On Makeovers and Making Do

Quite a few things happened in the last two days since the previous post. Firstly, by some lucky coincidence, my contribution to The Iron Writer Challenge #62 managed to pull through and get voted the best. Have to admit, I did not see that coming. This would be the same thing I wrote about three posts ago.

So now that I passed the initiation, I guess I really am a member of the Iron Writers… and this win has put me up for what they call the Summer Open; so I’m back up there on the 26^th of June. This time, against the winners of the other weekly Challenges.

As if that wasn’t enough for me, I went ahead and asked Brian to sign me up for another Challenge. So, C68 has my name on it, and that’s the 5^th of June. Better hope for another miracle.

And speaking of miracles… we got our telephone line restored a day ago, and Wi-Fi is officially back up and running again here at home. Until, of course, the next big disaster.

These past 48 days have been extremely illuminating to me. Here’s some of what I’ve managed to learn: 

·         Getting pissed off will not, by any means, be of the slightest help to you if the object/person that you are pissed off at is not within crushing/strangling reach,

·         The mood of your mother will depreciate at a rate faster than that of yours when you are in an emotionally disturbed state. This rate of depreciation will accelerate in direct proportion with the cost of objects that get mortally affected during outbursts

·         If you though that the public sector was lazy and incompetent before you found yourself in a crisis that required their assistance, your faith in that belief is only strengthened as time goes along,

And most important of all:

·         When there’s nothing else to do… just start writing.

And now that the Wi-Fi is back on, I have my unlimited researching capabilities… and so I can finally finish off that Longbow vs. Crossbow post that’s now six weeks late. I’ve been itching to get that done, and it’s about time I started.

A few hours ago, I was sitting here, basking in the glory of having my internet back again after weeks of deprivation, when I decided to try something out. I realized that I had been looking at the same old layout on my blog for the last five months. There was nothing wrong with it, as far as I could tell; but maybe it was time for something new. At the very least, I decided to tinker around and see what there was that I could do. 

Web designing was something I knew absolutely nothing about; one of the reasons why I’m here at Blogspot rather than on www.MathewWWeaverWebsite.com or www.MattWWW.com (kinda catchy, that second one).

I clicked here and I clicked there, and I adjusted this and poked there; and the result is what you see before you now. Of course, the first thing I did was to pitch the idea at N and see what he said.  I sent over a few screenshots and pitch it I did; didn’t take a few second before I got his reply:

“DO IT!!!”

And so I did.

And so here we are, first day of the brand new layout. I really like it; and I find myself wondering why I never thought about changing it before.

There’s the Iron Writers logo up there, as well. (I gotta say, it does goes rather well with the color scheme, doesn’t it?) If you’re willing to give the Weekly Tortur… I mean, Weekly Challenge a go, you can click the logo and it will take you directly to The Iron Writer Website. Have a look, maybe you have what it takes to be an Iron Writer.

I look at this new template and I’m feeling sorta happy, sad, and nostalgic all at once. Here’s how my baby used to look, till a few hours ago today:

Look around, and you’ll see what she’s probably going to look like for a while to come.

Yup. She’s certainly all grown up now... and I’m kind of teary eyed, to be honest. Here I am now at Post #34, and who knows how many there could be to follow. All I can do is what I’ve been doing so far; take it one post at a time.

Come Rain, Hail, Internet Deprivation or Power Outage… the Blog Must Go On. And thank you, all of you, for coming along with me.