Well, I have officially moved into my first ever apartment. Granted, I’m only here because my typical lodgings have flooded and our insurance company is paying the rent, but it’s still my first real, non-academic “place.” Also? It’s kinda awesome.

I’ll admit, when I found out that the place was on Cranston Avenue, I was pretty sketched out. In fact, I’m still not crazy on the neighborhood. I do like being pretty close to a Dairy Queen. Though it looks like it would be perfect for a movie about an inner-city sports team that ends up winning both the state championship and our hearts.

Location aside, the apartment is ridiculously nice. All of the appliances (stove, fridge, washer/dryer, dishwasher) are brand new. The floors are completely hard wood and tile. The dining room has this really cool, back-lit display case, the possibilities for which are endless. Plus, the place is huge.

It’s actually a three bedroom apartment. But don’t get any funny ideas, people. Though I don’t have an issue with overnight guests, once in a while, I’m going to enjoy my roommate-less living for a while.

Internet will be hooked up on Thursday (writing on my phone) and hopefully the cable will be installed this week, too. I’ll definitely need it for Dollhouse on Friday.

Alright, well, Katelyn and I were volunteered to work at Classic tomorrow, so I should get some sleep.

Now for a real blog post! Yay!

So, last week, Katelyn and I took a road trip down to Portland, Maine to see Kris Delmhorst and the Indigo Girls (separate shows). How was the trip? In short, it was great! But why don’t we go into more detail?

I’ll be honest, I was slightly nervous about driving down. I’ve never driven out of the country before and I’ve always been wary of those crazy American drivers. But my father loaned me his GPS system, nicknamed Lola. This helped assuage my nerves a bit. Though, as we would later find out, there was no reason for it to calm me at all.

We left on Saturday morning and, before too long, we found ourselves in the long line to get across the border. Lola proved to be invaluable at certain times and completely useless, at others. We got the feeling she was mocking us, every now and then, just for her own amusement. For example, she couldn’t figure out where we were, when we were in the middle South Portland. What a bitch. I’ve been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica and Terminator lately, so I was even more suspicious of her motives.

However, despite Lola’s intentions, we did eventually arrive in Portland, safe and sound. We checked into the hotel, ate a regrettable meal at Denny’s, and then headed to One Longfellow Square to see Kris’s show.

The venue itself was actually quite pleasant – pretty small, good acoustics, and a decent audience. I wasn’t too jazzed about the opener. I got the feeling that she had talent, but she just wasn’t my style at all. My biggest complaint about her was that she was pretty boring, with all of her songs sounding the same. She was only on stage for a short time, though, before Kris came out and started her set with “Riverwide.”

The rest of her set was pretty much ideal. With the single exception of “Everything is Music,” she played all of my favourites, even the ones that I was certain wouldn’t get played (”Bobby Lee” and “Broken White Line”). As Katelyn mentioned, Kris is great to see because she seems to genuinely enjoy putting on a show. A nice surprise was meeting my friend Nicole at the show. I’ve known her for years from the Patty Griffin board and I’d seen her at a Patty show, earlier this year, but I’d never actually *met* her before. After the show, Katelyn and I talked to Kris for a few minutes, before heading back to our hotel for the evening, where we watched a small, independent arthouse film called The House Bunny.

The next day, Katelyn and I headed over to Maine Mall, mostly to drool at the Apple Store. I was quite impressed with my ability to restrain myself. Apart from lunch and some excellent lemonade, I don’t think I made a single purchase at the mall. I didn’t even buy anything at Newbury Comics! Though I did come across a bumper sticker that I really was tempted to buy. It had a large rainbow, with “We are everywhere” printed underneath it. Katelyn did try to convince me to buy her something at Victoria’s Secret with the company credit card, just to screw with my mother’s mind, but I resisted.

