brianwisti’s blog

I'm at work right now, so what I'm actually reading is an assortment of PHP files that make me unhappy. Once home, however, I crack open "Knitting in Plain English." It's a lot more fun to read and has numerous great suggestions. I've needed to expand my knitting books beyond pattern collections. This seemed like a good start, and so far I'm pretty happy.

Most of my money these days is going to pay off bills and friends that I owe money to. That's good news. For one thing, I'm paying off bills and friends that I owe money to. For another, I am devoting a lot more time to pastimes that don't require much money. That means knitting, and a lot of it.

Brooke's sister is expecting a daughter in November, and I volunteered for the task of knitting some nice things for the impending niece. I did okay, with my first ever sweater:

I've got approximately 30 hours to come up with at least $280. Eep. I know things will be okay if I can make it past this last hump, since my first paycheck from Amazon comes in 15 days and will recur twice a month after that. But right now ... eep.

I have a blogging problem. It used to be that I didn't care about blogging and was content with static content for everything. Things are different now. I have probably 4 or 5 poorly maintained blogs. And when I tackle a new Web site, one of my first thoughts is whether it will fit into a blog format.

The church site is the first one which really would fit into that style, so I'm grabbing WordPress. Why WordPress? It's nice looking, easy to use, and very easy to install on the server that hosts greenlakeumc.org. Yes, Ruby is sexy, Python is clean, and Perl is familiar. But PHP is everywhere. When I move on to a new neighborhood it will probably be easier to find a WordPress/PHP developer with the spare time to poke at the church site. And for now it looks like WordPress provides the features (or plugins) that I think would be useful for development on the site.

I spent most of today playing with new themes for my development copy of the blog. I also copied some of the static site content into WordPress Pages. It's probably good enough to make live right now, but there are a few more tweaks I'd like to make. The bloggy version of the church site will still need some new features, but even a minimal amount of improvement is good.

I just wanted to let folks know what I was up to.

So I'm poking around at the few gaming books I still have, and enjoy a few nostalgic giggles over Hol, the cheekily inappropriate and endearingly handmade role playing game of adventure and slaughter and stuff in a dark far future. It was mostly just silly, but I did manage to play it a few times. Man, that was fun. What I remember was fun, anyways. There may have been alcohol involved. Or just really good coffee.

After looking at the books (yes, I own the full line - both books), I did what I always do these days. I went to Google to see if I could learn more. Turns out there was more. A second edition was released in 2002, with four extra pages! I must have that. There were also rumblings of a plush wastem. I want that, too. And if I cannot buy one (because you know maybe they never gathered enough money to produce them), I will make it myself.

It's been in the works for a while, but I am finally taking over our church Web site. I thought I'd post a screenshot of the way it looks today and maintain sort of a historical perspective.

The old design has worked well enough, but there are a few accessibility changes I'm making. Specifically, the header and menu are image-based instead of text based, which isn't very easy for text browsers to handle. I'm incorporating the Yahoo YUI user interface kit for the site layout and Google Maps for the directions page. The content is still mostly static, so I'm constructing the pages with WebMake. Eventually the site will be more interactive and get a fresh design, but I wanted to get the fixes in right away.

What are five words you really like? 
Submitted by purplesque.

pineapple, waffle, manganese, apparently, and wiggly.

Nothing special about them. They're just fun words to say.

Well, the good news is that I'm finally within a normal BMI. 159 pounds at 5'7" (yes, I'm a bit short) is 24.9, the upper limit for "normal." The bad news is that it's because I'm taking terrible care of myself. Eating poorly, sleeping poorly, and behaving poorly. I really need to go in again for a psychiatric evaluation. Maybe I should talk to Aaron about what the doctors have tried diagnosing him with over the years. It might provide a clue as to where I should start. It's felt like a steady slide downhill for me over the last few years, but truth is that it's been a problem all my life. Still, I'm optimistic that something can be done. I also have freaky self-destructive control issues that I was never fully aware of. Once they were pointed out to me it was like a veil was lifted and some of my more mysterious behaviors suddenly made perfect sense. I probably don't need medication for that, but I do need counseling. Good counseling, not the "so how's your week been?" sort. More like training. Yeah, I need mental training.

I don't have insurance, but there are some community clinics in the area, including one that handles mental health. God bless Seattle.

My brain feels clearer right now than it has in months. It's still freakishly hard for me to do everyday things, but I can clearly see the obstacles in me that are making it difficult. That is preferable to the fog I was in before, where it felt like things could come in from any direction.

And hey, I've lost about 80 pounds in the last 2 years. I don't look like a potato anymore. That's pretty awesome.

That's one more bill down. coolnamehere is live again.