Community

You will notice some changes in the appearance of my blog, I have been working this last week to learn how to customize the appearance (and other things), I know how to make web pages, I am fairly comfortable with HTML, but the blog code is a different animal, it’s similar in some ways, but the coding language is stricter and uses a lot of cascading style sheets (CSS), don’t worry if you have no idea what I am talking about, it really doesn’t matter. :)

The point is, I am working on improving the look of my blog and you will see some changes coming down the line, I work on a separate blog to tweak, test and learn so that I will not disrupt my main blog, and any mistakes will not appear here (I hope!).

Eeek, one mistake I just made, I lost all of my widgets, the things on the side of the page! I can’t seem to get them back, so I will go in and rebuild all of my widgets… in the words of that most wise of bears, Pooh, “Oh bother…” *sigh*

I hope you enjoy the new look and the upcoming changes I plan on making. Please feel free to leave comments, I appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative, if there is something that doesn’t look right to you or makes the blog harder to read or navigate, please don’t hesitate to let me know. Be sure to let me know which browser you are using, FireFox, Explorer… and anything else that might help, monitor type and size, Windows or Mac, and the version… if you don’t have all of this info, that’s ok, I still would like some feedback if you want to give it. Thanks! :)

10 Comments

Anonymous said…

Hey Wretha, I like the new look – it’s cleaner and easier to read. Nice job. (This is not to say I didn’t like the last look, now.) :oP

Karen

June 15, 2008 8:48 AM

Mayberry said…

Lookin’ good Wretha (and loads a lot faster too!)

June 15, 2008 10:05 AM

The Scavenger said…

Wretha, I LOVE THE NEW LOOK. Keep up the GREAT work. Oh yea, still looking for a can for the water filter. I’ll keep ya posted on the progress, slow though it may be.

Chris

June 15, 2008 11:32 AM

Wretha said…

Thanks Karen and Mayberry, I’m glad to hear that it loads up faster for you, that’s probably because I lost all of my widgets :(

That’s OK, I’ll be able to put them back in the following days.

Wretha

June 15, 2008 11:40 AM

Wretha said…

Hi Scavenger, glad you like it, I have had quite a good time learning the ins and outs of editing and customizing this blog, now I just have to reinstall my widgets. :)

Let me know when

It DOES rain in the desert! We finally got a good rain yesterday, between 1.5 and 2 inches, it started about 4ish, and it didn’t stop until nearly dark. A couple of times, it really rained hard, we really, REALLY needed this rain.

Here are a few pix of the rainbow that appeared during the rain. It doesn’t show in the pix, but there was actually a double rainbow. These images are looking east.

This pic is looking south.

These pix are looking west.

…

Well, this has been an interesting day and a not so fun night… we had (are still having) a big fire near our community. Earlier today, or technically yesterday now, I began to smell something burning, I went outside but didn’t see anything. About an hour later, I smelled it even stronger, we went outside to see what was going on, this time we could see smoke, a big column of smoke rolling over the mountains to the south south west. We have been having smallish grass fires, burning a few acres to a couple of hundred acres, the local fire departments have been able to put them out in pretty short order. This time, it was/is a BIG fire, I understand that some 20,000 acres have been burned, and it appears that the fire is still going, as of 2:24 this morning. Most of the people who live out here chose to follow the volunteer evacuation, packed themselves up and left. We talked to a couple of our friends, one set decided to leave, the other set decided to send his wife and kids out but he stayed, he says he knows the area and knows how to get out if it gets too hairy. Anyhoo, we watched the smoke roll over the mountains all day, it got bad enough to make my eyes sting on more than one occasion today. The smoke column went up high enough to begin to block the sun, it made the evening turn orange/red. We decided to stay and ride it out, at least until we could see it would get too dangerous to stay, ie seeing fire coming over the mountain.

I called a few of the other people we know out here, couldn’t get an answer from most of them, I did get a hold of the lady who owns the local store, she said she was leaving because she had her grandkids here for a visit, she got a hotel room in town (safe from the fire) and gave us an open invitation to stay with them if we decided to leave. She said she thought everything would be OK, but just didn’t want to take the chance with the kiddos. I don’t blame her.

