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We have ivy all over the front of the house, and lots of little birds live in it. They also crap all over our front entranceway. Eli and Nancy like to watch them out the window in my closet; it’s almost totally covered in ivy and you get an up-close view of the birds.

So we are having the house resided, partly because all the ivy has worked its way inside the siding, but it’s also pretty dingy and old. The siding will all be ripped out, including the ivy. The kids are crying and upset about the birds, but I don’t know what we can do about it. They are cute, and make pretty bird noises and flutter/fight around, but there are also bees and wasps living in there too (it’s a jungle). Sometimes the birds fight with the bees! I bet there are fairies living in there who will make all sorts of bad things happen to us.

Anyways, I wonder if there’s anyway to save the birds; E and N were crying so hard Jeanne told them the birds would move to the tree, but that ain’t happening. Oh well.

Most people love restaurants. I’m gonna go on record and state affirmatively that I hate them. I hate being seated, being served (no one should ever be “served” in this world), trying to get the attention of the waiter when something inevitably gets f’d up, looking around at the piles of wasted food everywhere, trying to figure out what the tip is, trying to figure out who owes what, waiting for the bill. Give me local street vendor food and quick/over the counter service, or let me cook it myself.

I want to start learning another framework. I don’t want to keep relying so heavily on WordPress as the default option when starting a new site.

It’s easy to assume that WP, being the most universal CMS, makes sense. But FSE, Gutenberg and block themes are placing enormous demands on its contributor base, theme builders and plugin developers to build a solid and user-friendly admin. Case in point: 6.2.1 auto updates broke countless sites that were using the shortcode block.

Building from scratch, something I’ve done forever, just isn’t fun anymore. There’s too much javascripting and build processes; I feel like I’m making an app (which is what modern websites are becoming, I suppose.)

While I will never touch page builders like Elementor or Divi, I’m considering GeneratePress or something closer to the core for my next WP theme. I’m also looking into WebFlow and/or Framer for my next project.

Is anyone else in this boat? How is your workflow changing, and what advice do you have?

Hot tub 104, and its 14 out

Sleeping in a 50° room piled under blankets

Dead silence when you want it

Sweater collection

Boot collection

When I was very young, I spent a lot of time at the Steins house:
View Larger Map Around the corner was a kid named Chucky. He was a little younger than Matt Stein and me, so we pushed him around. He was really weird. I don’t think his parents lived in that house; I think it was his grandparents or his uncle/aunt. There were lots of weird things about his house. First of all, we never went there through the front door. We always got there through the back, from Steins. It always seemed like we went through a forest to get there. The uncle/aunt/granparents never really knew if we were there or not, and they’d sometimes get mad at us when we popped up. A few things about Chucky’s house:

• There was a garage in the back that we used as a club house.
• We had a fight with the club from W. Milton St. I was in both clubs.
• Chucky had some “land” in front of the garage, basically a 6’x5′ plot. He said his U/A/G gave it to him. He tried to grow shit on his land, we dug it up and he got mad.
• Chucky’s UAGs were eccentric. They made a helium balloon in the house (not hydrogen, “it’s highly flammable!”). They taught me how to play chess. They had all kinds of knick-knacks, I think there was tons of war memorabilia.
• Chucky had a little sister who bore the brunt of lots of teasing.
• Chucky had very long, black hair but white skin. He looked like a vampire.

“Let’s go to Chucky’s!!”