Writing

The garage door died sometime between when I left for yoga this morning and when I got back.

At first I thought that maybe the electricity had gone out, since repeatedly jabbing the button on the garage door opener in my car seemed to be having no effect. Then I noticed that the garage door was kind of slumped over to one side and the motor was making a low-pitched grinding noise.

So I left the car in the driveway, went in through the seldom-used front door, and informed John of the issue.  We confirmed that one of the cables that serve to hoist up the garage door had, in fact, snapped.

Off to Home Depot.

That is only the second repair-worthy item in the last couple of days.

The first was the discovery that the almost-never-used closet toilet in the basement had been constantly filling up, draining, and re-filling for god-knows how long.  We were alerted that there was some kind of water problem when we received a quarterly water bill that was rather higher then usual.  Until John happened to be in the basement in time to hear the basement toilet kick over, we were somewhat concerned that we were having another problem with our main line.  (A couple of years ago we had to get a leaky main line completely replaced, and had originally discovered our problem by getting a quarterly water bill that was rather higher then usual.  And it had happened at about this time of the year.  So we were a bit concerned.  Hm.  Come to think of it, a couple of years before that, at about this time of the year, the pipes froze and burst, treating me to the discovery of a mini-flood when I came home from work for lunch.  February is not a good month for plumbing at this house.)

Fortunately we were able to solve the toilet problem by simply shutting off the valve that controls the water flow to the toilet, but we will eventually have to gut and repair it.

File those under chapters 482653 and 9734 of the book “Why You Never Need a Hobby When You Own a Home”.

I have had this site for about 8 years, and in all of that time I have always hand-coded everything, even my journal.

Journal software has come a long way since then, and my webhost makes it even easier to use by offering wordpress as a handy little widget that you can add with (literally) the click of a button. No messy downloading, and installing, and then futzing with something like MoveableType.

So about a month ago I clicked the button and added a wordpress blog to my site, and then I let it just sit there while I re-designed the rest of the site. And then I let it just sit there a little longer because the task of then taking the wordpress blog and editing all of the CSS and HTML so that it matched the rest of the re-designed site was exhausting to contemplate.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and just get it done. I found and imported the most simple theme that I could find that matched my general requirements (I used the “Journalist” theme) and then proceeded to completely change it. I will probably still tweak it a bit here and there as I go along, but on the whole I am pretty happy that I got it to more or less match everything else.

If you want to look at all of my older journal entries, check out the “Archives” section of the site.