All day we watched the smoke billowing over the mountains, earlier in the day, Bob and one of our friends went out to the main road outside the community and watched the fire, they couldn’t see the flames, just where the smoke was coming from. He was one of the people who left this evening, with his family. The wind has been up all day, and the wind was blowing the smoke and presumably the fire right towards us. I was told by the store owner that the fire wasn’t in our community yet, it would have to travel a bit further and jump the …

Found our first scorpion inside the house, it was bigger than the ones I have been finding outside. I am glad we found that one, I’m not happy it was inside the house, we have been working on tightening up the house, putting up screens and such. But in spite of all the bugs, I am still happy to be living here.

It’s been H O T! Fortunately the humidity is typically low, right now it’s 95 degrees F and 16% humidity, the wind is blowing so it’s all good. I’ve been heating our dinners outside using the sun, I still don’t have a proper solar oven, so I have been using a black roasting pan, it gets plenty hot. Yesterday heated a turkey and dressing meal (pre-made), these are supposed to be heated in a microwave, I had been heating these in boiling water (anyone remember boil-in-bag meals?). I took them and set them inside the black roasting pan and set it out in the sun, it gets toasty hot in about an hour. I wanted more dressing/stuffing, so I got some Stove Top, divided it between 2 plastic containers with lids, I added enough water, put the lids on them, shook them up and put them in the roasting pan too. Everything was hot and good.

Hmmm, let’s see, what else has been happening… we ate dinner at our friends house the other night, I’ll call him JB and her PB, they are a very nice couple. She made homemade spaghetti, she is a very good cook! They have lots of kids, started late in life, I can’t imagine raising young kids now, our (respective) kids are grown and living their own lives (even having their own kids). Anyhoo, their kids are great, and quite unusual out here, there just aren’t many kids living out here. Oh well… JB is helping us with some material, he has quite a spread with lots of stuff, some might call it a mini junk yard, but it’s all good stuff, and he seems to know what he has and where it all is. We saw him today on our way to the mailbox, we saw him outside and stopped by to say HI, he is really a very nice guy.

Oh well, enough rambling for now… don’t seem to have much to say. I’ll try harder next time… :)

5 Comments

lornkanaga said…

Other than the occasional scorpion, life seems to be pretty good. Bless your neighbor with his “junkyard” as he sounds like someone who truly knows how to recycle (g).

TheMajor’sLady

June 6, 2008 4:22 AM

lornkanaga said…

Oops. Forgot to ask something about your make-shift solar setup. Have you considered cutting three sides off of a box (leaving a bottom and two sides), then covering that with aluminum foil to increase the reflective heat generated for your pot?

I mentioned having an ant problem. we have another insect issue too, flies. Since we have to keep every window, door and any other openings open, the flies freely come and go, mostly come in, as far as I know they never leave. Yeah I know, we gotta get more screens up, one thing at a time…

Once the sun comes up, the flies start appearing, they buzz by your ears, face. land on you, just basically irritatating… I looked up some homemade fly catchers, I found ones that use clear plastic bottles, you cut the top off, insert it, lid side down into the bottle, you need something inside the bottle that the flies like, set these around and wait for them to fill up. The idea is the flies are attracted by the bait, crawl into the bottle, eat until full, they fly up, the problem is they don’t go back to the middle of the bottle where they came in, they just keep beating their little hairy heads against the top of the bottle, where they can’t get out. Muahahaha (evil laugh!)

Now to America’s Redneck Test Kitchen, I made 5 fly catchers, I placed a different bait into each one, I want to know which one works best. Here is what I placed in each one:

milk
vinegar and sugar
leftover chicken (with a bit of water to keep it from drying up)
leftover cinnamon roll (with a bit of water…)
poop (with a bit of water…)

Yes, that last one is real, I have to know! I set these all side by side, a veritable smorgasboard for the flies, they have their choice now, dairy, sweet & sour, meat, dessert, and poo.

I’ll post the results as they come in.

.

1 Comment

seth said…

LMAO…..good post…too funny

May 27, 2008 1:40 PM