Can We Talk About Something Else?

Or, to be more accurate, can I?

Last Sunday, a friend of mine asked what books I'm reading at the moment, and how work is coming along on my novels. I'm afraid my first, unvoiced reaction was, "What planet are you living on?" As tight as money is around here, I have a growing list of books on my Wish List that I would normally have bought and read by now - but that's not the main reason why I reacted as I did. No, it's more a matter of having no room in my brain or schedule for such things at the moment. In the immortal words of David Byrne, I ain't got time for that now.

You know why, don't you? You've seen how obsessed I've been lately with... well, you know. It's the engine that drives me to spend many hours a day just catching up with my Twitter feed, lest I miss some nuance in the day's news. It's sent me back to the tv set for something other than DVD watching, for the first time in months. And it's the focus of my creativity, with all those buttons and blog articles, in more places than just here.

But as many people are discovering (and griping about at some length, online and on tv), the stress of the countdown to next Tuesday can really get to you after a while. So here's my attempt to talk about something else. Anything else.

Well, um, how 'bout those Phillies?" Nah, it's a non-starter. Who am I kidding? The last time I watched the Phillies in a World Series game, John Kruk was still in the lineup. I even haven't watched a major league game in a few years now, aside from glancing at a tv across the room at Chuey's. That was for a few minutes of a Diamondbacks game. Amazingly after all these years, Randy Johnson was pitching. Anyway, the most interesting part of this year's World Series for me was the punditry and sniping over the start time of Game Five and accusations of opportunistic expressions of support for two or more teams by two of the... no. I'm not supposed to be writing about that.

Doctor Who is always good for a few words, probably too many from the point of view of long-suffering non-fans of the show who read this blog. Now, I was going to write here that we're in the drought between the end of Series Four and the Christmas special, and so nothing much is happening except for the release of the DVD box set next month, which I stubbornly just ordered using unemployment money. But I just checked the Doctor Who web site just an case, and discovered that there's been momentous and rather upsetting news over the last day or two. David Tennant, the best actor ever to play the Doctor, is leaving at the end of the four 2009 specials.

BBC interview clip
longer clip (which for me was out of sync after the first few minutes)

I'm really quite depressed about this. I always knew there was a good chance he'd leave before Hugo-winning Steven Moffat takes over the show for 2010, but I was hoping to be wrong. Still, the show will survive, and he's not gone quite yet.

But I was going to say, apropos of the ongoing conceit of this entry, that when I have managed to teat myself away from That Other Subject, I've been watching Doctor Who. I even designed two buttons, one with the Tenth Doctor and one with his fob watch, in support of... but if I tell you about that, we're back to my self-imposed forbidden subject.

So what do you think of the revamped design of this blog? I was kind of forced into it. I noticed the other night that the header still claimed this was the new home of the Monday Photo Shoot. In fact, Carly took this over a while ago, as the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. But when I deleted the outdated text and made one other small change, the blog mysteriously insisted on pushing the sidebar to the bottom of the page. Undoing the small change didn't fix it. I hadn't intended to do anything much, and had not saved the template before tampering with it. Even changing templates entirely (in preview mode) didn't solve the problem. But when I removed the Mâvarin flag from the header, the sidebar snapped back into place.

At that point, the wood grain image in the header didn't really look good any more. In fussing with that, I again failed to save the original template properly. I relied on leaving the original open in one tab, but that got refreshed at some point into a newer version. In the end I just went with the "Stretch Denim" template without a backup, and added a new, adobe-based header background that I made from a photo from a wall of St. Michael's. I like the result, but clearly, I absolutely went about it the wrong way. Kids, don't try this at home!

Other recent changes have mostly involved adding widgets / gadgets to the sidebar and rearranging them from time to time. Blogs of Mavarin gives snippets of recent entries on my other blogs, most of them not very recent at all. The exception is my blog Outpost Tucson, for which I wrote a "Closing Argument" entry on Wednesday night. I'm not linking to it here because it's on That Other Subject, but you can find it on my sidebar. Anyway, I'm hoping to set up more interactive blogrolly goodness after, you know, Tuesday.

Meanwhile, I've had no more job interviews since that one job I didn't get, and no really good prospects. It's been a month and a half. I haven't been unemployed for so long since 1979. And yet the days are just packed.

Oh, and the dogs are fine. Thanks for asking. They've had no more problems at the dog park, and are getting along much better with each other and with us. They've even made some new human friends over at...well, you know, the play I've been making those buttons.

There, was that so hard?

Karen