So, per Kellie's request, a post. :)

I am currently sick, and it's quite tiresome. It's just a really bad cold, but one of the REALLY bad ones where just walking will make me out of breath because hi, cannot breathe through my nose. Bad enough that I called in sick day before yesterday(!!!).. I probably could have survived work, but, I knew it would be better to get extra sleep (I could not stay awake yesterday) and rest, and I'd be braindead around the store and therefore pretty useless anyway. But yesterday wasn't bad, and I think I'm actually doing better today, though my ears are plugged still.

Labor Day, Tom was off but I had work - luckily, a short day, we were only open 9-4 due to the holiday (not that we should have been open at allllll, but, it was a skeleton crew, only four of us, and it wasn't a bad day). But I kept feeling worse and worse, which sucked because it should have been a pretty entertaining day, the group of people we had there. meh.

But, I got home and flopped on the couch, watched some tv (girly stuff that Tom usually won't let me have on, bwahaha) and worked on a bracelet and was all tucked in for a nice evening of vegging---

And Tom threw the phone at me. "Answer it!"
"Huh?"
Then I saw it was a call from Zinni. *giggles* He doesn't like talking to people if he doesn't have to.

"Hi! How are you?"
"Sick."
"Ohh~! Do you want some company?"
I'm afraid my answer was rather jumbled. Due to being sick, my thought process has gotten horribly clogged up this week, and I didn't know if she meant to chat or to physically visit (but that would be weird, why would she ask that?), so, I was a little confused. My apologies on that one Zinni. ^^;
But eventually I discovered that she did indeed mean an *actual*, physical visit! Obviously, being sick was not going to coerce me to pass this up. Tom offered to hide in his room so I could have "girl-time", which was sweet of him, though I know it was equal parts that and him.. well but really, what boy would want to hang around his girlfriend's friends while they chit-chatted about things he has no interest in? *giggles* He may be antisocial anyway, but this, I understood. So he and I grabbed a quick dinner at the Chinese buffet and then scurried back here, me to wait and he to go hide in our room with his computer.

And then I discovered Zinni *had* called while we were out because she was lost. But not very lost, so it was only a few minutes before she and Loni made it. :D (And I made sure to draw them a little map when they left - my verbal direction-giving skills are pretty lacking to begin with, and the cold was not helping.)

So, they were here, and Zinni gave me a nectarine, promising it would be THE most amazing-tasting nectarine I had ever had, despite Loni's protests that nectarines are icky. (Zinni, you were definitely right. :) We wound up sitting on the front porch for most of the visit - Loni had spotted what looked like an injured bird in the yard, and wanted to go investigate. It wound up not being a bird at all, but it certainly *had* looked like one. ^^; So we sat on the porch and taaalked and talked and talked, catching up on things and talking about writing and exchanging memories, and somehow in the course of it our group Monkees obsession came up. And I remembered that I'd *found* the posters we made during the Monkeeathons recently, while I was sorting through all my stuff Dad dumped on my poor little apartment. So we came back in and I dug them out (along with the tally of number of hours of Monkees things we watched at the first one, and a few still-packaged fortune cookies - there *had* been a few breadsticks still in there, but I threw them out when I cleaned, as they were making everything greasy and were getting pretty sketchy). And we tried to remember what had happened at which Monkeeathon - and fortunately we'd written some of it on the posters themselves, because, really, how clearly do *any* of us remember portions of 24-hours-straight!-of-Monkees-mayhem? *giggles* And we talked about the Applebus a bit, and how much better we could write it now, and Loni is a fantastic sport in conversations like these. :) She really finds a way to still join in to the conversation, and seems really genuinely interested, which is very cool of her.

So we hung around my living room a bit, still talking about random things. Loni started poking at some of the stuff I have sitting around - which she apologised for, but I told her that's why I leave it all out, as points of interest. :) We got onto the topic of writing (probably via the Applebus), and from there, NaNo, which Loni hadn't known about. Zinni reminded me that she'd read most of Beneath the Dust - and I realised that though she had, she'd never *seen* the site I built for it, so I scrounged around and found it and popped it into my computer...only to find that Kiran has inherited Lawrence's dislike for strangers. *facepalm* But eventually I got it to load, and they were both so impressed and thought it was *so*, so cool, that my artistic ego is all warm'n'fuzzy still. :) And they volunteered to be my cheerleaders for NaNo this year, and read it, and encourage me to keepgoingkeepgoing! on it, so I'm very excited.

Now I just need to decide which of the five ideas I have in mind I'm going to go with. ^^;

Eventually, the darkness outside made them realise they really shouldn't put off leaving any longer - it was almost nine, and they still had three or four hours to go! So I made a note on the map I made them of where Tim Horton's was so they could get caffeine if they needed.

I cannot even believe it had been a whole year since I'd seen the two of them, it didn't seem like it at all... but it never feels like much time has passed whenever I see one of my friends again, which is one of the things I love about them. :) You're all so true to who you are that, even if years have passed, there's still a core there that I know and have known and will always know.

When I went upstairs to check in on Tom, he commented on how much happier I seemed.. and I really do, after talking with friends I haven't talked to in a long while. So, even though I never make phone calls or anything - never feel shy to do so, I love hearing from everyone. :) And Zinni had a really good point - our little group of four needs to get together to do something sometime. Like really, before we start splitting up and no longer being in the same part of the country. I can always finagle a day off from work - I think pretty much everyone owes me a favor at this point, and I rarely ask off anyway so if it's a few weeks ahead I can request it. I may not be driving still but Tom does, so I can always bribe him with food to drop me off somewhere. ;) And, my apartment is ALWAYS, always open to visitors. Unless we're at work or out to eat, or it's the one day of the month where Tom consents to having me drag him out someplace, we're here.

