Happy New Year! 

Tom and I went to see Carmina Burana at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue New Year's eve.  This was the second time we participated in this Seattle tradition (Carmina Burana on New Year's eve).  We haven't been able to absolutely verify the last year we attended, but my best guess is 2006.  That production was in the 5th Ave Theatre. 

I started the New Year out with some lower back pain that I think I've finally fixed thanks to my lumbar belt, aspirin, 3 days off in a row, and hot tub.

I fixed a couple of imperfections in my rendering of my index page.  I clipped all the nav backgrounds so that they are the same size and will not repeat in larger screen resolutions.  I normalized my css to accommodate the images.  I had been delaying the image clipping and recoding because the amount of work (twelve images, twelve style sheets) didn't seem worth the gain, until I saw the page in Safari.  The Safari browser has a nasty background color artifact that shows up at the border of a background image. 

I also removed a bad kludge that I originally coded because my dyslexia and my incomplete understanding of divs combined to make the better, simpler solution seem unworkable. 

I performed a similar clean-up to my blog table of contents stylesheet.

Most of the tech projects I'm working on are at my workplace currently.  Tom got an ipad and he and I have been exploring its functionality, finding that it is particularly good at standing-in for books, magazines, movies, photo viewers, gps navigators...  and particularly bad at rendering web pages.  I figure if my page looks good in Firefox, IE, and Safari, I'm probably covered for every browser.

I'm working on time management.  I have to prioritize my life and figure out what I have time to do now that I'm working full time again and taking a lot of time in commutes. 

I learned there is a difference between Metro and Sound Transit.  Between the two, Sound Transit has been much better for me.  I've been meeting some interesting people on the bus. 

Tom figured out how to get us some free TV channels with an HDHomerun and a large directional medium range antenna.  Now we can watch local news again.  It feels good to be free of Comcast.

We had some hail on Thursday night that is still hanging around (today is Sunday).  The forecast says that it is supposed to be above freezing, but my backyard says otherwise.  I thought I saw a squirrel in my backyard that looked half way between an Eastern Gray and a Douglas.  Maybe it was just my imagination?  The Douglas squirrels are still here.  I was wondering if they would stay for the winter.

I've been swapping out the hummingbird food as it freezes; so that the Anna's will still be able to drink.  New Year's Eve an "Alaska robin" (varied thrush) showed up in our backyard and has been here since.