Surprise!

I’ve done some cleaning and tidying up around here, trying to make the place easier on the eyes.  Cleaning is easy when it doesn’t involve dusting and vacuuming.  Things aren’t quite perfect yet, but it’s a step in the right direction.

We’ve had at least three different cats roaming around our front yard for the past couple of weeks.  One of them cries loudly at our front door, but runs away when I open it.  Two others regularly fight, and we can hear it inside even with all the windows closed.  I’m on the verge of bringing out the traps to check for testicles and ovaries, but I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t had time to really plan anything.  I think the sound of the cats fighting might upset Jackson, though, so I need it to stop.  I could just chase the cats away, but I feel like that’s irresponsible.  Apparently no one else cares about cats roaming the neighbourhood, so perhaps I should.

About Jackson, the vet called to say that his lab results were negative for a urine infection, even though he had blood cells in his sample.  She wants me to keep him on the antibiotics for another week then she’ll do a recheck, but she thinks he has a case of cystitis rather than a UTI.  The cystitis can be brought on by stress, so he’s definitely a candidate.  Knock on wood, he hasn’t peed inappropriately since the antibiotics, but he’s still pooping in locations which are frowned upon.

Oh, I downloaded the new version of IE today, version 7.  It still feels so strange and awkward… Barbie says learning new things is hard!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/02 at 01:11 AM

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  1. Ooooh! Nice and fresh and pretty!

    Your use of my most-hated Barbie-ism has me laughing!

    Posted by Diana  on  11/02  at  04:02 AM

  2. I thought I was reading Tired Girls initially, and then I realized, no, these posts aren’t about those strange fiberpills…

    It loads much kinder this way.

    Posted by Georg  on  11/02  at  08:41 AM

  3. Very nice new look!

    Posted by Nancy  on  11/02  at  09:13 AM

  4. Flippy says I still need to jazz the place up a bit, so I might play around with a darker blog “wrapper” (the page background), or modify the font.  I’ve been using this blog as a business reference lately and I thought it should look a bit more professional.

    Diana, Flippy is always saying, “Barbie says math is hard”, so I learned my bad Barbie habit from her!

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/02  at  10:35 AM

  5. I’m torn between liking the new, clean look and missing the paw prints.

    Posted by Helly  on  11/02  at  11:11 AM

  6. Helly, I added green pawprints to the background, but I can’t seem to get the shade of green I’m looking for.  I want more of a dark olive shade, and while my background looks that way in Photoshop, it ends up looking more “forest green” in a browser.  I think there’s an Adobe plugin to rectify this… I’ll have to hunt it down.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/02  at  01:20 PM

  7. I like it, but I miss the paw prints, too.
    My fixed male fought loudly and frequently with the neighbor’s fixed female for years simply because there wasn’t enough territory for the both of ‘em. Small yards and houses too close. My poor cat got his nose scratched a lot. It was the 80s - only mean people kept their cats in all the time! LOL!

    Posted by Victor Tabbycat's Mom  on  11/02  at  01:55 PM

  8. You’ve all had me a bit boggled with your comments about “missing the paw prints”, but I think I’ve figured it out --- can you not see the pawprint background now?  This blog layout might be wider than my last blog layout, so I guess there’s a chance that the background scrolls off the side and you can’t see it.  Is that what’s happening?  My monitor is at the largest resolution possible (something like 1278 pixels wide), so maybe that’s why I can see it and some of you can’t?

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/02  at  02:55 PM

  9. I like the new streamlined look!  Very fung shui!

    See ya tomorrow, NaBloPoMo!

    Posted by vetmommy  on  11/02  at  02:59 PM

  10. I can see the paw priunts - although I may have to rest my monitor settings, the paw prints are a bit difficult to see against the background.

    I hope that Jackson feels better soon.  My Darren had cystitis a few years ago and it was quite the scare. I had been away for a bit on business and hubby didn’t understand why Darren was urinating in the bathtubs.  I thought he was being rather polite considering the circumstances.  The night I returned home, Darren was completely blocked and in a lot of distress and we ended up in emergency vet care once I recognized the symptoms from what hubby told me.  He has since compeltely recovered and never urinates where he’s not supposed to.

