I'm so glad you could stop by. This is my personal blog of daily life and my journey through life. You will find a strong emphasis on family and friends as well as finding my ancestors through genealogy. Unlike my other blogs this blog is more of a catch-all so any topic is fair game.
A few days ago I decided to update my blogs with a new blog signature image to replace the old text based signature. What this meant was creating an image, adding it to the blog HTML then removing the existing signature. That is easier said than done as I know of no easy way to remove the existing signature other than manually. Now, consider I have 6 blogs I am making this change to which means six different images and manually opening each existing post to make the change. On this blog alone there are 1564 posts spanning 63 pages. That is a massive lot of work! At the same time I am adding labels, correcting spelling and adding alt tags where necessary so it is beyond a massive amount of behind the scenes blog tweaking. It is slow going and it is creating a considerable amount of eye strain because it is all coding that I'm going through. The end result will give a better reading experience but it is still a lot of work. So far, two of my blogs have been fully updated and I'm now working on this one. Three more to go and life will be good :)
Oh wow! I did not realize how much my posting here had dropped off. It wasn't intentional, it just sort of happened. Quite frankly, 2012 has been a bad blogging year for me all the way around. Part of that is due to moving here in September of 2011 then spending almost three months spanning three periods at our vacation home in the sunny south. Part of it is due to still unpacking and getting organized combined with necessary new house work. Part is due to do things like painting and dealing with woodworkers, plumbers and those type of things. Believe me they can eat up a week's worth of time in a blink of an eye. Part is due to significantly increasing my home canning to compensate for almost two years of reduced home canning. And part of it is due to sheer exhaustion from a serious injury, a husband hospitalized and life in general. The past year has really been a merry-go-round of chaos. Well, there you have it in a nutshell the reasons for the lack of posts.
It's not that I don't have blog fodder, it is I have too much blog fodder. I haven't even finished writing about our spring vacation to Florida and Aruba yet and here we are gearing up for our fall vacation to the sunny south.
Ok, time to get back into the blogging loop to have a strong finish for the third quarter of 2012. I have added a new signature image to replace the old text base one and am not working through manually removing the text based sig from older posts, correcting spelling and adding label. So there is a lot of behind the scene activity going on. Progress is being made!
This past week has been rather hectic between my husband being in the hospital, trips back and forth to the hospital, trying to work home canning around that and life in general. I am beyond exhausted but so very pleased that my husband was discharged from the hospital earlier this week and is well on the way to a full recovery! What a wonderful blessing! Oh, and I did manage to home can chili sauce and tomato stock while he was in the hospital. The past couple of days, I canned salsa and seafood sauce with more tomato stock to be canned today. It is a blessing to be able to stock our pantry with delicious, additive free, home canned foods!
Blog posts have been rather hit or miss on this blog lately. I'm working on changing that so you should see more regular posts for the last quarter of 2012. The biggest change is I have changed from a text based blog signature to an image based one. It will take me a day or two to remove all the old text based signatures from older posts. I think the image signature looks a bit classier. Quite some time ago, I was going to eliminated the Blog Your Blessings Sunday posts. Most of the original members of the meme have moved on and are no longer participating. However, it is a good way to remind me to stop and count my blessings so I will likely continue those Sunday posts. I'm working on a few other changes for this blog just to help get my blogging mojo back as well. Here's to a strong blogging end for 2012!
By now you have a good idea of where I'm going with the design for this blog. I hope your eyes weren't too strained and I thank-you for your patience. Those who know me know that I'm very much into scrapbooking. For some unexplained reason I didn't think to use my digital scrapbooking skills for designing my blogs even though I use a lot of those techniques for the photos. Last weekend I found a website that was doing just that. Looking at the lovely backgrounds it immediately dawned on me that I could easily make my own designs using Photoshop. So I sat down and started tinkering. The background and header you see are the end result. I hope you like it.
There will me more changes throughout the afternoon and evening but most will be rather subtle tweaking. I will let you know when the changes are complete and again I thank-you for your patience.
Garden Gnome
©2006-2008
Updating: Later today I will start doing a complete make over of this blog so you will see some weird things going on as I test and tweak. It's not your eyes. Elements will appear, disappear or move to new locations. Don't worry as things will soon be back to normal with a whole new look after the dust settles.
Garden Gnome
©2006-2008
