then they'd have to scroll back and forth to see the full page all at once. Yuck. So knowing the VERY VERY little that I do about CSS, I made them a PERCENTAGE wide instead of a number of pixels wide. Damn, why didn't they do that in the first place. I think the default LJ templates do that. You'd think Blogger would have thought of that. Meh. Oh well, it can be fixed, and I've done it.

I know this is pretty small stuff, rather trivial and everything, but bear in mind I know VERY little about any of this stuff, and have to learn every tiny thing that I need to know completely from scratch. Maybe I should get some books or something...

I've spent a little too much time today trying to create code for knitting progress bars on my fledgling knitting blog. At first I was perfectly OK with some little CSS ones that were easy enough to tweak and update as needed - they only had one problem. I couldn't get the percentage done (text) to show up in the middle of the progress bar, regardless of how much progress was done. I got the numbers to show up inside the colored portion that shows how much I've done on any particular project, but if it was only 5%, then the text got crowded out and looked messy. Otherwise I could get the percentage in the progress bar just fine, but then the fill color got pushed down BELOW the progress bar! Worthless. So for a while, I figured I'd just have to put the percentage complete above the bar, next to the name of the project.

BUT!!!

I was just not satisfied with this solution - it really wasn't the look I wanted. I did some searching and found a nifty little javascript that does exactly the same thing, plus it's just a little simpler to update and it WORKS the way I WANT it to! Yay!

Now I need to start creating "actual content" for that blog. (I also started a new Flickr account to be knitting-dedicated. That way I can link to pictures there with comments on the images.)

The new couch was delivered this morning! ( Read more... )