Archive for February, 2009

I added a new print formatting function to the blog which should make it easier to print out articles from the blog but not have to print out all of the header and sidebar information.  This should be especially useful to anyone that wants to print out any of the instructions that go along with some of the crafts we’ve posted.

Personally, I’m going to use the formatter to put together a print record of everything we’ve posted on this blog.

The print function has been implemented using a WordPress plugin called wp-print.  It’s really flexible and with a little work, I was able to preserve the style of the blog in the printouts.

Our Vacation in England, Day 8: Still Wales — A trip to the slate mine and pottery making.

Our Vacation in England, Day 9: Leaving Wales — Visiting Conwy and driving to York, with a small shopping trip in between.

Our Vacation in England, Day 10: Are we done yet? — A trip to the National Railway Museum and the Minster in York.

I didn’t get much uploaded today, but on the plus side, both of these are fairly lengthy posts.

Our Vacation in England, Day 11: Scotland — Walking the Royal mile, including a visit to the (then-incomplete) Scottish Parliament.

Our Vacation in England, Day 12: Edinburgh to Blackpool — A visit to a Tartan factory before leaving Scotland, then a blustery day in Blackpool.

Our Vacation in England, Day 13 – A short post with a little more than you wanted to know about Blackpool (and possibly Sandi).

Our Vacation in England, Day 14: Brighton and the Return Ferry – Our brief stop in Brighton (which we found a little disappointing), and the return to France.

As I am going back through the old posts we wrote in Germany and France, I’m finding that there are lots of pictures we took and places we went that we never wrote about. Real life always seems to get in the way writing, I guess. I had also forgotten that Sandi was writing almost all of the posts that were going up on our site at the time, primarily because I was so busy at work that I hardly had time to go on the trips, much less think about them after they were over. In fact, we eventually cut our trip to Spain short, partly because of the weather, but also because I started to feel guilty about a major new activity that was being undertaken in my absence.

And so, as I was transcribing one of Sandi’s posts about our brief trip to Spain, I found a couple of picture sets that I took to make panoramas with that I never actually assembled.

This is one of them. I finally put it together last night:

cadaques-spain

Cadaques is probably a gorgeous place to visit in the summer, but we were there during February — and an unseasonably cold one as well for this part of Europe. Still, there were interesting views that we saw even if the weather did encourage us not to stay long and enjoy them. :)

Here is another panorama from the same town. I forget exactly how we got this shot, but basically we were standing on what amounted to a publicly accessible roof.

cadaques-spain-2

I’m no longer sure exactly where either picture was taken in the town, but it seems likely from the position of the town that the first panorama was made somewhere to the east of the second. The photographs were originally taken on February 17, 2005.

La Roche-Aux-Fées – A visit to one of the nearby structures left behind by the ancient Celts that inhabited Brittany.  Somehow, the original post has gotten lost, so this one is reconstructed.

Our Spanish Vacation, Day 2 – Including our scary drive through the snow in the Pyrenees and the realization that Spain is much colder than we expected.  It turns out that this was due to one of those “unusual weather patterns” that seemed to follow us around Europe.

Our Spanish Vacation, Day 3 – A trip to Tossa de Mar and Besalu on the one really nice day we had in Spain

Panoramas of Besalu and Tossa de Mar, Spain

Our Spanish Vacation, Day 4 – The girls get sick, Ken visits Girona, and a trip to the ruins of a Greek/Roman town.

Our Spanish Vacation, Day 5: Going Home – We finally give up on the trip… we’re all sick and it’s too cold to be outside, but we make up for it with a trip to the Salvador Dali museum!

Our Spanish Vacation, Day 6: Back in France – A brief stop in Limoges on our way back to St. Gregoire.

I’ve installed a new plug-in called WP NicEdit, which allows users to write fancier comments.  I mainly plan to use this feature to make updates to old posts when appropriate without having to edit the original post or create a new one, for example to add photos or other links.  This way, the update will stay with the original post and hopefully make more sense.

Feel free to try it out.

Today is CeCe’s 8th birthday. We’ve got a big day planned, from a trip to a local Creperie to the “make-your-own-pottery” place to a party with a big Oreo-encrusted birthday cake that we got last night at Jungle Jim’s.

We’ve also got a few new pictures of CeCe to post. Here are her 8th birthday pictures:

cece-8th-bday1

cece-8th-bday-2