Sunday, April 09, 2006

Things I have Learned

This blog doesn't have the right format for photos. Yahoo photos is nice, but kind of cumbersome. Flickr is a great place to host photo content, but not a great place for people to go to and see your photos. I just wanted to post some big photos that show our area and show some of our Photoshop work. So, I created a photoblog and now I am putting large format photos there. Go see it.
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HTML is hard. So is CSS, Java, and all those other things that make a web page go. That is why this blog is on a blog-hosting website that has blog templates and generally makes all those code type things fade into the background... so that I don't have to learn them. I tried to use a template to put together my new photoblog, but I didn't like the template, and didn't really see any others I liked, so I tried to alter it to suit my needs. Ha. So the photoblog is a little screwy, and might be until I figure this stuff out or find a better template or an HTML angel.
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Clay is hard. It seems soft at first, but when you have a 10-pound chunk spinning around between your knees, and you are trying to make it into a perfectly centered 10-pound cone, it requires some heavy lifting. When you do the heavy lifting with the heels of your hands, it presses on the median nerve. If this is your first attempt at this, and you keep this up for four or five hours straight, the median nerve gets irritated. If that nerve is already irritated from your past 6 years of computer related office work, it is a perfect recipe for instant carpal tunnel syndrome.
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Trying not to do anything with your hands for 4 weeks is really hard. Especially with braces on. I'm probably not even supposed to be typing, but typing is probably more permissible than wedging clay or digging in the garden or remodeling our other bathroom or cementing the floor of the shed or doing laundry or cooking spaghetti or any of the other 500 things I'd like to do this month.
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Making friends in a small town is hard. I guess it's just going to take time. I'm more OK with that now. I've realized that I'd like to understand a little more of the way this place is put together before I jump into the middle of some situation. Meaning, I don't really care what people think of me, but I want to be judged on my own merits (or not) rather than being judged by my association with people or organizations. There seems to be a lot of gossip and judgmental attitudes here, and I don't want to end up on the wrong end of that.
The folks who sold their house to us gave us the best advice on this. They said not to listen to what people say about each other, just to meet people and make up our minds for ourselves. Someone else advised us not to gossip, because everyone in town is related to each other in some way or another. Those two bits of advice have already proven themselves to be worth their weight in gold.
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Stopping before I get tired is hard. My fingers are starting to tingle now, so I'm outta here for today.