Yrae Chronicles

It's happening again :O None of the links work yet except those that link out--tpyo, Fig Jam and [Snapshot Henchman]--but the splash functions! Hooray!

Saw Toy Story 4 on Tuesday with new frand! I think I have a new favourite Toy Story, maybe. Best line: 'I think Daddy needs to say some Words now so we'll just go over here, okay, Sweetie?' I want to start using that phrase in my daily life. 'I need to say some Words now.'

Pixar fangirl 4 lyfe.

Which all leads me to: NEW FRAND!

Her name's Alice and she has the most adorable and photogenic three-year-old you ever did see, called Laszlo. I met her on Tinder and we at the very least clicked as friends, if not anything romantic because 'narti does not do childs. Met for coffee/hot chocolate back in... March, I think? YES because we went to the AFLW Grand Final. Anyway yes, we've been to do fun things pretty much weekly since then. Gone to the zoo, went to a Cabaret Festival show called The Swell Mob which I didn't do very well at because it was a sort of... interactive performancey thing? Idk. Like all the characters were LARPing, so I feel Sallie and Ku would've done awesomely at it but I just didn't know what sorts of questions to ask and who to talk to and what was going on. It was fun but I know I didn't get as much out of it as I could have.

Alice plays AFL herself so I've gone to see one of her matches en route to Victor Harbor where we got ice cream and played minigolf, gone to a community screening of Wall-E which was... an experience XD It was in this little country hall, the kids all had a costume competition where they dressed up as robots and gave a fashion parade during the interval--yes, there was an interval--and it was all rather odd. She's from the UK originally, moved to Perth as a teenager and hence picked up on Fremantle as an AFL team, so we've been watching the odd Freo match up at my place.

She's a love, as is Laszlo. Srsly perfect small child, which really does just confirm to me that I don't want one myself. He went bowling the day we went to see Toy Story 4 and got to choose a prize from a cabinet at the end, and picked the sparkly tiara, which he was trying on while watching the movie. He sits and pays attention to the entire movie while watching and gets totally invested when characters are sad, while other kids twice his age are climbing over the seats. He carefully pats the cat, I've seen him throw one hissy-fit (because I wanted donuts and bought donuts, and he didn't want donuts so he didn't get donuts. You bet I was thinking of the 'why my kid is crying' tumblr) and the rest of the time he's got the biggest grin and is always excited to see me. At the end of Toy Story 4 as he's hugging his Woody toy I asked who his favourite character was, to which he answered, 'Mummy!'

But everything still gets planned around the small child, which is ttly fine in a friendship but I couldn't deal in a relationship. Having to either plan around his bedtime, which activities are going to be fun for a 3-year-old, how much time he can deal with, or alternatively when Alice's mum's free to take him. Basically, child must always be entertained, and everything winds up being about the small child. I need way too much me-time to be able to deal with that day in, day out, no matter how perfect the kid is. So yes. Happy for a friend to have a small child, not for a significant other.

MEANWHILE. This is the most piss-weak winter I can remember. It's July and we've had, like, four days over 20. WINTER. We're at least still getting reasonably steady rain and I haven't needed to water the garden, but the rest of the country isn't doing so well. The drought in the eastern states scares me.

But my back's healed! So there's that. And bloogum's finally getting a makeover. Maybe I'll have that done by the end of the year. HHHHHHHHHAH.

Frig, over a month again, damnit. I'm 33 now! Yay! Also we have a new PM. Again. In the past eight years we've had two elections but six Prime Ministers. Wtf.

August has been my month of getting shit done. I made a big list at the beginning of the month of all the stuff that's been piling up to get done, some big and some little, and I've just about crossed it all off. I've cleaned the oven, washed the kitchen walls (I have no exhaust fan, so the smoke and steam from cooking congeal and drip down the walls. It's great), cleaned and reorganised the fridge and cleaned and reorganised the pantry. Fixed a shelf in the studio that Rory broke by jumping on it too many times, so he's not allowed in the studio anymore.

I've organised for more quotes for turning my cupboard into a display cabinet, this time contacting glaziers, because the only quote I managed to get out of cabinet makers was over 5 grand. So. Emailed ten glaziers, five said it's outside their scope (of whom two said I should go to cabinet makers), three didn't get back to me and the other two came around on Tuesday morning to get measurements. I've got one quote back so far, which is a titchy smidge over 2k so that's aaaalmost within my 1.5-2k budget. I'm just waiting on the other quote then I reckon I'll make a move and get this thing installed. Woo!

