Today, I spent hours just trying to clean up the "Home" navigation bar on every entry on this site so far.

The task was to unify the appearance, placement, color and functionality on every page and also across three web browsers: Edge, Firefox and Chrome. I, mostly, did a good job. There are still a few kinks to work out, but it's mostly unified. So I got the code to work on one page, trimmed it down as much as possible and then made a plan to cut and paste that "finished" code into every page's corresponding CSS and HTML files in the appropriate places. It's wild how many random errors and fuck ups this caused. I learned a lot just by banging my head against the wall trying to fix every inexplicable error that occurred from this tact. Text fields shifting for no reason, bullet-points recurring despite the "text-decoration:none" being clearly and correctly used. Random thin white lines appearing. The "Home" text not linking to anything. I had to go full patience mode and dissect each file piece by piece, going back and forth between the CSS and the HTML. I would delete one element at a time, one line of code at a time, save file, then jump to each browser, clear the cache and refresh the page to see if anything happened.

I have a feeling I'm going to redesign the "Home" navigation function entirely very soon but it was still a great exercise and got me so much more familiar and comfortable with the code. Also, just the feeling of accomplishing something as comprehensive as that, regardless of how small a detail it may seem, is great experience. I really feel like it was a huge step in the development of this thing. If I can do that I'm not far away from making a cohesive, seamless aesthetic and experience across this blog.

And this format that you see here seems to be emerging as the default "blog post" setting. Which works for me. Very simple, very straighforward, very clean. Big type, easy to read.

It rained all day and I got the wood stove going for the first time this season. Tomorrow is the first day of fall so I'll have another "First time using the wood stove this season" day coming soon, I'm sure.

I watched a lot of horror b-movies from a variety of decades today.

I'm going to do a half-ass job of putting up Halloween decorations in front of the house this year. I will buy a handful of cheap, Dollar Tree decorations and find places to hang them: on the front door, hanging from the flag slot, maybe some pulled cotton all across the front bushes. Some stuff hanging from the windows on the inside of the house. Might be kinda cool.