Saturday, September 06, 2014

Unintended Consequences

While I was successful this morning with my main goal (to to the gym) and miserably unsuccessful with the others (go to the bank, get haircut), the fact that I was up early enough to go to the gym and still have time to do the rest of my tasks should I have the motivation to do so.

Being the thoughtful husband I am, I got up and dressed very quietly so as not to disturb Chrissi, who was still asleep. An hour or so later I learned that, thanks primarily to my consideration, Chrissi had nearly wet herself by not knowing where I was and thinking I was in the toilet rather than at the gym. The crossing of the legs apparantly continued for half an hour until the sound of the door went as I came home - which was a hint that I hadn't been in the bathroom all along.

No harm done, though. Chalk up another victory for bladder control.

Thursday, September 04, 2014

But You're Treating Me Like An Adult!

There are some conversations during which you can't help having this little internal monologue, baffled that you're being treated like an adult. You know full well you shouldn't have this sort of responsibility or decision-making power, you're surely not old enough or serious enough to be talking properly about this sort of thing like - well, like a normal person.

Chrissi and I had one of these earlier in the year when we were handling the housebuying paperwork with the solicitors, and another previously with the bank when discussing mortgages. Throughout each of those conversations there was this incredulous disbelief that they're taking us seriously, which is clearly madness - it's us, how can we be talking about buying a house? In what sort of crazy world would they let us buy a house as if we knew what we were doing?!

Today there was another one of these conversations, as we were at the doctors discussing what we'd need to think about and what our options were if we were to consider trying for a baby at some point. I hasten to add that at the moment we have no idea if this is something we want or not, and it was with this intent that we wanted to understand all the considerations - but they took us seriously. As if we were the sort of people who might seriously talk about starting a family, which is clearly madness. Yet at no point during the appointment did the doctor turn to us, point and laugh and accuse us of taking the piss.
The whole experience was very surreal. Do you ever get to a point in your life where you actually feel that you are at the appropriate age to be doing something? Does the terrified bemusement that you're actually being taken seriously when you're trying to act like an adult ever recede?

Tuesday, September 02, 2014

Template Adjustments

One thing I've been doing with my free time at work recently has been learning a little more coding - there are several courses on CodeAcademy and while I've dabbled a little with Ruby and SQL, last week I was doing a combined course on HTML and CSS, the first of which I mostly understood but was useful to really get clear, and the latter of the two has always proved a mystery to me.

The result was that yesterday, when I looked at my blog and knew that there were a couple of features I'd never really liked but never quite worked out how to change, I realised I now probably was able to adjust it. This was somewhat true - I knew roughly what I was doing, but the difficulty of navigating a very concise template which wasn't filled with handy comments or pointers as to exactly what did what was slightly trickier to handle.

The eventual solution was a combination of handling the template code in one window while using firebug as my investigative aide to help pin down exactly which classes were causing the problems. The actual solution involved commenting out a couple of lines and changing some of the padding - but the net result should be a marginally cleaner layout, which has been long overdue.

Monday, September 01, 2014

How Does This Work Again?

While I'm on a blogging surge*, I still can't quite remember how this blogging thing actually works. I was in a productive mood last weekend and so wrote a couple of posts, which as with the tried and trusted approach I set to appear throughout the week to create the illusion of activity.

Apart from one slight flaw in my plan - I forgot to actually publish them as scheduled posts. I simply prepared them, saved them as drafts and then abandoned them. It was only when logging in to write something today that I realised they had been entirely abandoned. So I published them, and we return to activity.

* Yes, the now four posts within a little over a week does count as a surge.