    Posted by prajantr  on  11/02  at  03:36 PM

  11. Ah, is that the problem—there’s not enough contrast between the paw prints and the main background colour?  They look pretty good to me, which either means my monitor is exceptional or it’s wonky, and I fear it’s the latter :p

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/02  at  06:47 PM

  12. I can see the paw prints this morning, but yesterday when I left my comment, I didn’t see any green background at all, with or without paws.  I use Firefox at work, Safari at home, so sometimes things don’t look the same to me as to others.  Come to think of it, that’s pretty much true of my life as well.

    Posted by Helly  on  11/03  at  12:53 AM

  13. I use Firefox - you should consider it too.

    The body of the text is all I see and the side bar appears flush left *under* the body (which is also flush left). I see no paw prints at all. It’s a nice clean look, but probably not what you intended.

    Posted by Georg  on  11/03  at  01:34 AM

  14. Oh! There are the pawprints and green- in a thin bar across the very bottom of the page.

    Posted by Georg  on  11/03  at  01:35 AM

  15. That’s weird.  I don’t see any pawprints or green at all at the bottom of the page - everything on the sidebars looks normal to me, pawprints and all.  I use IE (still 6, because I hated 7 when I tried it last time), and I hated Firefox too.  I...don’t...like...tabs.  There, I said it.

    Posted by Flippy  on  11/03  at  12:06 PM

  16. Georg, I’ve considered a browser change in the past, just to try something different, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to switch away from IE.  I just quickly checked the stats on three busy sites that I own and the percentage of visitors using IE is between 63% and 82% on each of them.  So, if I stick to designing for IE, I know I end up making the site look “normal” to the majority of people who visit.  The cross-browser conflicts really annoy me sometimes—when I designed the website for the Wild Parrots movie, for example, my css looked one way in IE, a different way in Safari, a different way in Firefox, etc.  Another example is that I enjoy reading Niobium’s blog (she’s on my blogroll), but to me, her site is always hard to read because it’s designed for Firefox and doesn’t display properly in IE.  I wish those kinds of conflicts could be rectified.

    I mostly stick with IE because I do a lot of website design and website updating (nothing too complex—I know I’m not the Monet of website design!), and I want to ensure that my sites look proper to the majority of visitors.  I do have Firefox and Netscape installed so I can do visual checks of my sites on other browsers, though.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/03  at  10:53 PM

  17. P.S.  I just looked at this site in Firefox, and see what you’re talking about—the sidebar is under the main blog section, and the header is white instead of grey.  Those are css conflicts, I think, and I don’t know if there are remedies for them.  I’ll look into it, though.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/03  at  10:56 PM

  18. Not to beat a dead horse, but I have one more observation—I designed the page to display at 1280 x 1024, as those are my monitor settings.  At those settings, a green pawprint background is visible on both sides of the page, and at the bottom.  However, if I reset my monitor to 1024 x 768, then only the main part of my blog shows up, and the background (the green paw prints) isn’t visible because of the size difference.  The only part of the background that can be seen at those settings is a small strip across the bottom of the page, under the body of the blog.

    Okay, one mystery solved.  Now I’ll have to research the css differences between IE and Firefox.  Apparently IE allows some css tags which Firefox doesn’t recognize (they’re sort of proprietary IE css tags), so I need to identify them and see I can find some other options.  I don’t like the way this place looks in Firefox… it’s so bland rasberry

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/03  at  11:14 PM

  19. My monitor is 1024 x 1280. smile Yes, I have it turned 90º, but that’s because I like looking at the whole page of a document at once. I do a lot of word processing.

    I do see the green pawprints if the screen takes a little to load, but when the page finishes, it’s back to the bar across the bottom.

    Posted by Georg  on  11/04  at  01:02 AM
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