Housekeeping

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Scotland, for obvious reasons. Instead, we have other events like Burns Night on January 25th, which involves doing strange things like reading poety to a haggis before consumption.

So while many of you are currently off doing something related to turkey- that is, buying, cooking, eating, throwing against wall in fit of rage at insensitive comments from relatives, my dinner consisted of a bagel with some pastrami, and a couple of chocolate chip cookies.

Don't worry, I intend to make up for lost gorging time when I embark on the second leg of my international jetsetteryness to the States. I gather my mother has meals a-go go all lined up.

Before I depart, and in addition to all the frantic packing and tidying up of the house (I can't stand leaving a mess behind, even if I know E. will be here while I am away and wreak unspeakable havoc on the place), I thought I might take a moment to do a little blog housekeeping. This has involved a bit of tidying up behind the scenes (i.e. deleting a couple of old unpublished posts), going through e-mails, and the like.

Which brings me to an intriging comment someone left here about the way the template background looks. I am puzzled by the commenter's suggestion that I should keep the light green background, as she or he "did not like the black".

As far as I am aware, the background, as least as I see it on my screen, has NEVER been black. It was white very briefly, when I first started, then gray for quite awhile. Then I had a little flirtation with different shades of green, with one afternoon of blue, until I arrived at the current hue.

I do realise that the look of a blog can depend very much on what kind of browser you are running. I figured this out when the computer crashed that time and I had to use my cranky old laptop. All of a sudden I could see that using Internet Explorer on that model, the font looked teeny tiny and the background looked like...well...baby shit brown is the most apt description for it.

Blech yuck, thought I. That's not what it looks like to me, on my beloved iMac running Safari, my preferred browser.

But now I am curious as to whether the background has ever appeared black to anyone else, or if the multitudes out there using the dreaded Windows see things quite differently than I.

On a further computer, and indeed, travel related theme, although I will off to the States in the next day or two, I should hopefully have internet access at my parents' house. There is also chat of buying E. a new gizmo, since his laptop is on its proverbial last legs. The thing starts up with a kind of groaning sigh, farts periodically, is apt to fall asleep in the middle of important e-mails, and is generally ready for the big Hard-Drive heaven in the sky. If we get him a shiny new one, then he can play with that, and the much-fought-over iMac will be ALL MINE. Yay yay yay. Plus, I can buy it in America and use it to post on while I am there.

See. A cunning plan. I am all about the ulterior motive. I'll let you know how it turns out.