I just got back a little while ago from Huntsville, AR, where I had the misfortune of attending eighth grade and high school (my parents moved there from Ft. Worth, TX, when I was 13). My father and my sister (and her family) live in Hunstville. But despite my feelings for the place, it ended up being one of the nicer family visits I’ve made there in recent memory. My father was suprisingly lucid (he’s 83 and is in the early stages of Alzheimers). And my sister was also in a great mood. Even the weather seemed to be on our side.
My sister has been working as a bookeeper for a small accounting firm for as long as I can remember. It has always been understood that the owners of the business would sell it to her on their retirement. Well, it turns out that the principle owner died in the fall and his widow didn’t have any interest in carrying on at the business. So my sister has, very suddenly, become the owner of a small business. She seems to be enjoying it. She modernized the computers and had someone come in to network them. She hired an employee and kept one on who had been working there for the past five years. So now the three of them run a small tax preparation business. It’s located in an old house in the middle of town. I’m proud of her. She says business is booming. Long may it be so.
Speaking of family: I’m going to touch bass with all of mine in the next two weeks. My adoptive mother, Betty, who almost never makes it up this way (she lives in Durant, OK), will be in town Friday. She mostly comes here to visit my sister, as we are not close and haven’t been for the last several years. But I’m sure we’ll have a meal together, probably Saturday evening. That’ll be nice, I guess. I’ll get to see my brother-in-law, whom I like (I like all my brothers-in-law, on either side of the familily). And I’ll get to visit with my sister’s daughters.
Then, the following weekend, my birth-mother, Vicki, is comming up from Dallas and staying two nights. So we get to play host, which should be fun. Among other things, she’s going to catch a Nancy show, which will be the first time anyone in my family has ever seen me on stage (there’s occasion for some sad commentary in that, but I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blanks). I rehearsed with Nancy yesterday, and things went really well. I’m still reading chord progressions off of charts, but I should have most everything memorized by the night of the show.
Anway, today, thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we have the day off from work. That gave us the extra time to touch bass with my sister and my father. And it will also give us tiime to clean up the house and do some laundry. I’d like it very much if I could also spend some time revising my thesis, so I can drop it off to the committee, but that might have to wait. It’s already 4:00 p.m., and I have a lot of laundry and house cleaning to do.
The one design-related thing I’ll mention: I learned some really cool DHTML last night that I’m going to use to make a new design gallery for my homepage. It involves a frameset, some absolute positioning (via CSS) and javascript to horizontally scroll the main content frame to designated points. It’ll be cool. I’ll link it up here when I’m through with it. And I’m going to expand my PHP/MySQL demos site to include the script from this site as well as my browser-sniffer (still a useful thing in these days of multiple DOMs and lack of CSS-P support in NS6).