Hopefully you won’t notice, but Ye Olde Blog is now dished up as HTML5. (Why? Why not!) That took changes to two whole lines of my theme.

I also finally bothered setting up WordPress’ image gallery stuff, so using an image no longer requires me to manually create a thumbnail image, SFTP the images to a folder on my server, and add in <img> tags to my posts. (Pro tip: if you go to Settings:Media and set unneeded image sizes to “0”—e.g. I don’t bother with “thumbnail” and “large” images—then WordPress won’t create four resized images for every single picture you upload.)

Finally, I installed Markdown on Save, giving me the ability to write posts using Markdown. (Believe it or not, I’ve been writing my posts in HTML—<p>s, <strong>s, and all—since I started this thing back in 2003.) The nice thing about this particular plugin is that it actually saves the HTML version of each post as the official one, so my posts won’t all suddenly be unformatted if I ever disable the plugin.

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So, in short, I continue to spend more time screwing with the blog then actually posting to it. Still, these changes have removed a whole bunch of friction from my posting process.

So Mac OS X 10.7, a/k/a Lion, dropped on Wednesday. In a sign of my growing maturity, I did not stay up until 5:00 am reading John Siracusa’s lengthy review (as I did when 10.6 came out), and I didn’t even install it on release day. (I of course installed it the next evening.)

Just a moment ago I discovered the worst—by far—feature of Lion: my friends’ shitty animated gif attachments are now actually animated in Mail. That alone might force me to downgrade.

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On Tuesday night, when I should have been backing my computer up in preparation for installing Lion, I was at ballroom dance practice. After the practice the usual gang (the gang that’s in Corvallis over the summer, that is) reconvened at Sarah’s house. While Meredith made absolutely killer raspberry and chocolate ice cream, Barry and I (and occasionally Russell) entertained ourselves by singing along to the oldies that Pandora was pumping out in the living room.

At some point in the evening, the conversation drifted to one awkward guy at dance practice who also happens to post TMI on Facebook (something about frustration due to a failed attempt at sex (???; recall that I was busy singing to oldies)). The reaction to that was sufficiently negative to give me the killer idea of adding a XX days since last intercourse widget to my blog. Please check out the upper right corner of this page.

The capstone to a fantastic evening (to be clear: I’m being sarcastic about the “capstone” bit, but not the “fantastic evening” bit) came when we were getting ready to leave, and I discovered that one of my shoes was wet. Cat-peed-on-it wet. I would later discover that my backpack—which has served me faithfully since high school in the mid-’90s—was another cat pee casualty. It served me well even in its final day, as it completely protected everything inside (most notably my not-cheap dance shoes). :respect:

After hobbling home, I asked Marin if she had any idea how to deal with my compromised shoes. She searched for “cleaning cat pee off of shoes,” and found the following advice: “throw your shoes away and buy new shoes.” Hard to argue with that.

I opened my paper this morning and found a familiar face inside.

One year in middle school (I forget which…eighth grade?), Erica was my locker-neighbor. Every day that year she would state, matter-of-factly, “I plummet into you!”, and then proceeded to, uh, plummet into me.

Seventeen-bajillion years later, I still remember that fondly.

So my backyard is pretty much shit for growing grass or plants. I blame the sixteen months of shade it experiences each year. Also: deer. I used to have a pretty little tree peony, until the deer broke it off something fierce while gorging themselves. I now have a sad-looking stick peony.

There’s only been one exception to the horrors I have witnessed: my yard grows frickin’ magnificent hostas.

Need a hosta that can stand in for Audrey II? I’ve got ya covered.

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Recently I’ve been thinking about how to make my place feel a bit more “homey.” My general style tends to create spaces that are rather sterile and sparsely filled. While I definitely don’t want knick-knacks everywhere, I wouldn’t mind if I could make the place feel a bit more comfortable. (Which is not to say that I’m uncomfortable. Most of the reason my place is the way it is, is because I don’t generally notice decoration.)

My first motion in this direction was putting some throw pillows on the couch near the front door. (It’d been a bare couch for, oh, four years.) Definitely helped.

My second motion, initiated tonight, was to try and hang a calendar in my kitchen. My parents’ calendar hangs from a bare nail, and over the 20-odd years they’ve lived in their current home, that nail has made an ever-increasing vertical hole in the wall. Thanks to recent advances in technology, I figured I’d sidestep that particular issue.

(We’ll ignore, for the moment, that the temporary calendar I’m hanging is a Code Geass calendar that plays up the bromance something fierce. [The cover was *totally* misleading! I was promised females!] Gender imbalance aside, I don’t really advertise anime all over my house… quite unlike my blog.)

The first step in using a command strip is to clean the area you’re going to stick the hanger on with isopropyl alcohol. Tonight I learned that isopropyl alcohol removes the sheen from my oil-based wall paint*. I learned this in horrific fashion, after I cleaned a wide swath of wall under the theory that I’d be sure to get whatever spot I eventually stuck the hook on. The de-sheen-ification is pretty much invisible from more than four feet away—but it shows up bright as the sun when you get closer. Brilliant! The only thing missing, now, is the “fuck me” I need to clean into my wall underneath.

[*Oil-based paint is a blight on humanity, BTW. My closet and pantry shelves are painted, and the bleeping paint sticks to everything. When you remove whatever is stuck, you either leave a bit of it on the shelf, or take a bit of the shelf with it. Totally hot.]

Not sure what will receive my attention next. Odds are good, though, that whatever it is will rue that day.