PenFall

You may have noticed (or not, if you’ve just stopped checking all-together) that I haven’t written here in a while. Well I’ve been busy! I, with my limited technical knowledge, helped build a blog focused on the Washington Nationals. Granted I’m a die hard Cubbies fan, as are a few of the writers on river-dogz, but there’s always room for another witty, sarcastic and highly analytical baseball blog.

You’ll notice that my website-building skills are pretty minimal (the header could use some work), but all in all I’m quite proud of myself! I even figured out how to get an image to show up in a text widget - for me, that’s a huge accomplishment. Also, changing the fonts or text size was initially a challenge but now I find myself talking about font families and scrolling through stylesheets. It’s crazy! (for me it’s crazy.)

As for changing colors, well, I’m just not there yet. I mean, can someone please tell me what this means? As I began working with code and trying to figure it all out, the colors seemed pretty self explanatory. Find the ‘333′ in the stylesheet for the header color, change it to ‘033′ and you’ll get a new color (dark blue), right? Wrong.

Now I find myself working even harder on my own site (I’d link to it, but it’s currently password protected), trying new things, working with code and challenging myself more and more to try to make a website not only look good, but go past the original theme and make it my own. Once I take the password protection off it’s going to be great - not just visually, but it is and will be a full collection of my writing, research, and some photos.

A final note about river-dogz - I think it would be pretty awesome to have an embedded calendar (or something similar) to show the Nats season schedule. Any suggestions for how to go about that?

I have a routine when I arrive at work every morning. For about 15 minutes, I check the news, I check my blogroll, and last but not least, I check the Cubs site. I’m an avid Cubs fan and have been since I can remember. If I didn’t get a chance to watch Baseball Tonight the night before, I hold my breathe as I type in c-u-b-s-.-c-o-m. It’s nerve wracking almost every day, especially as we draw nearer to October.

If you don’t already know, Cubs fans are not only the greatest fans in baseball (I challenge you to find more loyal fans) we are also probably the most superstitious — we watch what we say and when we say it. As the days pass, and more and more games are played, we usually say less and less (although some people just don’t get this. Why they had a SOX fan singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the PLAYOFFS still boggles my mind).

So as October approaches, and things appear to get exciting, we remain realistic. Someone approached me today in excitement about the Cubs, and their present status in the rankings. I quickly quieted them, and reminded them that it is only August. That while we all have hope, and faith, and will always ALWAYS stand by our Cubs, we still have a long way to go. And until October, we should all just keep our mouths shut.

(go Cubbies!!)