In Praise of My Husband

Here is an amusing story. It is very personal but has a business lesson:

"Good communication is critical but good relationships can overcome communication mistakes"

 Story: My husband and I have started to use a Google Calendar to increase our communication and generally improve home operations. This was a compromise between my need to over plan and his need for "just in time" information. We mostly use it for events, but I will also add some "honey do" items there.

While home on Wednesday, Pink's "True Love" song came on Spotify. It filled me with love and appreciation for my darling husband. I could relate to Pink's sentiment of being madly in love and just mad at someone at the same time. I added a link to it on our calendar for my husband to notice on Sunday. It was a love note.

Monday we went to lunch together and he started the conversation with "I need to apologies for the weekend." I could see in his eyes he was genuinely interested in hearing any grievances. Luckily we quickly discovered he had seen the "love note" as the following:

 

When in fact the full title was:

 

and the description:

 

Apparently, I was clairvoyant on how bad I am at saying "I Love You". Luckily we have 18 years of  bad communication and have learned to assume the better.

And here is Pink's amazing anthem to True Love

Thank You The Iron Yard for the HTML\CSS Education

I drive a standard transmission car. It impresses people who don't realize how easy it gets. While there use to be real reasons to drive a stick, now my only justification is I doubt anyone can steal it. Why? You have to know to push the clutch down to start the car. It is so simple, but not obvious.

That is my best analogy to why I got so much out of the 90 minute class  "Free Crash Course - Intro to HTML\CSS" by The Iron Yard. I've updated dozens of HTML pages and a few CSS. I am no stranger to mark up languages. But honestly, I never had the guts to start one. And even if I did, I would often give up. Why? There were a few basics I just did not know I did not know.

Chris Davies and Kayt Hensley were great hosts and presented a fun, fast paced  session. He took a wikipedia page and showed us step by step on how to create it from scratch. I followed along an created a pretty funky page myself.

Here are a few things I learned: 

1. "Inspect Element" brings up a debugger the web page. I knew this but never "knew knew" this! It will change my life, I can tell already!
2.  Chris' secret to design: Draw it out with a thick marker, Make the HTML and then add some style. (Note: I expect signing up for their 12 week coding session would give you a few more secrets.)
3.  You can apply style for an html tag (ie all h1) or you can add it through a class= annotation to your html tags. (You can also do id= but Chris would be VERY disappointed if you do!) The class= gets added to the HTML and a period with the class name goes in your css.  What!?! I know, how easy is that!
4. The CSS is a simple language in the format of
   

   selectorName {
       property: value;
       property: value;
   }

5. Order matters but the rule of specificity matters more!
6. An 'em', pronounced "m" is the width of one "m" . Love the padding, love the margin! Shun the boarders!
7. Consider keeping text around 60 characters per line. 
8. Read about the Golden Ratio 
9. There are a lot of great sites like dribbble.com,  css-tricks.com, and lots of classes.
10. Chris Davies is an excellent teacher and The Iron Yard is doing some awesome work in Durham,NC 

Thanks!
Ginny

And for music? If CSS is the makeup of web pages, I can't think of a better song then RuPaul's Supermodel:

A Day at the Creek

Alan, Jonathan and I spent the morning at Ellerbe Creek picking up garbage and whacking down trees. To our defense, the trees had it coming, they were invasive. The third weekend of the month volunteers come together to help our watershed and Ellerbe Creek. This month they not only had a fun group of volunteers but also a bunch of goats thanks to The Carrboro Goat Squad. 

We had a great time and can't wait for the next opportunity.   Here are a few things I learned:

• Plastic Grocery Bags Are Evil: Most of what I pulled out of Ellerbe Creek was plastic bags. I need to do better at remembering my canvas bags. 
• Trees are no match for determined boys: Jonathan and Alan loved destroying the evasive species of plants.

Want to find out more, check out http://www.ellerbecreek.org/en/

Want to smile? Check out these pictures

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 Want to listen to music? How about Trees by Rush