I bought a duster and dusted, turned the posts on the cat tree upside down so he can scratch at the top of the posts again (he's all but destroyed what was previously the tops) and swapped over the hard disks in my laptops. Shwiggy, which had a shiny new solid state disk installed about 2 years ago, no longer charges so it's exclusively used for Foxtel now. And then there's N00b, bought at the beginning of the year, which had only a regular 1TB hard disk because it was $300 cheaper and I already had a shiny SSD. So finally I got around to swapping the disks over.

Dry cleaned my coat, wherein they lost one of the buttons that made me buy the thing in the first place and then tried to blame me for it. Thankfully I had a spare, but I'm totally going to leave them a Google review on this =| Not happy. On that note, did some clothing maintenance and sewed up holes, reattached other buttons, chucked out some beyond repair stuff.

Done weeding, swept the shed, swept the cobwebs out and sprayed it over with surface spray, cleaned and vacuumed the car interior (not exterior cos it'll get rained on within the week), done my taxes, done the last bits for getting my home loan refinanced and reopened a bank account that had closed itself due to inactivity.

I have an outline for the Tsayth NaNo which I'm pretty happy with, though I'll revisit that in a month to see if I'm still happy.

Finally, and I mean that in every sense of the word, I finished Kate Hawtin's website! She's currently in Greece so haven't been able to see it, but I'm pretty stoked. Still a bit of back end stuff, like obviously getting her domain/hosting and then converting it to a Wordpress site she'll be able to update herself, but this is the beginning of my portfolio of websites. It's been a looong time coming. I'd like another one, maybe two websites, then I can pretty confidently prove to prospective employers that yes, I can design a goddamn website you blind arseholes. Now I've got this one, though, I'm going to start applying again. Never know, that one could be enough to prove myself.

Two things yet to cross off the list, but I'll get them done this weekend, I hope. I'm so excited for the glasses cabinet! It actually feels doable now! I was so close to giving up and either leaving it as is or halfarsing it somehow, but now I feel like it's going to happen really soon. WOO!

Facebook: Good afternoon, Anna! Clouds are clearing today in Adelaide. Enjoy the sunshine!
It's 34 degrees, you irresponsible dickwits.

In other news, I had my first lady-date on Tuesday! I've turned off the 'looking for men' option on Tinder and also downloaded Bumble to do the same, and by golly, gee whizz, does that narrow the options. There are literally six people to cycle through of an evening, across the two of them together. I've significantly lowered my bar to the point where even people without any text in their profiles are being swiped right.

Anyway. So I finally got a match! Chatted with her a while over text, discovering we're in much the same boat of having had boyfriends but never a girlfriend, so we met up on Tuesday after work :D First to Cocolat for a nice cold smoothie where we talked for a good hour and a half, then to The Apothecary for a cocktail and impromptu platter of antipasti that ended up constituting dinner because the smoothie had been pretty filling, and finally once the sun went down to the Parade of Lights on North Terrace, where they've illuminated a whole bunch of historic buildings (museum, art gallery, uni buildings, that sort of thing) with basically painted light animations. It's part of the Fringe Festival, which started last Friday. This was the highlight. They have a bunch of smoke machines around the lawn in front of the museum, and fire big flat sheets of lasers through the smoke above your head, so you lie back on the lawn and just watch this play of light in the smoke. It's seriously awesome. So surreal, like being on an alien planet, or maybe under the sea, sometimes like the Northern Lights depending on how the smoke was behaving at the time.

The date itself was no more than a friend date at this stage, just chatting about family, work, the Fringe, wine/food/cooking, small talk that lasted until about 11pm. She was suuuuper nervous at the start so I didn't want to make any moves or scare her away XD She's also tiny. I have a good foot on her XD She's a PhD student, previously worked for the CSIRO, super into sciencey physics, kinda shy but opened up a lot as the evening went on. Easy conversationalist, almost as much of a foodie as I am, and just a fun, casual, relaxed time. Already so much less pressure than any first date with a dude. See where this takes me X3

Unrelated, last weekend I finally presented Katie Hawtin with her first proof of her website. This is something I instigated a good, oh, two+ years ago now. I designed her business cards at work and we print them every couple of years, and the last time she ordered them she mentioned in passing that she hated her website and didn't want it on her business card because it's so outdated and ugly. In an effort to add some real clients to my digital media design portfolio, I offered to design a new site, bells and whistles and all, for $100 just so it felt more like a business transaction. TWO YEARS LATER and she has a proof! She's phenomenally enthusiastic, absolutely loves where it's going, so I'll get started on actually creating it in March with the aim to finish it by mid-April.

