Well, the old crappy dishwasher that came with the house finally went tits up.  It wasn’t worth replacing right away as it did a passable job of cleaning the dishes and heated them up nicely, so I decided to either use it till it died, or replace it upon further kitchen remodeling down the road.

It died.

Noticed that the last batch of dishes a few days ago came out really spotty for some reason, bit since I got some spots anyway with each load, I figured it was just more of the same.  Loaded the washer up and went to run it and noticed it didn’t finish the previous cycle (and upon further examination, there was standing water in the bottom too)… that would explain the spots, and also meant I needed to re-wash those dishes.  So, cranked the dial around to run the latest batch.  Nothing. It just stared up at me with flat lifeless eyes.  I checked the breakers, flipped the retarded light switch that the building code requires to be able to turn off a dishwasher from above the counter, spun the knob a few more times… not a peep.

“Dammit, don’t you die on me!”  I grabbed my tools and prepared for emergency, open panel surgery.  I dismantled the front of the washer to expose all the wiring, searching desperately for a breaker of some sort.  “Live, you sonofabitch, LIVE!”  I confirmed I had power to every part of the washer (with this strange little toy/tool that Drew turned me on to that detects electrical fields), even the wash-selector dial.  “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!”  He was gone.

Ok, to be fair, there is likely some buried little part that is burnt out somewhere in the unit.  I could call in a repair person to take up the torch where I left off with my amateur, yet logical knowledge of electrical appliances (having repaired quite a few in the past).  But this washer is crap, and not worth the expense of a service call and subsequent replacement part, or even, to be honest, worth wasting more than the 45 minutes I spent on it last night.  It was earmarked for the shitpile in the near foreseeable future, so I might as well bite the bullet and replace it now — It can always be moved to its new location when the eventual remodel happens anyway.

Part of me is pissed that it broke before I could replace it, but the rest of me is breathing a sigh of relief that I can now get a modern, efficient unit that will allow me to unload it without the need to inspect every piece of dishware to be sure it actually got clean.  Sometimes you just need a valid excuse.

It’s been a year to the day since Sweets and I finally admitted to each other — and ourselves — that we were head-over-heels in love.  We count this as our official day, even though we had been talking and making goo-goo eyes at one another over a video connection for many months prior.  It’s the day we couldn’t hold back any more, and let drop the guard around our hearts.

It’s very strange — and neither of us can explain it — how two people from two dramatically different backgrounds, cultures, and living half a world away could find one another in a random encounter on the Internet… one that had nothing to do with making a romantic connection.  Not only did we manage to stumble across each other, but as time crept along, we found out that we were very alike and compatible.  Now that Sweets has been here for six or so weeks, we’re discovering that we get along very well in close quarters as well.  We’re both silly, geeky, very odd people with similar senses of humo(u)r.

I do indeed love you my sweet girl, and this last year has just zoomed by.  Now that you’re here, I can only hope time slows down a bit so I can enjoy having you near.

Happy A-day, my little honeybee.

Soooo, I did a stupid thing on Friday.  At GonzO’s hurricane party I hopped down from a height of about 3′ and rolled my right foot under me, effectively spraining it mildly.

I was standing on the head of DeJockamo’s cousin (currently “on loan” and living happily in GonzO’s yard) and peering over his fence and into the empty lot next door to see what Cleo and Puck were barking at.  Cleo, a pug/Jack Russell terrier mix, had succumbed to her instincts and efficiently dispatched a rat to its heavenly host earlier in the day.  I was attempting to see if there was another one — or several for that matter — wandering around and making the dogs go batshit loco.

Finding nothing of interest, I hopped off the concrete idol.  Whilst in mid-fall I noticed that where I once had a clear landing zone, I now had a fuzzy face with an adorable under-bite, and a pair of soft brown eyes staring up at me.  Cleo had maneuvered herself directly under me, finding me suddenly more interesting than the non-existent rats.  I shifted my weight and adjusted my feet so I wouldn’t squish her, and I came down hard with most of my weight on my right foot.

I felt it roll on the uneven grass, followed by a sharp pain in my ankle — but no pop or crack sound.  I immediately made my way to somewhere I could stand and support myself, and evaluated what damage I had done.  My ankle hurt like hell, but I could bear putting my weight on it, and the initial pain was starting to dull (thank you endorphins!).  After ten minutes there was no noticeable swelling and I could walk, albeit favoring my non-injured foot.  Ten minutes later I had a small egg of swelling on my outside ankle, and a tiny bit on the front of the foot.  I was reasonably sure I hadn’t broken anything as I could support my weight, and my foot/ankle didn’t swell up like a ham attached to the end of my leg.  I attribute this to the fact that I was wearing my tactical boots when it happened, and the tight lacing and high sides are designed to minimize foot and ankle trauma.

I iced the foot for an hour afterward, and was able to hobble around with my weight partially on it.  I was even able to drive with surprisingly little difficulty, to pick up Sweets from class and to get us home.  Walking was much easier and less painful after driving… using the foot to operate the pedals seemed to have warmed the ankle up a bit and loosened up the stiffness.  When I lay down for bed, there was only minor swelling and no bruises to be seen.  I had a nice little elastic ankle brace of Sweet’s to use to keep compression on it.

Waking up Saturday, I had shockingly little pain in the ankle — just tenderness and stiffness.  My range of motion had increased, and lo and behold, the bruise had finally decided to show.  It spread, over the course of the weekend, from my heel all along the side of my foot to the arch, and a lovely bruise also formed under the outside of my foot as well.  I kept it elevated and iced on-and-off all weekend, and have been able to walk normally for the most part.  The bruises are starting to fade, but here they are for what it’s worth:

After a day of work yesterday, and a little shopping afterward, I’m finding my ankle to be a little sore — it’s the most walking I’ve done since banging it up on Friday.  Also, the swelling is going down, so that’s contributing to it a bit too.  Ibuprofen is my friend!

