Did you watch the British detective series Bergerac? The building that was used as the police station used to be a children’s home. And now there’s a real mystery: child abuse and possibly murder, dating back decades, in that same building.
BBC NEWS | Europe | Jersey | Child’s body found at care home
Parts of a child’s body have been found by police in a former children’s home in Jersey.
Since I was sick week before last, we canceled the regular twice-monthly housecleaning service and deferred it to this Wednesday. Which means that in addition to more than the usual amount of clutter, there was a lot of stuff on the carpet and dirt in the front hall and a huge number of dustbunny-type junk in the upstairs bedroom.
It takes a while for my completely dormant housekeeping skilz to stir themselves, but today I’d finally had enough of looking at dusty margins and clumps of cat hair on the carpet, so I got out the vacuum cleaner. Fairly quickly, I realized why we rarely use it; it has a tendency to get clogged with pet and people hair (I have long hair, and I shed year-round; this wraps around dust bunnies like you wouldn’t believe).
There are few things in life more messy, and more satisfying to the soul, than unclogging a vacuum cleaner. I happen to be rather good at it, if I do say so myself. There is the proper sort of wire hanger to be selected, unbent, and straightened with a short little “L-shaped” crook at the end. It has to be fed down the flexible tube of the vacuum cleaner, which is an upright model with a flexible hose for use with attachments. Then there’s the rotating of the wire, in the hope that it’ll snag on the obstruction far down in the tube (this is where my having long hair pays off in the end). And then there’s the payoff, when the wire is slowly drawn out of the tube, pulling along a grey, mouselike blob of dust, pet hair, Ginny hair, bits of fluff, and other scrudimentia.
Today, I yanked several rat’s nests worth out of the vacuum, until I was able to pull the wire straight through and make sure that I’d gotten it all. The dust trap thing is a plastic compartment that snaps in and out, so that got emptied (and with it out, I could pull the wire through from the top). All gone, tossed out in the garbage in the garage already.
The vacuum was barely stirring the dust before, but it really sucks now! Wheee!
I admit that I’m kind of interested in getting a Dyson, because this clogging problem will just keep happening.
Okay, it’s Saturday, it’s too cold to go outside for more than a brief, well-layered walk, and so therefore I’ve been making some modifications to the CSS file for the blog. There were a couple of issues that were bothering me with this otherwise excellent theme:
The theme designer hasn’t responded to comments requesting fixes or information for several months. It’s likely that he’s not that interested in supporting his free themes, just in designing them. Which is perfectly acceptable to me, because after all.. they’re free.
Actually, there were a lot of little things that I’d already fixed. But the major ones were that for some reason, the theme author chose to style the em tag so that not only was the text not in italic, it was smaller, lighter in color, and added an extra line break above and below the tagged text. Why? I don’t know. It originally looked like this:
em {
padding: 0px;
font-size: 11px;
font-style: normal;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #666666;
clear: both;
display: block;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
margin-left: 0px;
}
and now it looks like this
em {
padding: 0px;
font-style: italic;
color: #000000;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
margin-left: 0px;
}
Of course, it’s overkill, it would look just fine if I deleted it from the spreadsheet but I do like that it uses a darker color and so on. It doesn’t require the font-style: italic; declaration. I have no idea why the designer would add the clear: both; display: block; declarations – that’s what was causing the unwanted line breaks, I think.
I also needed to somehow widen the center column so that it would take the 400 to 500px wide photo images that I’ve come to prefer. My Flickr page has one setting for copying my images that assumes a 500px width, so I kind of needed to do this sooner rather than later.
The other stuff that I had previously done:
The center content is now wide enough to accomodate the bigger images. The wrap was originally 930px, the container was originally 920px, the header and content were originally 900px. The left content and right content had to be widened so that they totalled 950px, the same as the content and header width, and the left-post had to be widened from 480px to be about 10px wider than my largest image width. I also increased the size of the post-entry text… may think about making the font darker or more readable, too.
#wrap_talia {
width: 980px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-right: auto;
margin-bottom: 0px;
margin-left: auto;
}
#container_talia {
margin: 0px;
float: left;
width: 970px;
}
#header_talia {
float: left;
width: 950px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
height: 120px;
}
#content_talia {
float: left;
width: 950px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
position: relative;
}
.right-content-talia {
float: right;
width: 725px;
}
.left-content-talia {
float: left;
width: 225px;
}
#left-post {
width: 510px;
font-size: 100%;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-left: 0px;
float: left;
position: relative;
padding-top: 20px;
}
UPDATE: Welcome to all the recent visitors via StumbleUpon! Since this post was written, I did manage to remove the stubborn secton that was titled in non-standard English; it turned out to be a widget and was listed by name on the widgets page. I didn’t figure this out until after upgrading to 2.5.1. This theme is pretty much compatible with 2.5.1 and I haven’t messed with it much, aside from trying to get the formatting for custom fields to stop overflowing the center section. Still have to find where an errant width setting from higher up in the style sheet is being invoked in the meta tags.
Be careful out there, StumbleUponers, I picked up a very nasty virus while Stumbling one night and nearly lost everything I had. Be sure your virus definitions are rock-solid.
[tags]Wordpress themes, Talian, CSS[/tags]
One of my Flickr photos got selected for the current Schmap online guide – they use photos to illustrate points of interest in their web-based city travel guides. It just goes to show you that it’s a good idea to tag your photos effectively on Flickr, as this is the second time something like this has happened.
The other one requires me to fill out some kind of form, need to get on that this weekend. I might actually get a small fee for use of another of my photos.
The decor is as interesting as the club’s name. Baby buggies, motorcycles, and antler lamps hang from beamed ceilings above an eclectic mix of collectibles and a western copper bar.
[tags]Flickr, NoNameSaloon[/tags]
