L’esprit d’escalier

Bear with me while I play with themes and headers.  The Aspire theme was neat, but after a while started feeling far too dark.

I’m digging this one so far.  It feels fresh and light, and I can customize the header.  Currently pictured: the flowers that spill wildly over our fence in the spring.

Nothing witty to say about this. I just think it’s awesome:

George Takei Marries Longtime Partner Brad Altman

About four years ago, a feral cat abandoned three of her kittens in our backyard. They weren’t even a week old. We brought them inside and bottle-fed them. Had to teach them to eat and bathe and all the things mother cats do. Two of them, we found homes for. The third, we kept. Her name is Arya.

She is very, very fluffy.

The last few summers, we’ve been able to brush her without too much trouble. When she did get a few inevitable mats, we were able to cut them off with scissors. This year, however, she sees a brush and her first instinct is DO NOT WANT. She gets bitey, she gets pointy, she tries to eat the brush. Because OH GOD MOM ANYTHING BUT THE BRUSHING OMG.

Which meant, of course, that as the weather got warmer and she started to shed, she couldn’t groom herself well enough to keep up with the long fur, and the mats began to form. It was no longer something Greg and I could handle by sneaking up on her mid-nap and snipping one or two off before she woke up.

We found out that our vet’s sister hospital does grooming, and so, this morning I loaded a very unhappy cat into the carrier and took her there.

This is what she looked like before:

The mats were close enough to the skin that they had to shave her. Now, she wasn’t completely lumpy, but there was no way a nice, relaxing bath followed up by a few passes of a detangling comb was going to do it. Not that I think any bath Arya could be part of would ever be considered “relaxing.”

They gave her a lion cut, so-called because they leave her head and paws and tail alone. She is not entirely happy with me right now, although she’s let me pick her up once or twice. Pixel, our eldest cat, followed her around for a little while, doing the kitty equivalent of WTF? Now he’s sleeping on the bed. Arya’s off sulking.

The after photo:

Hopefully she’ll be more amenable to brushing as her fur grows back in so we don’t have to go through this torment next summer. We did discover that she’s not quite as pudgy as we thought. A lot of it really was just how fluffy she is – though she has a bit of a belly right near her back legs. Still, we thought she was more round than she actually is.

And yes, it’s okay to laugh. I am well aware of how silly she looks right now.

I’ve been poking about with several themes over the last few days. The old purple one was a theme I picked out on my laptop when I was away at a trade show. The color looked much lighter on my laptop screen. When I got home and saw just how very dark the purple really was, I knew it couldn’t stay.

But damn, am I picky. I spent idle moments here and there looking for something better, but nothing truly inspiring ever caught my eye.

This weekend, I decided it was time to stop wibbling and find a new theme. I’ve lost count of just how many I’ve tried on for size. Several of them looked really, really good in their preview state, but when I viewed them with my content, oh, ick.

Here’s my favorite of the lot so far, but be warned – it could easily change. I like the three-column style, the font, and the old-fashioned-ish look. I realize that my subtitle has wandered off for a vacation (“beware, geekery within,” that is), and I’m not quite sure how to put it back without messing a lot of other things up. There’s a CSS book mocking me from my bookshelves; I could probably figure it out, but it might not be too pretty.

I do intend to make ye olde blogge look more visually interesting. Whether or not this theme allows for that remains to be seen.

So, bear with me a little longer – I might still be messing with themes and layouts now and then. Comments and suggestions welcome. This may be my wee corner of the intarwebz, but you’re a guest here. I’d like your stay to be comfortable and aesthetically pleasing.

Okay, I’ll admit it:  for about thirty seconds, the Gmail Custom Time announcement got me, until I remembered the date.  Look, in my defense, you can backdate blog posts with some software, so why not be able to stick a fake sent date on emails (aside from all the rest of the header info between your email and the recipients’ calling you a liar, that is)?  But, I figured it out quickly - at least I got it well before they mentioned the e-flux capacitor.

But this… if Fafblog’s return is an April Fool’s Day hoax, I will cry.

I need to keep this in mind.  Marty, you may want to follow the comic-mojo instructions at the end.

(via Making Light.)