I spoke too soon in the last post, I found out after wards that since I updated my WP with the newest version (as suggested by WP),  I now do not have any insert media buttons. I lost them somehow. I can insert links now, but I can’t add any photos, music or videos. Sucks. I am not finding a fix, actually I gave up for a while. I’ll just put my pics on Facebook, I guess. Not giving up yet, like the CSS thing, I keep plugging away at it, sooner or later I get something to work! Actually I am learning, be it slowly. how to work with HTML and CSS. It is maddening sometimes though, I still want to just open the info panel and place images with the x,y values, but there is no info panel. No move tool.  Arrggggghhhh!

The weather has warmed up to a balmy 35 degrees,  earlier this week it was down below 10 degrees, it was -25 celcius ( I didn’t bother to look at what the conversion in Fahrenheit was), over in Berlin and the eastern part of the country. Down right cold with the wind chill. Ice everywhere, on the news I saw a goose with ice all over its beak, it couldn’t open its mouth. I feel sorry for the animals when it gets really cold. I had a pair of shorts on under my pants, and thermal shirt and  a thermal hoody on under my coat  when I went to pick up Susanne at the train station last night. The platforms are pretty cold when you are standing there waiting for the train. Today is has warmed up a bit so it can snow. Speaking of snow, last Sunday afternoon, Susanne and I were walking home from the station. It had started to snow earlier and I noticed now that the tight little flakes of snow were bouncing a little as they hit the pavement. Not quite hail, frozen, tight, little snowflakes. When we looked at them up close, we discovered that they were in the shape of a perfect 6 point star. Every one of them! What a treat, it was really beautiful, they were so tiny and so perfect. Only nature can make billions of flakes so wonderfully! We must have looked like we were crazy because we were almost on our knees on the sidewalk and in the street looking at them.

I finally got made a page on Facebook for my ECards and a FB icon for the site. I gotta get the marketing end of  the business going. I will do the same with my Twitter page and get an RSS feed too. I made 1 valentine’s day card so far, I want to get one more done then on to more birthday cards. I also have to figure out a cheaper way to do customized bulk emails.

The man who’s website I designed has another project for us. Susanne is going to talk to him on Saturday about it. Meanwhile, I am still tweaking with the his first one. It is a good one to learn on. A little more money for next month. Susanne is liking where she is working, she is still working freelance for the same company, now she works at the company, 4 days a week. It’s kinda lonely around the apartment now, we have spent the last 9+ months together. The nice thing about it is that we are getting to sleep earlier, no more working until 1am in the morning. I like getting up early with her and getting the day started at 7am instead of 10 or 11. I get a lot more done. At night I stop when it is time to go meet her train. It feels nice to take a break, I am so used to work, work, work. In Florida we were either at work, in school or home doing homework, pretty much no time for anything else, just eat, sleep, school and work. I am not missing the homework/lab  part of school at all. I would spend 20 hours on the weekends working on some project for one of my After Effects classes alone! Wore me out!

It’s about break time for me so I am going to stop here, I am trying to work more sanely now and not sit at the computer working for hours on end. I am determined to not be so spun out this year, be less stressed and take it easy a bit.

Back at ya in a minute!

(PS-Well almost gone, it appears that my insert media is functioning again, so back to link up again. Best part, I didn’t have to do anything! )

I finally got my insert link button working again, it  took a few days and some frustration but I think I have the problem fixed, though I haven’t figured out why all of a sudden the insert link wasn’t working in the first place. The  problem was that I would highlight my text and hit the insert link button on my WP blog and the pop up window would come up but there was no text in it and the screen was grayed out. I could not click on anything and I had to use the back button or right click and refresh the page. I didn’t see an error message in Firefox so I had no idea what was going on. I had read on the forum in WP that it could be a tinyMCE Popup error, so I downloaded what I though was the right plug-in  but it was not, it did not fix the problem. Fine. I stopped trying to figure it out after a while, I was getting nowhere. So today I figured I would give it another try and I thought that maybe it was a Firefox problem, so I logged into my admin from IE to see if I could use the insert link there. I got the same thing, a blank pop up window, but down in the  browser corner where the word done was was a little yellow error triangle and when I clicked on it I could see the tiny MCE error message. Now I am in business! I went back to the forum page, downloaded and uploaded the right plug-in, followed the directions and shebang! My insert link is working once again!   The tread I read was

Can’t use Insert/Edit Link in Visual Mode: tinyMCEPopup is not defined. Scroll down to the last entry. If that can help someone, I am happy.

