A Bee working a yellow-orange flower
Hi… I’m working, really, trying out Windows Live Writer. I discovered there is a way to post directly from Photo Gallery, but I’m not sure if it takes the place of posting through the regular publishing page on WordPress. I have SO much trouble with pictures on many levels, and spend lots of time messing around with my photos and the darn camera.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not a newbie, just a mediocre photographer. I’m using a little Sony DSC530. It has a steady-shot feature, which helps some, but I still get too much shake when holding the camera and besides, my eyesight has never been really good for taking pictures. But hey, that’s a story for another time.
If this post really…er, posts…I will be very happy.
Time to Try a New Theme….Ta Da
[Updated version of this post.]
Yep, its that time again…a brand new theme for my blog. This one is called Colinear.
The main reason I looked for another theme was that I wanted to show off the photo of this gorgeous cloud formation, and a small header space just didn’t do it justice. I wanted the whole cloud surrounded by blue sky, and some tree tops.
A nice bonus was that the theme allows the background of the text to be a color…this is a feature that I have wanted. Mainly I like the soft color tint instead of stark white, which hurts my eyes. Perhaps the cloud picture is too big, and maybe I will make it smaller.
Photos of the sky and clouds are a favorite of mine.
o
The two photos above are in the same cloud formation. The sun is setting (Left) and the clouds are moving toward the East, over Lake Erie about ten miles to the North. Taken from an Ohio parking lot.
The Golden Age of Childhood
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Golden Age.”
Given a choice of one stage of my lifetime to last indefinitely, I would choose to be a child in the Golden Age of childhood— which I will define roughly as the period of elementary school, ages about five to eleven. These children are interested in almost everything, and are impressed with the enormity of the world around them, whether it is the majesty of the night sky or the or raindrops on a window pane.
Many, many years from age 10 a spider web or a pebble still can capture my attention. I still rescue silly moths that have fallen into the dog’s dish, floating with legs upward and gasping for their last wisp of air. Chatting with cats is a given for a child’s agenda. Inspecting closely a pattern of Jack Frost on the winter windows…like little schematic blueprints for a plan of a new neighborhood.
To a golden-child-ager, everything is new and exciting, worthy of attention and consideration. There is no such thing as boredom…there is always fascination in one’s own fingerprint, or the way of a flower’s construction.
This quality of wonder and discovery endures in a child until someone–who is older and immune to the wonder of the world around them–interjects a snide or snarky “so what?” which effectively deflates the buoyancy of the child’s ego.
This age of childhood provides ample food for thought, and there is a constant river of new and interesting things to experience and learn. If I were to exist entirely in one stage of life, my choice would be to be a child.
In contrast to the open-minded and ever expanding intellectual repertoire of a child, other choices would be existing as an adolescent, or as an adult. Neither niche appeals to me.
The adolescent is neither child nor adult, always stuck in between, either too young or to old, unable to fully understand the implications of life.
Then there is the plight of the adult–which in my view would mean a perpetual “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” state of uncertainty… the curse of the struggle to always know what is right or wrong, and bear responsibility for consequences of all actions.
The learning curve is still present in the adult stage, but with added burden of having to live with and build upon history–good and bad, with “THE BUCK STOPS HERE” placard always nagging in the background.
101 – The Magic Number?
This is indeed the 101st post I have published to Sometimes. I’m not writing as much as I would like to, but am spending a LOT of time reading other people’s blogs, and sprucing up my own site. I’m still using Bold Life theme. Now the effort is to get the blog set up the way I want it. Get rid of the “Uncategorized” category and arrange posts in logical order.
Some posts date back to 2011, most have been published in 2015. I started out with my header featuring a bright red Hibiscus flower…inherently gorgeous, requiring little thought or consideration. Well, that flower (or more precisely, one of its descendants) is blooming as we speak…in my garden. There are three Hibiscus varieties out at the back of my “maze,” the red one, a white-with-red-center one, and a white. I had feared that the bitter cold winter we had two years ago, and again last year, had killed the red plant–but no, fortunately it returned, almost as large as before.
To continue about sprucing up my blog…
One of the things that I have noticed from studying my Stats Pages is that only a handful of my 100 posts so far actually finds my readers. Or vice versa. The current or most recent post reaches readers, but mainly only a smattering of my posts are actually being discovered. Why? Because of my sloppy and lackadaisical organization skills.
WordPress is a wonderful program, it is varied and chock full of great advice, classes, leadership. I actually printed out on paper the support pages…and that is my bedtime reading materials. I could easily make mastering the WordPress University my goal, except that there is so much to learn that it seems that I forget more than I learn. Packing so much information into my old brain’s filing system is threatening overload.
My blog badly needs to be organized. Categories, tags, links, short-links, paragraphs… HTML, CSS revisions…what a smorgasbord of things to learn!
So…what I need is some lined notebooks or legal pads, and some pencils with good erasers. Make some outlines: with headings, and sub-headings, and bullet points and note cards….well, maybe not note-cards,
Yep, I’m from the old school, before computers. I am proud to say that I have finally reached the point where I can compose an original essay on screen, but until a couple of years ago I always used the pencil and paper system befre transferring to the computer screen.. Since I have had computers since 1983…one of the first kids on the block to get one of their own…I can honestly say that my reluctance to compose on-screen was not for lack of confidence in my computer skills, but force of habit in trusting the old tools: pencil and paper.
Tinkering with my Blog Theme–Again.
I love working on my Blog. It’s fun, relatively easy (compared to climbing a huge mountain, or understanding Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, or even cutting an even edge with a power saw,) and endlessly rewarding in creating something unique to offer my deathless prose…well gosh, that’s my point…my words will be out there bouncing around in cyberspace forever.
Since my first WordPress theme, long ago…maybe three serious years ago, I have tried out countless themes for my blog. Since March 2015 alone, Sometimes has undergone 25 different changes, more than half of those returns to my present theme–Bold Life. Those are changes are just the ones that are listed on the revisions page, I forget all of the different themes I used prior to March.
Most of the changes to my theme were explorations into one basic feature, replacing the stark white background of the content page. My eyes are sensitive to light, and I am constantly looking for a way to change my background to a soft color, other than white. I should say here that I have for years and years tried to change my background color in various Windows and other writing platforms. Since I have not had unlimited time to search, I just cut the brightness of the computer screen itself.
Yes, I do pay for the Premium features for Custom Design. Some themes offer the color factors I want, but not other things like size of Heading images, and menus and various custom features available in specific themes. It just takes some tinkering to find a theme that is really expressive of my goals for my blog…but herein lies one of the detracting factors of blogging, spending so much time on the mechanical aspects of the blog instead of writing substantive posts.
Choosing a theme from the hundreds available is part of the fun, though, and I will not commit to never looking at a new theme.
