'Well enough' is good enough

Have you ever heard that old advice to “Leave well enough alone”?

This is the sad tale of someone who didn’t heed that advice and the trouble it led to.

This won’t make sense to those of you who read this on Vox or Blogger. It refers to my efx3 blog and specifically to my dissatisfaction with the width available to me (and my photos) to the theme I had been using. I liked the theme, but my pictures have to be cut too short to really show them, and I finally had enough of it.

So on Friday, I went shopping for a new theme, one that can show my photos in all their glory. I saw a couple and tried them out. But the preview either (A) didn’t work at all, or (B) showed things way skewed around. What the? I finally picked one, took a deep breath and hit the button. No turning back now.

I soon realized that the culprit was the customized CSS that I had “adjusted” when I first started using the theme. The customized parts were still in place, even though the theme it referred to had been replaced. So I cleared that out. Things started looking a lot better.

Then I saw another theme that I liked better, so I chose that. It was OK (came out the way I expected), but everything was green. That’s because the theme actually was done in green. Green is OK, but I like blue a lot better. So I decided to change the greens to blues, different shades.

Efx3 has a couple plugins that allow you to tweak themes–colors, typefaces, etc. So I decided to venture into that, changing greens to blues. Alas, it was a lot of work and it took a great deal of free time, which I haven’t been blessed with lately. I managed to change some of the greens to blues, but by no means all, and my frustration with the process eventually got the better of me. (On top of that, some of the blues that I changed and fiddled with and finally was satisfied with have reverted to green since then. You can imagine how happy I feel about that!)

The theme still has green headers, and I’m just going to leave it that way … until I pick still another new theme. Betcha that one will be in blues.

And when I do — I vow solemnly — I will not mess with theme tweakers or CSS customizers or anything like that. I’m just going to obey my philosophy of life: to take things as they come, to accept them as they are and not try to change them. It’s a good philosophy in life, and I now realize it’s a good philosophy to follow in blogging, too. Especially for those of us not blessed with lots of free time or infinite patience.

That’s not me. Neither of them are.

****

There has been a blogging malaise sweeping the world lately, sort of like the swine flu. Maybe that’s what came over me lately. It’s not fatal or permanent.

So many topics I could have written about lately. What I’ve been doing lately. What I plan to do in the weeks and months to come. Little observations about everyday life–nothing earthshaking, probably not terribly interesting, but no less interesting than other things I’ve written about in the past. Face it, my life can get a tad, um, mundane.

But I’ve had a hard time writing blog posts about them. Don’t understand why. Writer’s block? But I don’t have writer’s block at work. I still know how to write letters to close friends. Still, writing for the blogosphere has been hard lately. Whyizzzatt?

True, I don’t like having to use the narrow pictures because of the narrow style I used, but I’m changing that now. Also, efx3 doesn’t seem to get along that well with Photobucket. But I want my photos at some public site–I’m afraid to uploading them to a blog host that may not be around tomorrow.

Remember, I’m a refugee of both Modblog and Efx2, so I know what it’s like when a blog hosting service goes belly-up on you. When the site vanishes or the guy who runs the place decides to go off somewhere and redefine his life, the stuff you put at his place is in grave danger. That’s why you don’t see me at efx2blogs any more.

But there are other reasons, and they all fall under the heading of lack of time or opportunity. Let me count the ways. (1) I’ve been writing a lot to B and occasionally to S. (2) I’ve been watching the hockey playoffs. (3) I’ve been focusing a lot on work. (4) I’ve been watching movies with my wife. (5) At night, when I sit down to type on my desktop upstairs, Charlie comes around and plops herself into my lap so I am obliged to pet her for a while. (6) Occasionally I play games and get sidetracked with them. (7) Maggie, our old (16+) cat, has lately taken to sleeping on the glider rocker in the living room that I like to use when writing on my laptop. (8) I also get tired a little earlier than I used to.

Oh, it’s a wild and crazy life I lead!

Maybe I should write a post about all the topics I have been letting get past me, touching on a few things that might have made a full post on other days.

This week, I read a post from DeeJay, which mentioned how few people are writing now and how the old “community” seems to have fallen on hard times, with refugees moving to many other places or just not writing so often. I can relate.

I’m still here. Pretty soon, I’ll break out of this blogging malaise and get back to writing about this and that. Maybe I’ll even do better with pictures after I find a new theme I like. For right now, this is what I can manage.