So back to a subject that I talked about last post, the hatless German people. This time they were topless. Okay, clean it up, I wasn’t talking about clothing, I am talking about convertible cars. Last Wed. I was out for a walk, the sun was actually out and it was nice. Still cold, mind you, but nice. I am walking down the street (with my hat on) and here comes this guy in a red sport something-or-other car with the top down! Like it is summer! It is 30 something degrees here and this guy is rolling around with his top down. I just stood there and looked at him, as he sat at the red light. He did have a hat on too. So let me get this straight, people don’t wear hats when it is cold out, but if they have the roof of their car down in the winter, then they wear their hats. What the ****? I do notice that the people with hats look like they come from somewhere else. Foreigners! I will not try to make sense of this, all I know is that it seems that most people love the cold here. More power to them.I feel like I live at the top of the world. South Siberia.

And while we are on the subject of things I still don’t understand yet, why is it that people here stand while they eat and drink? I have been and seen a number of places that have tall tables and no seats, everyone  stands around the tables eating and drinking coffee or beer. And some places have the tables outside,where hatless people stand around chatting and having a grand old time. Sipping Schnapps probably, that’s why they appear to not notice that they are standing in the cold. I keep meaning to ask someone why they stand up when they eat, I guess maybe they just like to, or maybe it gets the food to the stomach faster. I’ll report back on this later when and if I get an answer.

I was talking to my landlord the other day, the sunny one, he was saying that in a couple of months the sun will be high enough in the sky to actually reach the ground here in the city. YO-DE-LAY-HE-HOO! Two months?!?!? Damn, think I’ll go get my shorts on and wait out on the balcony! That will be late March. I noticed he didn’t say it would be warmer though. Actually I have started to wear my shorts around the apartment, I am tired of wearing pants everyday, I wear them with my thermal knee high socks. Tooooooasty!

I can’t believe how time is zinging by, I thought I had just posted and it has been 2 weeks! I now have a small website project, 10 hours a month, around 120 euros, for a man here in Muelheim. With Susannes help, it is now live and functioning okay. I had to get a crash course in CSS, I knew nothing about when I started and I had to relearn HTML, I haven’t used it in a long time. I had stopped concentrating on web design after my first audio production and video editing classes, I was more interested in the latter two. But now I see that I can possibly make money (FINALLY), here if I can do web design for people. I have seen websites here that belong on the “Websites that suck!” site. People can certainly use the help!  I am teaching myself more about CSS, slicing and more HTML, it can only help in the long run. So I am earning my first money here after 9 months, not much but it’s a start. I am still making e cards, it is a slow process but it will pay off in the long run. I am making valentines day cards at the moment and I found  great tutorial that walks me through creating a CSS driven website. I found it the other day, I wish I had found it last week when I was trying to learn CSS and was about ready to tear my hair out. I sat here tring to figure out how to use the stylesheet with HTML and I was sooooo lost. The fact that I had to work without a timeline and keyframes was frustrating. I gave up and gave up and keep going back until finally, something started making sense. I sat with Susanne and watched her as she worked also, which helped immensely. I will post some of the sites I fould to be the most helpful.  So now I am confident I can learn how to do wed design without using Flash. I am really looking forward to making nice sites for people. Yes, finally the wheels are turning and we are moving forward. I guess we have been all along, but now it feels like we are out of the driveway and on the road.

