I started the day listening to GIS podcasts and, thus inspired, I went out to do some OpenStreetMapping. I’m now sitting in Zekraft Café, the new coffee place on Southside where Sagra Bean used to be, and blogging the adventure by phone. (I got a cup of coffee, and a poached egg with avocado toast.) Nice place, and soon it will be on the map…
UPDATE: This didn’t publish from my phone until I got home — I think I might need to work on my security settings to get the WP app to work.
We had our second Thanksgiving yesterday with Anne’s mom and some family. Turkey & rice soup, carrot soup, some bread and salads, and desserts of course. Lorraine and Ray stopped in, and Anne’s brother Frank came with Heather & Bruce and their son Isaiah (almost two, and this was the first time I’d seen him in real life), and Nick, and Holly with her boyfriend Chris. What a hoot! That little kid never stopped moving while we all hung out, gabbing and watching him do laps around the house.
(Our “real” Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday was with Lorraine’s daughter Liz and her family, plus Lorraine and Ray. It was a very pleasant and low-key event: too much food, too much dessert, and some fun with the kids and board games afterward. Even the travel — they live outside York — wasn’t all that bad, the roads seemed fairly quiet.)
Meantime, on the yardwork front… I managed to rake the leaves into the street just before the leaf cleanup a week or so ago, and no one parked on our leaf pile this year, and our leaves got taken — and then I managed to do it again, just before the second cleanup on Friday. This time I was “that guy” whose car was blocking the leaves; I moved the car just in time, and watched the giant leaf vacuum truck go by. I told Anne once how I loved watching the garbage men do their thing when I was little, and on Friday she reminded me about it, and laughed and said I hadn’t changed…
I got the leaves done just in time too: the first snow fell last night. Luckily it was just a dusting, a warning shot, and it’s mostly gone already. We’re getting ready to ride the towpath in a few minutes.
A friend runs an academy for humanist celebrants (people who officiate non-religious weddings, funerals etc), and I got a Facebook advertisement the other day for one of her new classes: grieving rituals for ecological grief. Ecological grief? I’d never even heard the term before, but an hour of browsing and I just wanted to cry myself.
Today was a beautiful fall ride on the towpath after my cello lesson. It was kind of spur of the moment, but the day was so nice (if chilly at first) that I’m now really glad I got out.
Last night we stopped by John & Donna’s for post-turkey dessert — her brother was in town so they celebrated early — and we saw him and his son, Donna’s parents, Erin and Todd and baby Sloane, Brian and Sam, John’s boys, and Liz H-D. We didn’t stop in for too long, but it was nice to see everyone. (I also got to play cello duets yesterday with Liz’s mom; it was a full day.)
Meanwhile, back at the official, obligatory Brooklyn-jerks-turned-Buddhist rappers Thanksgiving song post:
This is a short and pretty abstract list, but our friend Julie just stopped in with her child Lee (who is here to get some knitting pointers), so I think I’ll wrap things up now.
Happy Thanksgiving everybody!
Just a few simple solutions to life’s little computer problems…
When I post photos on my blog (in photo galleries, like the one here), if the photos have captions they show up when you hover over the photo thumbs. So far so good, but when the caption appeared it was at the top of the thumb, as opposed to appearing at the bottom, and the space used by the caption was much bigger than it needed to be, almost covering the thumbnail image. This has been driving me nuts for about a year; I assumed it had something to do with my offbeat WordPress theme, but yesterday I did some Googling and found people complaining about it, starting abut a year ago — apparently the offending caption styling was related to some WordPress update.
I found several styling fixes posted online, but none seemed to work — it seems that a later WP update might have broken these fixes as well. The nature of these posted solutions gave me an idea though: I used Mozilla’s “inspect element” to get the CSS elements responsible for the captions, and used what I found to come up with a modification that would properly style my gallery figure captions. I added that to my theme’s custom CSS and it worked like a charm.
