All is quiet here in west Alabama. I am tucked away, typing merrily, in the back bedroom of the house, still not quite dressed for the day. I doubt seriously that anyone else even knows that I'm up yet, which is fine by me. I like having a bit of time in the morning between wakefulness and conversation that allows me time to gather my thoughts, settle the last remaining embers of dreams into the dustbin of the day, and ease into the day as I'm ready.

At some point I'll brush my hair, change from sleeping-clothes to day-clothes, and carry on.Our arrival last night was quiet. The dog wasn’t even interested enough to come out and see us, but Kirsa—Lori’s enormous orange male tabby—you’d think Kirsa hadn’t been looked at by a human in weeks. He is unneutered, as his coarse fur and particularly feline smell attest, but as far as he's concerned he's just an enormous kitten in search of humans to give him scritchies.

Jeff hurried inside. I stopped to have a bit of a chat with Kirsa; I scratched that enormous round head of his and got a satisfied rumble and tailswish in return. I told him I'd come back for more tomorrow, and for him to get a good sleep in the meantime. He swatted his tail against me as I stood up to walk away.

I was ready to come out here and take a bit of a break from the work I've been doing at home. Now that my changes to geek-chick are through, I can turn to the list of changes for cat.net that have been waiting on me to find the time to work on them.

I've implemented a few already. I've changed a few pictures on the cast & crew page, and I’ve made a slight update to the archives index. There are a couple of support pages that merit rewriting, but the most important change is going to be skins-related.

In the next couple of days I’m going to drop 'flowering' as the default skin and put in its place a simpler, tabled skin called 'mint.' It’s kinder to NS4.7x; the only thing that keeps me from implementing it at the moment are a couple of issues regarding Opera under BeOS. Once resolved, I will move 'mint' into skin #1 and take 'flowering' down for the time being.

I plan to revamp it a bit. It needs some tweaking and fixing, but I have no plans to retire it. After it spends a little time in Photoshop, it’ll return under a different skin number.

Shortly afterwards I'll probably rework Brad's-blues. The skin as you see it now was not as I intended it to look. When I turned the Photoshop flat into HTML, I was never able to get a few particular features to work correctly. The result was a plainer, less technically interesting skin than what I'd envisioned, and it’s bothered me ever since I posted it. Once I fix 'flowering' I think that I shall attempt to fix the layering problem that caused me to simplify Brad's-blues in the first place.

Once those are all done, I'll be left with no option except to do what I've been dreading to do all these months: rework my picture archives into something that makes sense. I’ve outgrown my directory structure, and I need to come up with a better way to provide listings of all the pictures I've got. I've put it off because I haven’t known how to do it properly.

I still don’t know. But I’m the queen of muddling through, and I suppose I should just jump in and figure it out.

In the meantime, I'm slated for dinner and general amusement with Kris and Lori today. They're starting to work on renovating their new house, and they just got two new golden retriever puppies. There is no such thing as a boring dinner when Kris and Lori are involved; I suspect I'll come home with plenty of stories.

A pity I didn't think to bring my camera.