subsomatic

So, my time at home with Tom all day has sadly come to an end. Today was my first official day back to work at Brainpark and it was actually pretty okay. Luckily, Andrew has taken my last few months of parental leave for himself so he was home for the first day with Tom all day! It was really hard to leave him this morning, but it was also refreshing to spend so many hours out of the house and I know he’s in good hands with his Dad. It also makes me happy that they get to spend some good quality time together before we lose the baby altogether. That being said, it was Tom’s 0.5 birthday on Sunday. He’s growing into such a strong personality. He giggles and laughs and squirms around all over the place. He’s pretty much crawling already which is amazing for his age, and I actually saw him catch himself as he was falling backwards from a sitting position tonight. I didn’t even know babies could do that!

It’s suprisingly refreshing to get back to work, actually. I got to do some user testing with the new feature set and I’m really impressed on the direction the software has moved since I left last June. I’m thinking there are going to be some nice changes to the front end coming up soon that will leave me with my hands full.

So our whole house is/was/is getting sick. It all started with Tom. I think he just got a cold from the weather. It’s his first sickness so he was a little shocked to realize that he couldn’t breath through his nose anymore. The sickness then passed to me, unsurprisingly. I got a wicked cough from which I am slowly recovering. Then Brent came down with it pretty badly and spent two days in bed. Now it seems that Andrew might be catching it, finally. It’s crazy how this stuff travels.

Despite the cold, Tom is still in a great mood. We’re learning from each other every day about fun new things to do together. I really am looking forward to nice weather so we can get outside a little more. There’s a park right next to our house which I’m sure will be a good source of amusement for him. For now, we’re limited to jumperoo-ing, rolling around on the floor together, sitting practice and airplane rides on my legs. I set him up a website at http://www.tommyknuckles.com and am posting pretty regularly if you’re interested.

Best midnight coming home from the pool hall snack of all time:

So, it would seem that I might actually be getting the hang of this mom thing. I’ve been able to get a good deal of web work done over the past couple of weeks after Tom goes to bed around 10-11pm.  I launched the new redesign of http://www.kellybaker.ca last night and I’m pretty pleased with it. I’m still on the fence about whether to move this blog over there and let subsomatic expire, but I think I would regret it as soon as I let the domain go. So who knows – maybe I’ll try and set up some duel blog so I can post to both at the same time. Can you do that? Anyone? That would be a very cool Wordpress feature/plugin.

Along with the redesign, I also launched a blog for Tom :) http://www.tommyknuckles.com I’m going to try and post something everyday whether it’s a picture or video or some other random bit of media. I’m soooo happy I got that domain. I don’t know why I thought it would be taken, but it wasn’t so I scooped it up.

Other than that, the kidsLink site is almost done. We’re down to the last odds and ends of the Bistro theme and then working on content (yay content!) but I think it should go fairly smoothly. I’m also helping out the K-W Chamber of Commerce with a few updates to their website. So far I’ve had a hard time getting into their CMS, but I think everything should go smoothly once that is taken care of. I also met with Angela yesterday about another freelance project which I need to give her a quote for. So yeah, things are definitely busy.

So, I’m working on a layout for a Bistro theme and ran into a bit of a problem. See, there’s a dynamically populated menu module in Bistro which allows the website owner to add, remove and edit elements in their main menu. I like to use unordered lists to create horizontal menus as opposed to tables, which can create a problem if you’re trying to use up 100% of the width of a div or something. I figured it was about time to actually write a little bit of jquery to handle setting the widths of the list-items dynamically and will share it with the world lest it be useful to someone else:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
children = $(“#menuList”).children(“li”);
num = children.length;
size = (940/num) – 1;
$(“#menuList”).children(“li”).width(size);
});
</script>

So, make sure you are using jquery and throw that up there in the header. Then you can make an unordered list with the id of “menuList” and populate the list-items which ever way you please!

Nothing much has been happening lately – hence the lack of blog posts. The new year has come and Tom’s a bit older. Things are going awesome as far as being a mom is concerned. I might possibly have the happiest baby in the world.

In work news, I’ve been working with kidsLink to help re-create their website and bring it more up to date. We’ve just finished working on a design and I’m about the start working on the Bistro template. I’m happy with the design process we went through – there was a lot of give and take but everyone was open to new ideas and concepts and constructive feedback. Hopefully the site will have a soft launch at the end of the month with some upgraded features coming shortly after.

I’m thinking about a new redesign for Kelly Baker to include a better featured portfolio section. The site that is there currently was really thrown together very quickly and it’s done a great job giving me a web presence but I think I’d like to add a little more to it. I might wait until I’m back to work on March 1st since I’ll be online more and able to maintain it more effectively, but I’ll also have a lot less time, so maybe I should start working on it now.