So, it was a damned stupid thing to do, but it could have been worse.  I now have a reminder for the next month or so of my own idiocy… like I don’t have enough reminders already.

The new site makes me very happy.  I’ve been tinkering with it nonstop since I decided to make the changeover, and especially now that the changeover is official.  There is one issue that will affect only a small portion of my readership, and that is because they are still using Internet Explorer to browse the web.

Now, I can’t tell you what browser to use (but shame on you if you’re still sailing the Intarwebs on that leaky tub IE), but I can tell you that at this point DmentD.com may never be optimized to work perfectly in IE… and here’s why: Microsoft has deemed it unnecessary to bother conforming to the ever changing world of web design standards and conventions.  MS picks and chooses what it feels is optimal to them, makes up a fair amount of their own shit, and discards the rest.

The case in question here has to do with integrating my gallery into the Wordpress front end here.  The gallery is optimally viewed in an environment that favors a landscape page design, whereas I utilize a portrait page design that employs tightly controlled design elements.  In FireFox, and indeed on the other non-IE browsers I’ve tested the site on (including, I would like to add, an iPhone), the gallery merely extends gracefully past the confines of the right border of the page design as needed because that content is”floating” above the page design itself.  IE, however, triggers a “float drop” (a phrase coined specifically for this little anomaly), causing the gallery to appear below the navigation bar because it is wider — by narrow and wide degrees — than the space allotted for it.

There are workarounds (not solutions, mind you, but the equivalent of using a coat hanger to keep your muffler from dragging the ground as you drive), but none of  them are readily applicable to this situation.  I s’pose I could find or build another theme that is laid out better for these circumstances, but I like the one I’m using, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time making it pleasing to me, and to selectively quote GonzO:

“I found out that I don’t really care, on a personal-site level, about standards, language validation, or other such nonsense.  I care about people reading what they came to read, not using excessive amounts of bandwidth, and being able to use the entire site. This should happen across any platform, and on any browser, you can think of, though I no longer test in IE or even in Windows for that matter. The site will not fit if you’re using anything less than 1024×768, so sorry to all the dudes out there still using a 4mb video card, but COME ON and get with the program, already.”

So, I apologize to the IE users, you’re just gonna have to scroll down a bit more than everyone else.  I’ve got more important site tasks to work out than fixing the gallery display in one browser, only to have it broken in another, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.  If you’re particularly upset about this, you can always just bookmark the direct link to the gallery and use that.

And having blathered on about all that, I also want to point out that I am still working on the backlog of fixing broken links and images in the remaining posts, and assigning them to appropriate categories.

Welcome one, welcome all to v3.0 of DmentD.com!

The last major overhaul of this site was about five and a half years ago (January 2003), and it opened to thunderous fanfare — the crickets were a nice touch.  It was a growth step that took me away from obnoxious, poorly cobbled together page design to a more conservative, blog-based concept.  With the (at the time) expert and ground breaking programming assistance of Mensa, we managed a scratch built posting/display system that was flexible enough for a programmer to expand upon in any direction he chose.

Five and a half years later, the programmer has shed his diapers and is flying at light speed in directions nobody could have expected.  He has, more than once over the last few years, looked at the code for DmentD.com and said “who wrote this pile of crap?”, only to remember it was him.  I have done my best to reverse engineer his work and add features of my own, and when spam started becoming an issue, Mensa did his best to graft sophisticated engineering onto a cinder block.  Dr. Frankenstein would shake his head in embarrassment.

With a pile of behind-the-scenes features left to do, and a programmer with ever increasing demands on his time that didn’t include having to bang his head repeatedly on his desk in frustration trying to do me the favor of making the ‘old girl’ watertight again, I was quietly disheartened.  I decided to just let things be for a while.

I recently, however, set up a new domain and site for Sweets.  I used Wordpress, and Gallery2 (which I was successfully using on my site… the only large-chunk brand-spanking new code I’ve had in ages, and from an outside repository no less), and was shocked at how quick it was to install, how very simple it is to configure, and how modular it is.  There are plugins aplenty, the styling is easy to tweak, and best of all, it requires very little programming skill to make some surprisingly major changes.  I know, I’m late to the Wordpress party.  Shut up.

Hmm.

So, I quietly worked on this revamp.  Utilizing the mad-genius skills of GonzO (and numerous bribes of alcohol), all my old blog and other data has been migrated over, and I just need to  go back through all the posts and fix broken links and pictures.  My old familiar friends are still in place — the random quote, the gallery image, the blogs — along with a few new faces.  I’ve signed up for, and added a Twitter feed to the navigation bar so I can keep everyone up to date with the progress of my bowels in 140 characters or less.  There are the native Wordpress options to jump to a category, view posts by month, search the entire site, and subscribe to RSS feeds for everything.  The gallery is now integrated into the blog itself, making image posting a downright treat to do.  Behind the scenes is a really dynamic spam filtration system, and an administration control panel that is slicker than whale shit.

For those of you who like to comment on my shenanigans, your first comment will require moderation, and as long as you don’t wipe your cookies out in your browser, you should be able to comment without impediment.

There is still a lot of mopping up to do from the data migration, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking and fiddling a considerable amount in the weeks to come, but basically this is the dealio.  Just be sure to take your shoes off when you come in, the carpet is new.

Added three new cakes to the gallery.  Poolside, Sheepy, and The Sorting Hat.  Have a peek.