I am, in essence, a cartographer by trade. I make maps. I do more than that - but unless you’re in the field - it will sound like gibberish to you, so just trust that I make maps. Sometimes I get to play with satellite photos too. I love my job.

I got into the field of Geography in college because of my long time love of maps. But - my love of maps is deeper than just “Wow. Cool Map.” It’s more like, “I have no idea where in the hell I am, please save me dear map.”

You know how people say “I have no sense of direction.” Well, that is such an understatement for me it’s not even funny. I can get NO WHERE without a map. Or very VERY accurate directions. Don’t give me that “Turn left at street ‘A’” shit - no - I need to know how many miles it is to street ‘A’, what are the landmarks by it, and is it a left turn on or off of a major highway without a light - because I don’t do those.

Here is a prime example of my very, oh-so-VERY, bad sense of direction.

In order to properly decide if something is EAST or WEST of something else (Like, if someone says - “Is Knoxville in East Tennessee?”) I have to take the following steps -

1. Visualize a map of Tennessee with Knoxville marked by a star.
2. Acknowledge that the star is on the right side of the state.
3. Visualize a map of the United States
4. Acknowledge that California is on the WEST coast which is on the LEFT side of the US.
5. Go back to the thought of Knoxville being on the RIGHT side of Tennessee
6. Since California is on the LEFT, and it is the WEST coast, then Knoxville, which is on the RIGHT, must be EAST Tennessee.

See? I can’t just instinctively answer those questions. Luckily my process is a quick one and the person asking the question doesn’t know the inner turmoil I have to answer it. Unfortunately - dependence on this technique gets me screwed up sometimes.

Someone asked me recently where the city we’re vacation is at in relation to another city. This is all along the gulf - so I envisioned the map of Florida. Unfortunately - I was seeing it from HUNTSVILLE’S POINT OF VIEW.

Yes, I was looking at a map of Florida in my head from my current city’s point of view.

(DONT ASK. I DONT KNOW WHY MY MIND WORKS THIS WAY.)

So my left/right California-is-the-West-Coast technique got me all turned around and I may have told the person that the city we’re going to (in Florida) is WEST of the city in Alabama they asked about. Which - it’s totally not. Florida is EAST of Alabama - so no city in it is WEST of Alabama, but because of my bass-ackwards way of looking at the cardinal directions, I got them all confused. And how do you explain to someone -

“Oh. I’m sorry. The city in Florida is EAST of that city in Alabama - not WEST. I was confused because I was looking at it from Huntsville’s point of view.”

When I go to NikkiZ’s daycare for her 9am feedings (hee - right after we feed the chickens and slop the hogs) she is often asleep. Of course, this doesn’t keep her from nursing, as she has perfected the art of sleeping and eating at the same time. This comes in handy at night when she wakes up for the nineteenth time because I’ve perfected the art of sleeping and nursing. However, without fail - when she’s done eating and I try to put her back in the bouncy chair to finish her nap - she wakes up. She gets that really dazed look in her eyes as she tries to look around and focus on her surroundings. She’ll glance around, see me in front of her, and then smiles with a look on her face that says, “Oh! Was that you feeding me?” It cracks me up everytime because she looks so suprised to see me there. I always wonder who she expects to see standing in front of her after she’s finished nursing.

If I were really cruel (which I may be - I haven’t decided yet) I’d get one of the teachers to jump in front of her as she’s waking up to see if she looks as confused. Or even better, I could hold up the giant stuffed rabbit from the classroom in front of her - and see how her expression changes when she realizes she was just nursing from the Easter Bunny.

Yesterday, NikkiZ woke up around 4:15 or so to eat, so about 4:45 I got out of bed for the day - a good 30 minutes before I usually do. Since I leave the house around 6:10 - this gave me a good chunk of time in the morning to blog, design, clean, do whatever - while NikkiZ stayed asleep.

I woke up at the usual time today (around 5am) and I’m feeling cramped. I don’t think I’ll have time to get all the things done I wanted to get done. This means that 4:30am may be a good time for me to start getting up. It allows me to get all my chores done in the morning instead of at night - lets me blog while not holding a baby - and gives me enough time to finish a WHOLE pot of coffee. Which makes me function better.

BUT 4:30am? Even though I felt better yesterday having woken up that early - it just sounds SO UGLY. Who the hell gets up at 4:30am besides delivery guys. And they probably hate the sound of 4:30am as much as I do. I mean, I realize it may make the rest of my day go better but it just sounds so hateful. Like - starting the day at 4:30am INTENTIONALLY is probably a symptom of insanity and would get me shipped off to a padded room. And if it doesn’t? It SHOULD.

(Emily emailed me a suggestion to my last problem which helped me find a solution that worked.)

I have gotten a lot of emails asking me if I found a way to stop Mike Furir from commenting on my site (the BASTARD) and I have, indeed. However, it only works if you run MT 3.2 (as far as I know) - but if you run MT 3.2 and you hate Mike Furir because he leaves annoying comments on your site - and maybe you have fantasies about feeding him to rabid gerbils - then here is what you need to do.

Log into your MT interface. When you first log in, there is a box to the right that says “System Shortcuts”, click “Plugins” under that heading. Scroll down the plugin page to the bottom (usually) and you’ll see the “SpamLookup - Keyword Filter” plugin. Click “Show Settings” to the right of that heading. At the bottom of the “Keywords to Junk” box type this:

Mike Furir 10
mikefurir.com 10

And that will add a score of “10″ to all comments using the words Mike Furir and that will junk them for you. If you look in your “Junk comments” you’ll see them there if you get anymore. Eventually they’ll stop coming all together - but it won’t matter because if they’re junked they don’t show up on any of your pages and then you will have THWARTED THE SATAN THAT IS MIKE FURIR. I HATE HIM SO.

Help. Please. I have traveled the entire internet for a solution and now I come to you. If you know nothing about stylesheets or .CSS - don’t even bother reading this. It will bore you to death, I promise.

WARNING: I do not use web lingo properly. Most of it is either made up or used wrong. I apologize but I don’t know any other way.

Okay - my page looks all fine and dandy in Internet Explorer because it sucks and doesn’t interpret code exactly how it is. Even though it is to my favor this time, in that it looks right, the code is still wrong and if you look at my page in Firefox you’ll see a break in the white background below the sidebar.

Here’s the catch: My main container that holds everything is centered on the page using the “auto” value of the “margin” variable in the stylesheet. BUT - the container holding the blog entries and the container holding the sidebar are both “floated” and evidently the main container can’t be centered using the “auto” value AND still maintain it’s background color IF all of the embedded containers are floated.

BUT - I don’t know any other way to do it. I’m dumb. Help me.

I want the main container you are looking at that holds everything to be centered on the page no matter what size monitor or window you’re using.

I want the background for everything outside that container to be green

I want the background for the container to be white.

I want it to ALL be white no matter which is longer, sidebar or blog entries. In firefox right now there is green showing under the sidebar meaning the white background of the main container is not showing up.

My style sheet is here if you want to see it.