Updating the website: Part One

Fine, so I have finally decided that it's time to suck it up and get on with renovating our work website.

This has been sitting in my 'parking lot' of things to do for quite some time now and it has been gnawing away at my subconscious with its sharp little teeth until I could stand it no longer. The little taniwha has finally pushed itself forward and all those mini-attempts at doing this rather large project have been fully laughed at and consigned to the 'information gathering' folder.

Now it's time to work on it like a big girl and stop hiding behind my bed, my baby, my housework, and my 'any excuse will do, thanks'. So here is the first step.

This is a large project for me as I have to divide my time into fairly small slices. Roughly one to two hour slices at the most. This provides some challenges for me around "flow". I will need to find some way of dealing with this as it isn't likely to change significantly in the next few weeks or even months.

To help me with the organising and planning, I have enlisted my trusty Mindmap software from Mindjet. I am more than happy to pass along the responsibility for keeping my thoughts and ideas in some semblance of order. Here is what I have to start with. This contains my initial and brief musings on the subject of creating a new and improved website.



Clearly this requires more attention before moving into the details and tasks. A whole section for required skills is missing and irrespective of whether I intend to use Wordpress or not, I will still need to learn the finer points of CSS design.

Some of the items are "might be, could be" in nature. Nothing is fixed, nothing is set in concrete. Oh dear. That could lead me to waffle about. I am getting a strong impression of needing to have stern words with myself and committing to a couple of major decisions.

Right then.
Please take this opportunity to praise or whinge about websites you love or loathe.
In the meantime I will shuffle away to my corner and make those 'big picture' decisions. I will report back once they are made and I am ready to start the nitty-gritty.

The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing

I have been wondering about Miss O's handedness for a while now.
Will she be the dominant right hander, or will she be the alternative left hander.

The reason for this musing? Observation, of course.

Since her ability to use her arms and hands has become more obvious, she has appeared to develop skills dominantly on one side, then transferred that interest to the other side. I can't say that I have noticed which side starts this off, but I can say that it appears to change focus regularly.

Currently she appears to be mainly ambidextrous with a leaning to the left side. She does things with both hands, but is favouring her left for the fine pincer movements and the throwing of objects. And a fine throwing arm she has too. Just ask the larger of our fur children about bouncing plastic rattles hitting him between the eyes from a great distance.

What I would like to know about handedness is this:-

- is this laid down in the brain prior to birth?
- is it hereditary, like blue eyes that pop up from brown-eyed parents?
- when does this facet settle down and become 'dominant'?

Or, does this develop as the child uses and learns their motor skills?

If there is any wise soul out there who knows the answers, or can point me at some information, the unenlightened would like to know.

Just for the record, both Mr O and I are right-handed.
However, my paternal grandfather wrote right-handed but used his tools left-handed. I have little doubt that he was left-handed but of a generation (b.1913) when children were forced to write by the right. And my cousin, like our grandfather, is also left-handed.

This is just another wonderful aspect of our little Miss that she is slowly letting us get to know. Ah, joy !

Words of the Week

I've been reading Kerry Greenwood's Trick or treat this week and have been expanding my vocabulary with it.
Here are my new words, with definitions supplied by Dictionary.com.

Sabra

A person born in Israel.

Piccaninny

[Origin: 1645–55; prob. ult. < Pg pequenino, dim. of pequeno small; as a word for “small child,” pickaninny and its variants are widespread in English-based creoles of the New World and West Africa; cf. Jamaican E pickney, West African E pickin small child]

According to the American Heritage Dictionary:

Used as a disparaging term for a young Black child.

In the context of the book it is not referring to a person at all, but to the state of daylight. It does make me wonder if this is one of those words that is culture dependent.

Manichean

–noun
1. Also, Man·i·chee
an adherent of the dualistic religious system of Manes, a combination of Gnostic Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and various other elements, with a basic doctrine of a conflict between light and dark, matter being regarded as dark and evil.

-adjective
2. of or pertaining to the Manicheans or their doctrines.

And there ends my expanded vocabulary.

A Miss O Update

I thought I would write a quick update on the little Miss.

I last wrote about her progress at the beginning of May when she began to stand up on her own. Since then she has been motoring along on the standing and walking front, culminating in truly being able to take independent steps shortly after her 9th month birthday. Of course it was step, stagger, fall on bottom. Repeat this multiple times each day and eventually you make it to today when walking the full length of the living room presents very little problem.

In addition to being sound on her feet, as long as she is not tired, she is also able to step over items on the floor (well, bulldoze through them really) and also manages to walk in her very first set of soft little shoes.

Miss O made a passable John Cleese doing his Ministry of Funny Walks when she first tried them on, but has since worked out that you do not need to lift your feet as though stepping over a large dog turd. Still with two fur children in the house, perhaps we should not discourage that walking style too much.

And the other major change occurred over the weekend, when Miss O was moved into her own bedroom. This was a big day for us. Both in a good and a sad way. It's amazing how much I find myself wanting to keep her close by, but I also want to have her (and us) getting better sleep through the night. After 18 months of sleeping in the same room, it was time to allow the beginning of the "growing up".

I had no idea that the little separations would tug at me quite so much.
Uggh. What AM I going to be like when she heads off to school !!

Anyway, here's a photograph of the curtain fabric we chose for her room.
I figure it's a fair compromise. I was not willing to have a "pink palace" full of Barbie dolls and princesses, but I still wanted her to have a little girl's room. It doesn't hurt that it has a good dose of blue in it. :D

Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations - Alexander McCall Smith

This little book of short stories by Alexander McCall Smith called to me at the library last month, and so it came home in my May book batch.

I am a fan of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency Series, the Sunday Philosophy Club novels and the 44 Scotland Street novels.

I wasn't quite sure what sort of tone the short stories would take, but I thought them likely to be worth the effort. Unfortunately I was wrong.

Let me cut to the chase, I found it to be a disappointment.

The subject matter is relationships, as the title would indicate. It covers all sorts of relationships many of which could not be described as salubrious. The writing covers three continents and wanders through different eras. Many of the resulting musings on these relationships is dark in nature, occasionally a bit obtuse (either that or I was away with the fairies when I was reading), and generally unsatisfying.

I found myself asking "What was the point of that?" after reading a number of them. Perhaps there wasn't actually a point. Perhaps I missed the point. Perhaps I'm out of practice reading short stories and am doing him an injustice.

If you have read these stories and enjoyed them, let me know what you think I was missing.

In the end, I enjoyed maybe one or two of the offerings, the rest I would have been happy not to have read. They added nothing to my view of life or of bad, sad and dodgy relationships.

I regret to have to give it a 1 out of 5, but I really didn't enjoy the read. Sorry Mr Smith.

Noah's Ark - May 2008 Progress

It is the first anniversary of starting this project. Blush.

I did manage to spend a little bit of time on this in May. At long last.
As you can see, it hasn't exactly grown like Topsy, but the cats are almost completed and I did a tiny bit more of the boxed edging. Here's what it was like at the last update so you can see which bits are new.





I think that this might need to move up my priority list of ways to spend my personal time otherwise I will be finishing the supposed birth announcement sampler for Miss O's 21st.