Come friendly bombs » love http://www.comefriendlybombs.com Swarm over, death! Thu, 15 Apr 2010 12:16:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 Macroblogging ≠ Britney* http://www.comefriendlybombs.com/2009/11/22/macroblogging-%e2%89%a0-britney/ http://www.comefriendlybombs.com/2009/11/22/macroblogging-%e2%89%a0-britney/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:00:14 +0000 admin http://www.isoglossia.com/cfb/?p=23 An enormous, warm, and somewhat nervous welcome to any visitors to the new site. It has been a long time coming. The heavily Slovenia-specific theme of www.isoglossia.com has been out of date, graphically and geographically, for nearly a year and a half. Dithering over the priorities of updating the theme versus content led to 17 [...]]]> An enormous, warm, and somewhat nervous welcome to any visitors to the new site. It has been a long time coming. The heavily Slovenia-specific theme of www.isoglossia.com has been out of date, graphically and geographically, for nearly a year and a half. Dithering over the priorities of updating the theme versus content led to 17 months of neither, and finally an ill-advised update to the software that serves the content caused the theme to break down. At that point I had to decide: forget the whole thing, or start again from scratch?

I decided to go with the second option. Isoglossia lives on, just not with all of its original clothing and with what remains in a bit of déshabillé. All of the archives remain intact, and a link to it is featured prominently in a place of honor at the top of the left sidebar.

Isoglossia was nearly entirely handmade in the sense that Frankenstein’s monster was, its code pieced together over time from a generic theme’s body parts and various internet morgues, and it showed — I put personalized over aesthetic, and, clunky as it often was, I preferred ‘I made it, sort of’ to ‘it looks good and works’. That was done back in the days when I had a government job and Adam was not yet ambulatory, so there was plenty of time for me to dick endlessly with tiny shards of css without mastering a damn thing. It’s been nearly five years (!) since isoglossia launched, and the change in WordPress’s level of sophistication over that time amazes me. I am delighted to be using the Atahualpa theme by BytesForAll to power (and I do mean power) this new blog. It is astonishingly configurable, and as it’s early yet in what I hope will be another fruitful five years, don’t expect the site to remain in exactly its present form for long. I have a fairly long list of tiny but doubtless hour-consuming tweaks, changes, additions and so on to make to the site, which list will no doubt grow rather than shorten, thus endlessly feeding my tiny, tiny streak of OCD. Please write or comment if you are having any particular issues with it (the site’s rendering, not the OCD); I know, for example, that the header image is catastrophically cropped in Mobile Safari, and I would like to know what other failures are out there. They are probably legion, and I should have let the OCD win out and kept this on localhost in my laptop until 2012, but I wanted to let Come friendly bombs go live in time for the post just below this one.

For some insight into the name, see that post, and you might also considering reading the nascent About page, reachable by the tab at extreme upper left labeled ‘CFB WTF?’

The header image owes an enormous aesthetic debt to Banksy, with minimal (MINIMAL!) cooperation from Adam and Alek.

I hope you like it. I hope you like it all.

I love you!**

*Sorry. The headline refers to a saying we have in our house, “As over as Britney.”
** Magda! Oh, what the hell; all of you!

]]> http://www.comefriendlybombs.com/2009/11/22/macroblogging-%e2%89%a0-britney/feed/ 8 Happy anniversary http://www.comefriendlybombs.com/2009/11/22/happy-anniversary/ http://www.comefriendlybombs.com/2009/11/22/happy-anniversary/#comments Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:00:20 +0000 admin http://www.isoglossia.com/cfb/?p=19 2003: young, hot & single. 2009: 2 out of 3 ain't bad

Today is our fifth wedding anniversary and, well, it astonishes me, as it does, you know, that I’ve had the fortune to spend five years with the woman pictured at left. In the face of such daunting astonishment and joy I am moved [...]]]> Young, hot & single

2003: young, hot & single. 2009: 2 out of 3 ain't bad

Today is our fifth wedding anniversary and, well, it astonishes me, as it does, you know, that I’ve had the fortune to spend five years with the woman pictured at left. In the face of such daunting astonishment and joy I am moved to get all sarcastic and stupid, as in past years’ posts on this topic, but I’m going to fight it, even though I strongly wish to provide enough text to wrap this photo so I can ensure that the wrapping on Come friendly bombs doesn’t look too bad, and getting all sarcastic and stupid has served me very well in the past when I’ve needed to fill column inches and/or placate a spouse who secretly wishes I would do more around the house.

This year I’m not going to do it, because I appreciate you more than ever, Magda. This is partly just due to the growing-together we’ve done over the passage of years — and at the five mark I don’t think it’s too early to begin talking in such terms — and to a large extent is the result of seeing how much you are capable of. A year ago you returned to work full time — VERY full time, sweet corn, how hard do teachers WORK? — and have not let up one jot on the immense amount of labor and drudgery you do to keep this family running, work which has not diminished an iota as the boys have grown and we have moved not once but three times since changing jobs, living in places that have often been less than ideal. On the contrary, it feels like you are doing more all the time. I have been doing a bit more cooking and a token amount of cleaning since we moved into Last House, but it occurs to me that while I have caulked two bathtubs here, I have not experienced cleaning a Last House toilet.

What we’ve managed to build together brings me more and more joy all the time, including our shared idiolect, which grows along with our love, and which is among the sources of this site’s name. Happy anniversary, sweetheart. One anniversary present is a new ‘website’ (because I know how you hate blogs). Another present to you is this, and I’m using our new site to state it publicly: I am cleaning the toilets from now on.

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