The snow has melted – YAY!. I was getting used to seeing it, now it looks bare outside, back to gray, soggy days! I looked at my shorts today, they miss me, they told me so. I told them they would have to be patient, it is another 5 months until it gets (what I consider) warm. I think they actually cried a bit. My hands stay the coldest, I sometimes work on the computer with gloves on, to keep them warm. We are lucky here, it hasn’t snowed nearly as much as in the eastern part of the country. Susannes friend up in Lubeck, near the sea, was snowed in for a week. They just got the three roads leading into town cleared and now it is snowing again.

Susanne and I went to get me signed up for an Integration course over at the Volkshochschule, about 6 minutes from here. If they have enough people for the class, I will begin at the end of the month and will have class in the mornings for 4 hours, language and German life and politics. It is a little expensive for us right now, but it is good that I can get more language lessons. I started reading a novel witten in German, I am almost past the 1st page, I should be finishing it by the time I am 80. It will be cool to be with others learning the language, I hope to make a few new friends there. That’s about all for today, I have to get back to work, I’m going to get back to posting 2 times a week, things got busy over the holidays and I got lazy about writing. Now I gotta get back into the habit of writing.

Til next time!

I hope everyone had a great time over the holidays! Susanne and I celebrated quietly, quite frankly we didn’t have the energy for much more, we have been stressed out for far too long trying to get settled here. We spent Christmas eve and Christmas Day at Susanne’s parents house. They put up a little tree, first one in years, I guess. I liked the fact that it had edible ornaments on it, can’t go wrong there! Then we spent time at people who live next to Susanne’s parents and the parent’s house. It was a nice evening, I stuffed myself, first with potato salad and then with 2 heaping bowls of spicy chili and bread. At midnight we went out with all the other people on the street and blew off fireworks, the real ones, not the kind you get in American supermarkets. That for me it is the best part of the holidays, seeing and hearing the entire city lighting off their fireworks at the same time. It was snowing too which made it all the better!

So back to work, I made my first birthday card, I had to get the new years card off the home page! Boy, I’ll tell you that is a lot of work trying to keep up with the upcoming holidays, Valentine’s day is right around the corner and I have to get them ready fairly soon. Coming up with ideas isn’t easy sometimes either, I have creative crashes, can’t think of a damn thing to create for a card. Maybe I should go for a walk, but it is cold out there and there is snow. Today I wore my shorts for half the day, I got tired of wearing so many cloths. It felt good to have my legs free!  The cold is nice, it feels refreshing to get out in it, but at the same time I feel encased, encapsulated, engulfed in cloths. Being fresh out of Florida, I need extra layers, a hat and heavy duty thermal hunting socks. That’s right- heavy duty thermal hunting socks! Keeps the feet TOASTY! The hat I mention because it seems that nobody here needs to wear one, they must have super heated heads or something, even when it is 10 degrees here they have no hats on! And not just a few people, I mean nearly everyone! Guess they’re used to it. I was at one time too, back in upstate NY, I remember running around in 20 degree weather in a tee shirt and a hooded sweat shirt! I did have my hat on though. I have grown soft now, the body likes to be warm when it can, it performs better, less bone creaking and aching muscles. Lord, I’m getting old!

And what is with people sitting outside in the cold drinking coffee? I don’t care if there is a blanket, the coffee won’t stay warm long, and neither will I. Another thing that amazes me is that some people leave their windows open all day long, no matter what the temperature is. We open ours for a while to air out the house, but there is a point where it starts getting cold in the apartment. Plus there is the heating bill to think about. I see some apartments witht the windows cracked all day long. It must be freezing in their apartment and they must either have lots of money to throw at the power company or they don’t use any heating at all. Amazing! My father would have killed me if I dared to open a window in the middle of winter. Mind you the winters back in upstate NY used to be a lot colder with lots of snow and ice, here it is alot milder. All in all I am managing to stay warm for the most part.  We will see when late Jan. and Feb. roll around just how well I’ll manage then. I have the thermal pants ready just in case and the apoteke around the corner sells threma care, pads I just slap one of those bad boys on my lower back an I am toasty for 8 hours!

Okay winter, bring it on, show me what you got!

Oops,I probably shouldn’t have said that!