The Lost Ann-Mi

So, I finally actually got around to adding some text in the “About“-tab at the top of the page.

If you’re reading this through an RSS feed, don’t worry. It’s not worth visiting. But I still included it for those who are curious enough or want to get in touch with me without leaving a comment. (There’s a link to my e-mail and a little photo).

Yesterday morning, I woke up to the sound of gushing water. It sounded like someone was having a shower.

The only problem was, the only other person in the flat was lying next to me - fast asleep.

Sometime between 4 am and 8 am, the little water pipe leading from the wall to the toilet had burst and started squirting water into the house.

When we got up to assess the damage and rescue our electronics, the water was already deep enough to cover my toes. It had spread all the way from the bathroom to the hallway, bedroom, workroom, livingroom, and kitchen.

Apparently the God of Electronics was watching over us, however, because it had stopped 10 cm from the X-Box, and while my big extension cord full of five different electronic plugs was lying on the floor in the water, it had somehow avoided getting any water inside of it. I immediately unplugged it and lifted it up off the floor. And today, after letting it dry completely just to be on the safe side, it seems all my devices work, including my drawing pad which was leaning in the water.

We spent over an hour cleaning, mopping, scooping, sweeping the water off the floor. I discovered that the dust-shovel was perfect for scooping water into a bucket. We filled a total of ten buckets, and ejected the rest of the water through the hole in the wall in the bathroom. By the end of the day, the floors were mostly dry, everything was rescued, and the only casualties were two books: one Terry Pratchett book and one Tove Jansson book: The Exploits of Moominpappa. Both are currently undergoing Operation Please Dry Up Without Pages Sticking Together. Maybe they’ll still be rescued.

Today, everything is alright. No further leakages. And luckily all the water was clean. Also, our repairman rescued us within a few hours of our phone call. It could have been so much worse…!

Today, I got to experience an earthquake! Quake? More like shiver. This is apparently the second earthshiver I’ve knowingly experienced. I slept through the first one about 20 years ago.

This second one was a little scarier. I sat on the sofa in the top floor of an apartment building. Suddenly the sofa starts wobbling, and in fact, so does the whole damn floor. The sensation is of standing on a tall ladder and someone wobbling the base under you. A few plates jingled. And it was over as fast as it started.

I thought it was an explosion, because I’m used to those. In Finland, when they build things, they often end up having to use explosives because the ground is all one big slab of giant granite rock. But it lasted a little too long

Then, I thought something had crashed into my building. 

Both these thoughts went through my head within the span of several milliseconds. When I realized there had been no sound accompanying the jiggling, other than some noisy plates, I decided that both my theories were wrong.

Earthquake, then? Either that, or I was going a little insane.

Later, Eyal assured me that he had heard in the news that it was indeed an earthquake. So I was no madder than usual. Phew.

I’ve been trying to learn to use a CMS (content management system) called MODx. For those of you who are just about as ignorant as me and who don’t know what it means, here’s a really basic and bad explanation. It’s a system that lets a designer/programmer build a “frame” of a website. Then, anyone who has the login details to the site can update the content of the site without fear of messing up the design. Kinda like a blog, really!

I’m trying to learn to do this because I would like to give my own gallery page a complete overhaul. This would mean that I would update my art gallery more frequently, since it would be easier to update. Hopefully this would make the place more alive again.

I’ve just spend one whole day going through an 11-part tutorial on the subject. It’s beginning to make some sense, but there is still so very much to learn! I’m still rather pleased. I managed to create what I wanted to:
A ‘container’ page that contains images and short texts for other pages that are linked to it. So there’s one page that has small pictures and a small amount of text, and when you click on it, you get to the main article. I’m happy. I also managed to implement an e-mail for which may or may not work, a commenting system, and a menu that updates by itself according to what categories I add to it.

I think next I will try see if I can implement things such as automatically creating thumbnail images, or resizing images, or implementing lightbox functionality.  

Phew! Maybe when I get good at this, I can take a look at scripting and creating my own fancy thingies and gizmos.

I’ve just gone back a bit over a year in my archives, trying to organize my tags so that they can work as some sort of a system to make this place easier to browse. 

I’ve stuck a few tags on the left side, such as tutorials, art, design, and many more. Now I’m just trying to figure out how on earth to get the tags visible in the design itself… I think I’m going to have to resort to installing someone else’s premade theme and stealing the coding from there, because I am not getting anything useful from the official coding page. Sure, the text is there, but I don’t understand it. I’m dumb like that.

I should still go deeper into my archives and tag the even older ones.. but that can wait. :) Meanwhile.. if there’s some weird stuff going on here, it’s probably me just trying to figure out the tumblr snippet coding stuff.

I’ve given my site a new banner, so if it looks funny, push refresh a couple of times and the hard edges should be gone.

Spring skies and spring flowers! A little optimistic, perhaps, seeing as Finland is still covered in snow and Israel’s “spring-like” blossoming is over, I think?

I also removed the Last Comments widget. It was a little depressing, what with all 3 of you faithful commenters being the only ones. ;) Plus, I think it was a bit ugly.

The various blog stickers are gone from the bottom of the blog as well, since they never put my blog on any of their feed sites.

I think I will change the font of the rest of the blog as well, to something subtle and nice. Anybody else getting tired of seeing the same fonts all over the internet?

I’ve been feeling really down lately. Perhaps this spring cleaning of my blog will help cheer me up a little. Free hugs for anyone who needs ‘em!

I just spent all morning kvetching some very persistent bugs in my blog layout!

They have now been eeeeeeeeeliminated, probably making space for brand new ones!
I couldn’t even sleep, thinking of them. Now that this one works well enough at least on my browsers, I can finally start thinking of making a new one.. ;)

AHH! Finally! I have converted my old pages onto the new domain! Now I just have to add a few links, some poetry and prose, as well as the very newest stuff! 

WAHOO! My very very very own art gallery is finally here!