Thing One? Oh, she's been lost in the land of push button publishing.

Thing Two's view is that in blog land, how our pages look is less important than what we say, and that we say it regularly. This week I've had to disappoint her, while enjoying her enthusiastic and funny contributions.

Since last Monday, I've spent far more time than I expected from the phrase, push button publishing, sitting at the kitchen table learning that intuitive as some of it all is, some things here in blog land, as in other areas of life, are just not simple for me. That's me, the ex-typesetter hoping-to-retire-soon-perfectionist.

Before beginning to torment any of my friends and relatives who have ever said to me "you should write" by inviting them to Nowhere,  I wanted to be at the point where looking at the page gave me a visual thrill. And, of course, to have laid out the rest of our schedule and some of the reasoning behind it.

Instead, I found out a lot about a couple of features of  Picasa, the photo handling application that I use. What became evident to me in the process of trying to turn a particular photo into one I could run in behind the header on the template I finally chose, is that there's a lot I don't know about html, pixels, ratios and the math one uses to resize, not to mention transfer, images between applications.

The fact that I know so little about so many things, math being high on the list, can open the door into a little room marked Worries about Home Schooling with a sudden slam.  One day we'll take a look in there, but at the moment I've barricaded it with the schedule we laid out in December to carry us from January 10th to April 1st. Remember? We had just gotten to the last few moments of Independent Study last Monday when I dashed off, thinking that by the end of the day I'd be back to write a cheerful, funny report on the rest of our exciting first day of winter term.

Thing Two's comment "You know what's weird  about us? We usually judge how well we are doing by how late we are," doesn't really describe how the rest of Monday went. It was a great day. But it does give you a sense of life's learning curves here in Nowhere.

Other things I learned this past week?

• The notebook worked: en français,"'weird" est Bizarre!.
• My habits of spelling and punctuation and proofreading are not the same as Thing Two's habits; a reasonable difference given the 50 years difference in our ages.
• Thing Two thinks she can be "super grouchy without getting detention"? Time to invent the Consequence Clock.
• Sticking to a schedule is one end of the teeter-totter. The other end is working at something obsessively in hopes of getting it done soon. 
• Too much time on the obsessive end of the teeter-totter can lead to sleep chaos.
• If blogging is going to be doable, I have to learn to do it faster and find a place in the day to fit it in.

Time to cook something with the eggplant I was so excited to find Wednesday in our wonderful local grocery store. Eggplant, zucchini, portobello mushrooms, garlic. White sauce or tomatoes? Lentils or not? Polenta or potatoes? With big questions like these who has time to blog?