This is a holiday light painting I made using some images my stepson and I created at home.

This is a very, very first attempt at light painting.

A few things have motivated me to spend more time on this site lately. First, we have a decent-sized workspace now after a weekend spent converting two old closet doors into a corner desk in our basement. The second is a new computer, which we bought because our oldest child had finally done the old one in with enough viruses that it just made more sense to start over. The third reason is a sewing machine, which I bought for my wife as a birthday present in October.
 
I figured she'd use it mostly to hem her pants and work clothes, but instead she has become the next Martha Stewart in training and spends many of her evenings whipping up, well, mostly pajama pants. But she's learning.
 

So pardon the mess here that you'll find lately. I've once again decided to give another theme a go, and it may be a while before I am 1) motivated to get it looking how I'd like and 2) figure out how to do what I'd like to do with it. For now I just got it up and running and figured I'd poke around with it.

Although my Drupal skills are still coming along (very) slowly, that hasn't stopped me from toying around with many different themes lately. For the last several weeks, I used one called "Scruffy," which reminded me of some kind of tiny, white dog with a dirty face. I liked the look, but the theme has its issues, so I've since switched to something called "nitobe." 
 
I'm not much for customizing themes, but I like the look of this one: A simple, clean, two-column layout with a wide area for content and a right rail for links and other stuff. I really don't need any bells and whistles right now, as the site is purely a sandbox to try out different things in order to see if I can get them to work. I'd say I'm at about 50-50 right now in the can-get-them-to-work department. But considering I don't have an extensive amount of time to dedicate to it, I'll take it.
 

Every PHP tutorial I can find on the Web keeps telling me how it's such an easy programming language to learn. So far, I do not agree. I guess for people who have programmed something before, it's probably not too complicated. But for someone like myself, who has a strong understanding of HTML but not much else, I'm finding it a bit difficult.
 
But I haven't given up.
 
I'm plugging along slowly, and it is starting to make more sense. Being able to upload simple PHP scripts and seeing how they work has helped. I'm also still dorking around with Drupal, which is one of the reasons for this blog post. I got tired of the PHP so I decided to mess around with this site again, which I never seem to have much time for anymore.
 
The wife and one of the kids went camping at the zoo, of all places. So The Toddler and I stayed here. But once he was asleep, I had nothing to do but sit in front of the TV, watching football while messing around on the computer. I'm now watching West Coast football, which is rare.