Rain Down On Me

I really ought to just merge “musings” and “general” since they do tend to overlap so much. Before I get to rambling about the rain and such, a few things.

Shortly after finishing my first chapter last night, I spent many hours futzing with my website. It all started out fairly simple: change my archive lists into pulldowns. That way I don’t have to worry about space as much, and I can open up methods of navigation more. I’ve implemented this on the gallery and my written section.

Never one to leave things well enough alone, it occured to me that by using the pulldown technique, I could finally add navigation to my image gallery. Not to be satisfied with just a quick pulldown of “Home”, “Return to Gallery”, and possibly a “next image” and “previous image”, I opted to list all images in a given category in the category section, and all images in a given month in the individual section. After posting on the MT Forum for help, I finally got it working.

Of course now, I’m beginning to think that I should rethink the whole damn thing. Keep the pulldowns, yes, but change what is in them… again. Meh, maybe after I finish this next chapter (it’s a doozy).

On to the rain. (FYI: The title of this post is actually a lyric from The Who’s Quadrophenia, “Love, Rain Down On Me”)

As I left the house this evening for another rousing night of writing and revelry it was looking like it was about to rain… about two minutes into the drive, it did in fact start to sprinkle… by the end of the fifteen minute drive, it was pouring. I walked over to Dirt, got complimented on my hair (the blue dye has faded to a delightful green), and then walked over to Collis: total transit, about two blocks. I was DRENCHED, and happily so.

I suppose it comes down to the fact that I like the rain. It is a personal, visceral experience between you and the world, and can be seen in a variety of ways, ranging from spiritual to simply getting wet from playing in the rain. How I see it varies on my mood. Today, it was just a visceral pleasure, an expunging of worries.

I’m currently watching this passle of six young college girls in white tshirts shriek at the rain, dashing from tree cover to tree cover. It’s really QUITE hilarious. Just thought I’d share. I know it is a little mean to laugh at other’s expense, but there it is: I think it’s funny as hell.

I’m currently waiting for Eli and Megan to join me, which they should be doing sometime soon. Eli got out of work late, and then had to go pick up Megan, so c’est la vie. Mickey is back home packing (and occasionally sending me IMs poking me to do my work… which I AM doing… this post is actually taking me about an hour+ to write. Hell, it’s nearly stopped raining, even), which means I’m all by my lonesome here under the pillars of Collis.

I found a new webcomic, but I haven’t added it to my list yet. It’s called Dandy and Company and is about a devious talking dog named Dandy that is constantly going on misadventures with his “owner.” He’s also generally giving said “owner” a hard time and performing practical jokes on him.

In other webcomic news, Sluggy Freelance is having money issues! They go through REAMS of bandwidth a day, and that bandwidth costs REAMS of money. All in all, there’s a whole lot of reaming going on. They’re doing a fundraiser for the next few weeks, and have instituted a “Defenders of the Nifty” membership for as little as $25 (year membership). I’ve been reading Sluggy for years, so naturally I spent my money, and I’d recommend to any other readers out there as well. Anyone who has ever had an actually popular site disappear on you knows how much it sucks, and anyone who has hosted such a site knows just how much it costs to maintain.

And back to the website. Eli and I are sitting around chatting about our blogs right now and I think I’m going to do a total structural rewrite of the site. I’ll still be using MT, and I’ll still keep the majority of the design, but I’ll probably firm up the colors a bit (still soothing, probably less soft though), and make more of the site dynamic (grabbing php includes instead of putting so much of the repetitious content like the navigation bar in every damn template). This will be after I finish my essay, and probably after I move, unless I REALLY get my ass in gear.