School’s out for summer

The high school, that is. My sister got out today. Next year, she gets to start the adventure that is senior year. But over the summer, my mom, my sister and I share two cars between us, so we may end up do ing some shuttling, depending on what we need to do.


Yesterday and today, I was working on making a plant stand for my parents’ bedroom. They have one now, but it’s all wobbly, so I’m making another, using roughly the same design, but the joints will be tighter, and I’ll use better fasteners. I started with two ten foot 4×4’s, and ripped them down to 3/4″ square strips, which were then cut for length. What with knots in the wood, and all, I had exactly no spare pieces, and actually had to go scrounging for scrap when I made a mistake. I made 3 mistakes, two minor and one that required a design change to fix. I was cutting the dadoes so that the horizontal pieces can interlock with the vertical supports, and I measured out the edge of where I should cut. Then I cut on the wrong side of the line. So one of the ledges will be a bit higher, and I needed two more pieces that were about an inch longer. Luckily, we have lots of scrap laying around, but I don’t think I have enough for many more mistakes. I’m actually all done with the cutting, and now I need to sand off my marks, and any edges, and prepare for assembly. Not bad for two day’s work, considering they haven’t even been full days.


Lately, I’ve been checking in at the support forum of Sitesled, a free webhost that I considered going to after Aloof closed. I think I miss the interaction with users who are just learning HTML, and the way they think you’re a hero, even though all you did is notice that they wrote HERF instead of HREF (a mistake that I’ve made more than once). The last few days, I’ve been helping someone control from the address bar which page is displayed in an IFrame on the main site. I had already written the code to parse the data from the URL, but had to develop the code to change the source of the IFrame based on what I pulled out. Along the way, I learned about changing the contents of DIV’s after the page is loaded, and that has made me want to go over my navbar and work on the insides, and possibly make it so someone could use it. I would also like it to be able to expand and show what is contained in a section, without you having to load the page that they fall under. That would enable people to navigate to any other page on the site, with one link (and a few other clicks). Ideally, it would support as many levels as I want to have. I’ve seem one like this, and I’d like to develop my own. But enough rambling on technical stuff.


Cel, the pictures have been taken for the most part, and will be posted sooner or later. I might try and upload them after work tomorrow. The city of Stevenson provides free wireless Internet access in the downtown area (which is only a few blocks), and it’s a heck of a lot faster than dial-up. It’s a bit spotty, but I’ve found a few places that usually have a good signal.

Speaking of pictures, I took several during a thunderstorm last weekend, and posted them to the Nature photo gallery.

And even though all my regular readers have requested pictures 🙁 , anyone else reading is welcome to post a request.

One thought on “School’s out for summer

  1. cool 😀 No rush…I certainly wasn’t too good with getting my photos up quickly. Plant stand sounds excellent. You should totally post a pic when you’re done, so we can see the end result (and maybe the old one, so we can see the design changes you had to make.

    Hmm, that sitesled idea seems like not too bad of an idea. I remember the questions being asked at Aloof* really made me learn some new stuff (things I hadn’t thought to look at), and refreshed my memory on a lot of the other stuff. I’d never find the time now, though. LOL

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