...I'm really painting him in a bad light this post, I don't mean to. *giggles* He's really not all *that* antisocial, he's quite fun and entertaining. I can't tell funny stories for crap, I always defer to him because he's fantastic at it. He's been trying to teach me, but, I'm afraid it's slow progress. I have this habit of wanting to tell every detail, and relay things as they happened, instead of leaving things out and changing things for dramatic affect and whatnot.

...this post, of course, being a perfect example.

I need to go shower and wake up, it's nearly noon - I've been letting myself sleep in far more than usual, to sleep off this pesky cold. I think it helps but I get very stiff, and I do have to make it to work this evening.

Crap and buy some groceries sometime soon too, there's nothing in the apartment that Tom wants to eat and that's a bit of an issue. (He's A MAN and needs meat and things he can sink his teeth into, while I can live quite happily on rice and sandwiches for a week at a time.)

 
And of course, not only did linking that way not work (I had some code wrong, and idek what else was going on), but that image does nooooot work at allllll in terms of readability. And to blur the main text area would destroy the image, it needs that dark sharpness to work, and *that*, won't work for text.

Fortunately, there were all sorts of wonderful things buried in the layers of that particular photoshop file, and I just took the thing in another direction. And, after much tweaking and recoloring and releveling and recurving and blurring and, y'know I'm finally starting to use adjustment layers, and I can't wait 'til they're second-nature to me because I think they'll really be a great thing for me. ^^;

In any case! With the caveat that I may yet do some layout tweaking (particularly if anyone has any complaints - do let me know!), Amaranth and Jasmine is now up and running. Writing is my passion-of-the-moment, so that's where most of my online appearances will be made for, uhm, however long this phase lasts. Will update you again after that. ;) But for now, enjoy! And do, do do feel free to leave any sort of feedback whatsoever. Tom hates the sorts of stories I write so I haven't got any good sounding boards around me just now. He'll critique my lack of plot and suggest a thousand new ones, but, that's about it. That helps me when I want a new plot, but.. y'know.

 
So after having discovered that all the old blogger code had been shoved into the little widgets of the new layout system, and flinging EVERY freaking thing I thought I'd need into the css in the header, and still seeing it not work, I figured I'd switch to the most basic template I could find and see if the code was any clearer. And then I happened to notice a little option below my template editor, saying to switch to classic template. Thinking this meant it'd give me a very basic template to my blog, I clicked it.

And then my eyes fell out of my head as I SAW THE GOOD OLD BULKY BLOGGER CODE!!!!! The neighbors must think I'm crazy all the bizarre exclamations I've let out today.

SO, now I know - like lj before it, blogger put in a new layout approach, buuuut if you pay attention properly you can still switch back to the old way of doing it.

THANK FREAKING GOD, though it's just as well I finally learned about div tags anyway. And this brushed me up on my css quite well, which I would've had to do anyway because THE FONT TAG IS DEPRECIATED!!!!! You have no idea how much this upsets me. But I miiiiiss the simple little inline font tags to switch colors wherever I pleased. sigh. Yes the whole system is more streamlined with everything set up in the styles, but, it's.. I don't know, yes it's elegant which is lovely but it's much less visceral and I liked the visceral.

I'm too freaking young to be griping about the changes coding has gone through in, what, five years? gahhhhh.

Oh but so I know it's uploaded somewhere (photobucket resizes my freaking images and I am not downgrading this one), my background image for the other blog, because I'm too lazy right now to sort out how else to get it into blogger's system.

 
WHAT THE HELL ARE DIVs and WHY DID THE INTERNET DECIDE IT NEEDED THEM IN EVERY FREAKING INCH OF ITS CODE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!?!?!


..even copying over the templates I'm using in any of my other blogs WHICH WORK FINE THANKYOU doesn't work, BLOGGER kicks me back out giving me some lame excuse about "well-formed character make-up" WHAT THE HELL! Since when does the computer code care if it's elegant, so long as it makes logical sense and works? Who the fuck cares if the seperate little areas of your page are demarcated!? AAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGG this is making me so angry, and making me feel like such an old freaking fart, scowling and growling about how GOOD OLD PLAIN CODE WORKED JUST *FINE* FOR US BACK IN *MY* DAY!!!1!!1!

Give me plain fucking vanilla old-school html anyday, fuck this xhtml garbage. I don't need any damn divs to tell me where my posts start thank you WHY DOES BLOGGER have to know I'm not going to use its lame "layout adjustment!!1! add widgets!!1!!11!" interfaces, I want to make my own thing goddamnit I HAVE SUCH A PRETTY PICTURE TO UUUUUUUUSE! All I want is to put the text over an image I don't care about being able to have blogger read it to be able to let me change colors through the dashboard. Damn dashboard. Blogger you need to STOP dumbing-down, why do you think I came here in the first place all those years ago!?



...all of this angst for the new story blog, Amaranth and Jasmine: http://amaranthandjasmine.blogspot.com/, too many freaking bloggers that was the best I could do to get something unique but also sensical. YOU FREAKING SPELLCHECK HOW CAN NONSENSICAL BE A WORD BUT NOT SENSICAL!!!! omfg. That's it. I'm going out. I need to buy groceries so I can eat some lunch, and once I've given my body some fuel I'm going outside where there's nice warm sunlight and cushy grass and I can WRITE WHATEVER I WANT on PEN AND FREAKING PAPER and not have things correcting my non-mistakes.

Freaking future hold up a sec and let me catch my breath.