After dinner, we started walking to the Indigo Girls show. I had looked up the venue on Google Maps and chosen our hotel because it was only a five minute walk. Except, not so much. It seems that Google Maps uses the location of the venue’s box office headquarters, instead of the actual location of the venue. That was a slightly frustrating experience. We ended up discovering Lola’s usefulness, when we drove to the venue. Parking was slightly annoying, but it was still only five minute drive. Unfortunately, we didn’t budget our time well enough and ended up missing the opening act.

The Indigo Girls show was great. Katelyn had really only listened to “Ghost” before, which has become one of her favourite songs, so we were really hoping they’d play it. I think she was genuinely surprised how lively the audience once. There was a lot of audience participation and dancing. And the setlist rocked. I know that the more devout fans, who see the Girls ten time per year, are sick of hearing the “hits” at every show. But, speaking as someone who sees them once every few years, I love hearing “Closer to Fine,” “Galileo,” “Power of Two,” “Shame On You,” and “Get Out the Map.” Plus, they played “Devotion,” which I really wasn’t expecting and was quite excited to hear. We were disappointed, when they finished their main set without playing “Ghost.” But then they came back for their encore and it was the first song they played, followed by an incredible rendition of “True Romantic” and then, of course, “Galileo.”

The next day, we woke up and went for lunch at Burger King, before getting back on the road and heading home. All in all, it was quite a successful trip. I’m trying to plan the next one. Peter is playing at Longfellow Square in a few weeks, but I think that might be too soon. Madeleine Peyroux, however, is playing a free show in Freeport, at the end of June. Definitely a possibility…

I think I’m finally ready to unleash this on the general public! All known IE7 issues have been fixed and I am officially no longer worrying about IE6. That 17% of browsers can go to hell! They’ve made my life much more difficult in many ways, it’s time for me to return the favour.

For the most part, I’m rather happy with how it turned out. I’m really happy to be using sIFR. It looks beautiful when it works and it degrades fantastically, when Flash and/or Javascript are taken out of the equation. This is, of course, old news to anyone who has been using it, for the past few years. But I’m a new convert, so indulge me.

I’m also really happy to be back on WordPress. *So* much better than TypePad. I also hadn’t used WordPress since before they redesigned the Admin area, and it’s really quite nice now. Much better than before. It’s quite interesting to have a website that is based entirely around a CMS, which is a first for me. Even my TypePad blog had some pages that were basic XHTML.

I’m going to try to keep this design for at least a year, with many upgrades along the way. I have a terrible habit of redesigning my personal site, only weeks after uploading a new design. It’s a rather time-consuming habit. Hopefully, I’ll have enough clients this summer to curb that impulse. Right now, I think I have about four projects lined up for the summer. Should be interesting!

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new look. If you notice any bugs, feel free to let me know about them and I’ll try to fix them. I still want to throw in some minor updates later today, such as some RSS buttons and whatnot. At some point in the future, I may restructure the whole code, so that everything degrades a bit better.

OK, I need to stop thinking about coding and start revising for my exam on, well, coding! Yay!

Warning: I’m experimenting with some things, so things may look wonky for a bit.

Update #1: Rather than writing endless posts on the progress of this site, I’m just going to edit this one a lot.

I’ve got just about everything worked out, for Firefox and Safari. I like the footer, comments are working… it’s all going smoothly. I need to add some post navigation at the bottom of the template, but that’s not really a big deal. I think I might add a section for my resume, at some point.

IE7 still looks like it’s going to be a nightmare, and I’m really avoiding it.

Alright, I think I’m mostly done with this site now. It has taken much longer than I had hoped, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Plus, I’m pretty confident in my WordPress coding abilities now, which is nice.

I’ve yet to fix the IE7 problems, unfortunately. It should look fine in IE8, but the problems in IE7 have been too numerous for me to even begin to contemplate, with my exam this evening. I’d also like to add a real footer the site, but that isn’t really a big deal. What I have now will hold me over… … probably until later tonight.

I’d also like to add a bit more functionality on the WordPress side of things. I don’t have Categories enabled in my sidebar and post footers and I haven’t made the template widget-ready yet.

Now I need to go study for my Social Psychology exam in three hours. Fantastic.