Here is the new custom CSS that did the job, in case I need it again, or others need it and find themselves here:
.wp-block-gallery.aligncenter .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery.alignleft .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery.alignright .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .wp-block-gallery .blocks-gallery-item figcaption, .gallery figcaption {
min-height: 5%;
left: 0px;
top: auto;
height: auto;
bottom: 0px;
text-align: center;
margin: auto;
}
Fonts have always been a mysterious pain in the butt for me. It doesn’t help that I have hundreds of fonts installed by default, many with similar names and meant mainly for non-Latin alphabets. I was experimenting, searching for the right look for a document, and had to scroll through hundreds of useless fonts while trying to find something to suit me — very frustrating!
I did some Googling, and I found I could just delete font files to get rid of them — but that’s a non-solution since I hate to throw anything away, you never know when you might need the perfect Linear B font…
A little more research, and I eventually found and installed a simple utility called (surprise) “font manager,” which let me enable and disable fonts without deleting them. I spent some time shutting off my nuisance fonts, and now my word processing life is much simpler.
Anne and I both got our booster shots yesterday, so today we’re just hanging out in case we start feeling sick. So far it’s just a sore arm — two sore arms in Anne’s case, since she also got her flu shot…
Last night was a visit with Shari W at Lost Tavern. Nothing much to say about that really, it was just a pleasant evening.
Wednesday afternoon we went over to the Museum of Industrial History with Judy J, starting with a pre-game lunch at La Lupita, and Tuesday was a cello day: practice in the morning and then duets with Donna H in the afternoon.
I don’t even remember what happened Monday.
It’s raining out right now (though the weather is supposed to get nice later), and I am suffering from either allergies or a cold, so today is a good day to stay indoors and play the cello. Its also a good day for it because I haven’t played or practiced once this week…
The past three days were spectacular, and that’s good because I was working as a Road Scholar guide again. This trip worked out much better than the last one, probably because:
I wasn’t there for the first ride because of Monday’s funeral, so I probably missed the day everyone had to work the bugs out of the system, but things seemed to run very smoothly — the crew, and the participants, were all playing on a higher level than on other rides.
The weather is improving moment-by-moment as I write this, but I’m sticking with my original plan. The quartet is playing Sunday, duets are Tuesday, and I have my lesson on Wednesday so there is definitely a groove I need to get back into.
That’s the song that’s playing right now, and it sums up today for me. I met Doug for a ride at Jacobsburg, and we got in about 12 miles or so on some really beautiful trails — blue skies and fall colors, leaves on the ground rustling under our tires. There was still a frost on the ground when we started, though I can’t say we were particularly chilly either riding or standing around. Neither of us were particularly interested in going fast, we just enjoyed tooling around in the woods. Plenty of other people were out too, biking, hiking and riding horses, but the place was big enough that we weren’t on top of each other — there would just be a sociable moment every so often, when we came across some fellow trail users.
It was an easy day to get up earlier than usual because of the time change, but also because Anne’s sisters were over for a visit, and we all just naturally got up early. They knitted and watched “The Great British Baking Show” yesterday, and while I was out riding they spent the day trying some of the “show stopper” recipes from the episodes they watched. Not a bad thing to come home to…
Tomorrow is going to be a bit rougher: we have to go to the funeral for a friend’s grand-daughter, who died in a car accident the other day.
I ran across this entry the other day on my old blog: it was ten years ago today that we had our first (non-test) firing of the wood-fired oven. The oven is in pretty rough shape right now, we haven’t used it more than a year — it’s something we usually do for parties (the same is true for brewing beer) and we haven’t had a party in, well…
The Halloween weekend started Friday afternoon with an Oscar Meyer Wienermobile sighting:
Not the best shot I ever took, but there it was in front of me on Freemansburg Avenue so I had to capture the moment.
Saturday was the CAT Halloween Bike Ride. Anne and I raided the last dregs of a Halloween costume pop-up store and scored some fairly disturbing masks, then we rode around town with the usual crew. There were not many people out and about, but we did see some themed backyard parties, here and there in the neighborhoods we passed through. We also saw a few houses where people really outdid themselves with the decorations.
Sunday we participated in Bethlehem’s 100th Annual Halloween Parade, where I got a few shots at the start:
Our quartet met that afternoon, followed immediately by Trick or Treat. It was a weekend!