Saturday, January 05, 2008

Weekend Thoughts

The house is coming along nicely, considering the problems from weather. We now have a roof complete with shingles, and the windows and doors will be installed starting Monday. I'm going to wander around tomorrow and make my electrical plan, in the last day I'll be seeing the house in bright daylight before I apply for the electrical permit on Thursday night so I can start pulling wire next weekend. We're getting a spell of warm weather--by New England winter standards--for more than a week so we intend to take advantage of it.

New front-page house picture will come tomorrow; I didn't have time today until the light disappeared. I will try to create a couple of picture galleries, too. I have at least three subjects to cover: our trip last month to Santa's Village, Christmas, and the house. And I could probably do an entire gallery on snow, if it doesn't depress me too much.

My pickup truck, which sported a plow, has been declared DOA, at least as far as my budget is concerned. Bad brake lines and rotting where the cab meets the frame, along with transfer-case trouble, mean too much money for a twenty-year-old truck. That repair bill would pay for a lot of plowing by someone else. Not that I want to spend money on plowing, but I think it's just going to be that sort of winter.

I'm going to be making some changes to the Web site this month, designed as usual to make it easier to update. Now if I could only design some extra time into my schedule. The front page will remain similar to what it is now, with a hot spot on the bottom (where the holiday page link is now) that will take you to a page of links to other features. The holiday page, for example, or the picture galleries, or anything else I can manage to toss up onto the site. Karen wants me to put up recipes, poems, and stories, and the new format will make that easier. In a way it will be like the holiday page, but perhaps with a little more structure, at least in the long run.

The banner will change every month intead of once a season. That's because it has always bothered me that a few short weeks after the end of a season, last season's banner looks completely out of place. Look for the December banner to appear within the next couple of days. A page of old banners will be available from the main links page then, too. It will probably appear without captions at first, but I will add them later.

I now have a working scanner again, so I will be adding some artwork as well. William and Daniel will be glad to share with you; we'll see if the teenager will consent to include some of his art. He's very picky about what he shows, although the only people who can see flaws in it are his artist mother and himself (and Karen only points out technical errors; she's very supportive of his art).

When the year is done, I'm hoping to make the site a richer experience, more fun for friends and family to visit, with more frequent changes to keep you coming back every day or so. If you have anything you'd like me to add to the site, send me an email and let me know.

Ah, yes, email addresses. There are no links to our email addresses because of the amount of junk email we get on them from having published links earlier. But I will give them to you here (and list them on the site) in a form that an automatic search engine can't find. Just use the name of the person you want to email as the alias, and thebrooksbunch.com as the domain. So mine would be gordon at thebrooksbunch dot com, in proper email format of course. If you misspell the first name, don't worry, it will come to me as the administrator, and I will pass it along.

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