In other news, I’ve started CrossFitting again. I’ve actually set up another blog to keep track of my workouts and progress as I didn’t want subsomatic to turn into a fitness blog altogether! If you’d like to check it out, you can find it here.

I’m sad to say that I’ve restricted commenting to people who are willing to sign up to comment. If you have comments, please take the time to sign in – it doesn’t take much time at all.

That being said, I fucking HATE the number of spam comments that I get on wordpress blogs. It’s ridiculous. I would say the ratio of legit comments to spam comments is about 1:500. Srsly. So annoying.

So, this blog seems to be turning into my happy little housewife blog. I decided to try and modify a knitting pattern I have for a pair of socks down to baby size and they actually came out pretty well so I thought I would share.

Baby Socks

You need – whatever kind of yarn you want, some small gauge dp needles, a stitch holder and a darning needle

Cuff
- Cast on 24 sts
- K 20 rounds
- Sl last 6 sts on to a free needles and K first 6 sts of the last round on the same needle
- Sl the other 12 sts on to a stitch holder

The heel flap
- With the sts on the needle, P across
- Turn and K across
- Repeat x3 for a total of 6 rows

Turning the heel
(Turning the heel is my favourite part of knitting socks! It’s so much better than just straight knitting which can get a little mind numbing after a while. With this, you’re doing something different every row.)
- Row 1: P6, P2tog, P1 then turn leaving the last 3 sts untouched
- Row 2: Sl 1 as to knit, K1, SSK*, K1 then turn leaving 3 sts
- Row 3: Sl 1 as to purl, P1, P2tog, P1 then turn leaving 2 sts
- Row 4: Sl 1 as to knit, K1, SSK*, K1 then turn leaving 2 sts
- Row 5: Sl 1 as to purl, P1, P2tog, P1 then turn leaving 1 st
- Row 6: Sl 1 as to knit, K1, SSK*, K2  – you should be left with a total of 6 sts

Gusset
- With the right side of the heel flap facing you, use a free needle (or crochet hook if you have one handy) to pick up 6 sts along the left side of the heel flap. On a second free needle, knit the 12 sts from the stitch holder. On a third free needle, pick up 6 sts along the right side of the heel flap. Then knit 3 sts from the heel flap on to this third needle, and slip the remaining 3 sts on the first needle. You should now have 30 sts.
- On the first needle, K to the last 3 sts and then k2tog, k1; on the second needle, k 12 across; on the third needle, k1, SSK* and knit across.
- Repeat the last step 3 more times
- You should now have 24 sts

Foot
- K 14 rounds

Toe
- On the first needle, k to the last 3 sts then k2tog, k1; On the second needle, k1, SSK*, k to the last 3 sts then k2tog, k1; On the third needle, k1, SSK*, k across
- Repeat this 4 times until you only have 6 sts remaining.
- Cut the yarn leaving enough to thread a darning needle and weave the yarn through the remaining sts to finish the toe.

* SSK – Slip slip knit : sl the next 2 sts, one at a time, as to knit; insert left-hand needle through both sts from right to left and k2tog

Well, I hope that’s clear! I’ve written up a pattern before and there’s nothing worse than finding a free pattern that’s hard to follow. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment.

I promise not to do too many recipe posts, but I’ve been looking for a good fritatta recipe to try and I think this may be the one. I’m planning on trying it for dinner and I’ll let the world know how it turns out.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 6 small red potatoes, sliced
• 1 cup torn fresh spinach
• 2 tablespoons sliced green onions
• 1 teaspoon crushed garlic
• salt and pepper to taste
• 6 eggs
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Directions

1. Heat olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Place potatoes in the skillet, cover, and cook about 10 minutes, until tender but firm. Mix in spinach, green onions, and garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Continue cooking 1 to 2 minutes, until spinach is wilted.
2. In a medium bowl, beat together eggs and milk. Pour into the skillet over the vegetables. Sprinkle with Cheddar cheese. Reduce heat to low, cover, and cook 5 to 7 minutes, or until eggs are firm.

I just finished up two new templates for eco web design tonight – Shamrock and Whitetail. Both of them are pretty simple and straight forward but I’m happy with how they both turned out. I really wanted to focus on keeping things uncomplicated and simple and making sure that things would look good for different kinds of organizations as well as different browser requirements.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to work on as many template designs as I would have liked to recently, but happily that’s because I’ve been working on contract work! I just launched a new site for the re-opening of Crossfit Guelph. It’s a pretty snazzy custom wordpress theme that took me beyond the boundaries of what I’ve done with wordpress before. I’m pretty stoked and have opened up a lot of further customization options. I’ve also been working with the fine folks of kidsLink in St. Agatha, Ontario and we’re just starting the design process. The site is a Bistro CMS site and the new theme should be pretty snazzy.

And with that, I’m off to bed!