December

I dropped my classes. i am very sad about that, but relieved too. It was too much. So much work and trying to deal with meds (or lack of them). I just couldn’t keep up. It is very similar to what has always happened when I’ve tried to do school, but with one major difference. Since we actually learned by doing things, I still know everything I learned and can use it for my work.

As I have probably mentioned before, I love CSS. I have been learning it and using it for close to 10 years now. Both of the CSS classes that I took were excellent and at least doubled my knowledge of the subject. I finally understand CSS positioning and the reasons why people use values like -9999px. I can troubleshoot specificity issues and create cross browser compatible layouts (or at least I could when I still had access to a windows machine with IE6 on it – not sure what to do about that little problem yet).

I have also learned much more about PHP and javascript. I hope to be able to take more classes when I get the meds thing straightened out. It is probably best to take one class at a time, aside from short overlaps. Maybe by then they will have updated the curriculum. I am trying to decide between Ruby on Rails and Python as a next language to learn and also wondering if it might be better to just keep learning PHP instead of branching out. If anyone has any ideas about this, I would love to hear them.

Besides from meds and things related to them, everything is good. Work is still very busy and overwhelming at times, but it has been really nice to have a growing number of regular customers and lots of new projects. I am excited at the possibility of being able to work w/d and extremely relieved by the fact that K has taken on the roll of ‘beedragon billing manager’!

K got a promotion at work 😀 It makes me really happy that she is being officially recognized for all of the great work that she does. She is now the Crisis Team Coordinator. Congratulations K!

The cats are all finally getting along, at least for the most part. Nikkyo has won the at least the tolerance, if not the hearts, of both Marley and Kito. My niece Hannah gets cuter by the second. I can’t wait to see her in person again. I am really hoping that I will be able to go to Florida/Baltimore in April. Hard to tell at this point. The trip to Seattle went well. I will take that as a good sign. I am also really excited to get to see Cindy and Helene. I hope it all works out. It has been much too long.

I should really be getting back to work now, but I am hearing the call of Warcrack. I love that game! I switched servers so I can play with d. We can’t really play together too much because she is a way higher level than me (for now ;)), but it has been nice to have interaction in the game with a real person that i know and like as opposed to the random teenage boys that I occasionally group with for hard quests. I would also like to keep playing the character I have on Scratch’s server, but I think that might be more warcrack than i can handle. I am also liking the character I have on the new server better.

[Warning: Serious geekiness ahead. Get out while you can!]

My first character was a male night elf druid named Skiki, which was a typo for Shiki. I abandoned it at around level 8 to play on Scratch’s server as a female night elf hunter named Tsayad (hunter in Hebrew). She was an herbalist/alchemist and had a pet nightsaber named Bob. I was really into the pet part of it. I got to send Bob in for the attack, and shoot from afar with arrows. Other than that, I didn’t love the character. Wandering around picking flowers just wasn’t doing it for me. On d’s server, I am a male dwarf warrior named Greggo. Warrior’s are pretty fun. They are not very smart, but they can do lots of damage and use every weapon and armor type available in the game. Fighting style is more Rambo than ninja. I like that in a video game. Greggo is a miner and blacksmith. I much prefer banging on rocks to get ore than picking flowers. Blacksmiths can make weapons and armor, which is pretty cool, but i do kind of miss having endless amounts of healing potion like an herbalist/alchemist does. d mailed me some healing potions and bandages. thanks d 🙂

[/end geekiness]

Ok, back to the real world now where you can’t just brutally kill people that piss you off. I have a couple of projects to work on today. A photo gallery and an online sales catalog. On Friday I am meeting with a friend of mine to discuss another new project, and I am playing phone tag with someone about yet another new project. Thankfully, two of the larger new projects are temporarily on hold while the clients are getting organized. It is going to be a busy month!