Do you love the new look? Because I LOVE the new look.
And if you’re reading this in your feedreader then you need to make the extra effort to click over here and see the new design. (You don’t really have to. I don’t want to be pushy.) Of course if you always read from your feedreader then you may not even know what the old design looked like. But pretend you’re excited anyway.
I have known for a long time, deep in my heart, that I was ready for a new design for the blog, but didn’t know exactly what I wanted. I had some vague ideas, but no real concrete plan. Which is basically how I go through life.
Sometime around mid-December, I emailed Cathy at Desperately Seeking WordPress and asked if she’d be interested in helping me work on a new blog design. What I failed to mention were all my obsessive tendencies and complete inability to use helpful adjectives in describing what I wanted it to look like.
So, bless her heart, she said she’d love to help me and put me on her design calendar for mid-January.
You don’t even want to know how many emails we’ve exchanged since then, but I have a feeling that Cathy feels significantly older than she did when she started this process because these are some real live excerpts from my emails to her:
“I found this painting that I love. Can we make it look like this, but without the British flag?”
(It looks nothing like the painting in question. And that’s a good thing.)
“I think I want the letters to be a peacock blue, but not too bright. Like maybe a soft peacock blue?”
(Soft peacock blue? I hope she rolled her eyes when she read that.)
What’s the thing that shows up in your browser bar? You know? That thing that looks like something?
(The answer is a favicon. I’m going to have one.)
“I don’t know. I can’t decide. Will you decide for me? I have issues about making decisions.”
(Yes, will you please code and design everything and make all my decisions?)
Ultimately, Cathy used a graphic that I sent her way back in December and we worked together on all the other aspects until it was something that we both loved. She was so great about making suggestions that I wouldn’t have thought about or even known that I should think about, but added so much to the final design and feel. I wanted something that was simple and clean, but still pretty. I wanted something that felt like me. And this is it.
Seriously, I can’t thank Cathy enough for her endless patience and design sensibilities. She is a peach.
(However, peach wasn’t a color I wanted on my blog. Just some soft peacock blue.)
In other news, we received our new receiver from Dish Network yesterday and I had to spend an hour of my life that I’ll never get back trying to program the new receiver with our remote control. Then, to add insult to technological injury, I still had to call Dish Network customer service so they could verify our new receiver and help me figure out why the T.V. in our bedroom wasn’t working.
Honestly, they don’t make a bottle of Valium large enough to help me through that kind of situation. At one point the girl asked, “Can you find your RS0009 code?” and I said, “Is that even a real thing or are you just messing with me? And, while you have me on the phone, can I help you with any free tax advice?”
Fortunately we got it all working because I would have had to crack some skulls, or at least talked to someone in a not very nice voice, if the DVR wasn’t up and running in time for a T.V. lineup that I like to refer to as Majestic Monday.
And. lastly, look who still has all their teeth.
Her loose tooth is bothering her so much that she couldn’t even eat her broccoli last night. Although, miraculously, she managed to eat all the Doritos I sent in her lunch.
Note to self: Call and schedule a haircut appointment for your child.