Saturday, January 15, 2011 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM

Rio Grande River, Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM, March 26, 2009

Never a duh! moment

Back on January 9th I started a project to update the bones of this website. There were lots of things bugging me, the big one being poor navigation. Stuff accumulates and there are now about 1,500 pages here on lots of unrelated topics. It's a mess. I've tried several navigation schemes over the years and none of them pleased me. Determined to do something about it I set out to tune up some underlying structural issues while thinking about the navigation mess.

In the process I bumped up against the HTML <strong> tag which hadn't been working for a long time and I wanted it back. It is widely used around this site but you would never know it. I made a few half hearted attempts to figure out what went awry in the past but now I wanted it fixed, dammit. I'm a self taught tinker in this HTML and CSS world and I assumed I had tinkered with something in the CSS files that was suppressing it but I couldn't figure out what I might have done.

By yesterday I had had enough. I was going to fix this thing once and for all and I spent most of the day trying.

I went to bed last night no closer to an answer than when I started. Frustrated, I was. This morning I went at it again, this time in a very systematic way and finally isolated the problem in a CSS file. For some reason way back in the dim past in some experiment I had added "font-weight: lighter;" to the body element and then forgot to take it back out. Well DUH!

Night camp

Site 23 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM

Verizon cell phone service - good signal
Verizon EVDO service - good signal
Go to the Percha Dam State Park website
Locate Percha Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
Check the weather in Arrey NM

Something Useful Can Be Artful

A life, I believe - lived well and openly - with a certain sort of careful attention to form and function - creates art - or, at the very least, inspires it. I believe that art is contained in the ordinary events, that the small things we see and hear and learn everyday provide opportunities to explore parts of ourselves or our society in a way that can actually produce art. Whether it is a story you leave behind or one you take with you, I believe that any given situation is rich with opportunities to participate in the creation of something useful that can also be artful.

Living Art - Photography By Catherine Jamieson

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