I'm also in the middle of updating my own portfolio, which is slightly broken and very out-dated. I have no idea where the slightly broken came from, since I haven't updated it since I made it, but the navigation icon up in the top corner now scrolls instead of sitting there nice and fixed, the gallery images on the print page are off-centre by about 70 pixels, and there's a 5-ish pixel gap at the beginning of each client. Also the header on the blog is now an error message. NO idea where all this came from, but that's this weekend's task. Just what I want to spend my weekend doing, bug fixing of my portfolio. Yay.

And I saw Black Panther on the weekend. It was pretty gosh darn awesome. The warrior ladies had the most badarse character design, omg. Also the villain was probably the best Marvel villain in a while. His motivations were just bang on. Loved this movie!

WHY.

JUST.

WHY.

Everything is perfect in Chrome and Opera.

Print breaks ONLY on the last slide in edge and Firefox, which, instead of making a box for the sliding gallery that's the same size as everything else, it makes a long line of slides and scrolls for days. IE is perfect (wtf).

Fics break ONLY in IE and edge, where the text goes over the image.

That's it. Two pages, each in two browsers, both with the same COMPLETELY PAGE-BREAKING PROBLEM.

And I have NO IDEA how to fix either of them.

WHY.

6:30 ALL RIGHT I've done fitness and had dinner now I'm going to FINISH this goddamn print page!
11:20 ... I'm going to bed.

Aww yeah. That took way longer than expected, mostly purely because the gallery script I was originally going to use, PhotoSwipe, just would not work for me. Way to frigging JavaScripty. No idea what was going on with that thing. So I made the gallery with touchTouch instead, which made a shedload more sense. I even made my own little preloader gif for when it's loading the next image, so that was fun :D

The basic page still doesn't work properly in Safari, but I think I know where to fix it. I'll troubleshoot that later. Now it's dinner time, then start drawing the thing for the illustration portion of the launch. At least that'll work for me.

:B By golly gee whiz I love coding. Especially when it works in ever browser you have access to except IE. I super duper love that.

I swear web design is about 5% actual design, 10% coding, and then the remaining 85% is troubleshooting. Of which at least half is just troubleshooting IE.

Plus side, I'm about a day and a half ahead of where I had planned to be by now. The fun tricky part will be working out the actual gallery bit. I want to make it be able to swipe on a mobile. THAT'll be something to learn. I've set aside an entire week to figure that out.

Today, we stop IE from distorting the thumbnail images. Yay.

The blog is pretty much done! It's all now powered by Wordpress, so all the links--like making a comment or clicking the categories and dates in the sidebar also work, and I can make posts to it and IT WORKS! I did break it on Saturday when it was SO CLOSE, only the mobile view was giving me sidescrolling and whatever I did to try and fix it... broke everything else. So I went off to bed in a huff and the next day played Banjo-Kazooie, but I was up to Rusty Bucket Bay there, which has always been my most hated and frustrating level, and so I just got myself more frustrated and didn't touch it again until tonight. But yes, all fixed now!

Also, for a delightful bit of serendipity, the mobile view now works on Internet Explorer! And Firefox picks up the fonts now! So now Opera is the only browser anywhere that it doesn't work in. So awesome. God I'm so proud of myself for figuring this out. HEE. Few little fiddly things I want to fix before I actually start putting entries on it:

o The date, which should be in the form 'Monday 12 October 2015' with a break after the day of the week. Not sure exactly where to change that.
o On that note, date seems to have a random tab or many spaces or something at the end of the line? It's not padding--Chrome's handy inspect element thing proves that--so idk what that's doing there.
o Figure out if there's a way of stopping Wordpress from automatically putting a <p> around every new paragraph in an entry, because it's putting one around my in-post images. Doesn't matter so much on the wider views, but on the mobile view I'd like the image to stretch all the way across the screen, which I can't do if my paragraphs also have the 40px of padding, cos of course that then gives the picture 40px of padding, too. So that's annoying.
o Link to the rest of the portfolio. At this stage it's just the index, but I'll be expanding it a bit more shortly.
o Take a better photo of that moss (it was late and failing light so it's a bit blurry) and probably redraw the (th)inky thoughts. The g is bugging me, and the swash on the y isn't smooth enough.
o Rename the folder from /wp_testing to just be /blog, aka LAUNCH THE THING YAY!

I'm sure there are other pages I could code up to be pretty, but if I keep fiddling then it'll never actually function, so just those bits for now. That'll all be tomorrow's task, except the moss photo, which I'll do over the weekend when it's sunny.

Tonight I'm going to celebrate this achievement by writing :D