Absurdity

Diana and I have taken advantage of Petcetra closing to buy lots of hamster equipment, mainly a lot of playpens so we can set up a huge area for them to run around in. Recently we found some half-decent cages there and bought two, and got a new hamster from another store, Petcetra long since being out of pets. She a black and white Teddy Bear hamster, so she is larger than the other hamsters we have since had. She is seemingly scared of everything right now, and attempts to give her a permanent home have thus failed as she escapes from everything we have tried.

At first we had her simply in the cage, but she manged to squeeze out between the bars. To be fair the cage was advertised for guinea pigs, not hamsters. So we put some metal mesh up around the cage to keep her in, but she somehow managed to squeeze through that as well. At this point we put the playpens next to her cage to hold her in, but she squeezed through the mesh while pushing the pens enough to give her enough room to get out and escape. All in all she managed to escape from her pen 9 times since we've brought her home, and the number is only so low because we kept a very close eye on her, turn around for five minutes and she was gone. Eventually we put her in a bin with shavings and the basics, it wouldn't fit her house so she'll have to do without it for a day, though we did give her a box for privacy. We are going to attempt a much finer mesh (though not metal) and hope that can keep her in.

The other hamsters are doing great, Though Remmy and Rommy seem to lounge around all day and are only active in the play pen now, so we try to let them out much more than Hamtaro, who is always running around. Remmy and Hamtaro have taken up the habit of scratching on the ceiling of their outhouse when we're around to be let out, sadly we can't let them out all the time, so we give them treats when we can't (1-2 a day). Think that's just taught them to scratch more, we seem to be teaching them bad habits.

Work is going good, Chef will try to keep me there as much as he can while I'm not in school, as I've decided not to go back. I just don't know if I can do two years of school in a row. I love cooking and I love the hands on stuff, but any class work just bores a hole in my brain, and I just can't concentrate. I'm tired all the time, and I'm just not one for classrooms, I prefer to learn while working. I think after a year or two off I'll go back and finish, once I've had a big enough break, but school just drives me insane for some reason, and it wasn't even nearly as bad as high school with all their arbitrary rules. Sure there were stupid rules, the clean shaven one comes to mind, which is another reason I don't want to go back, don't want to lose my goatee. At least the rules weren't to the absurdity of some of the high school rules, which some of them were pretty bad.

As for this site I plan on updating more (like always), I don't seem to be doing any writing, and my stories seem abandoned. I figure it might be easier to write about what I know, so I'm going to try to include more cooking stuff, and memories of my life. I will try to write down as much as I can remember about what I've done, the short life I've lived. Part of this is so I can remember later on, as I tend to forget things, the other part is I believe it will make me a better write, as I enjoy writing more about things I've experienced than things I've imagined. I love my imagination, and I'm constantly living some fantasy in my head, but writing it all down sadly seems to be a chore, and I tend to forget a lot of things that I've thought, which I dislike, and is why I started trying to write them down in the first place.

I am also working on a big category update to my site. Currently there is a lot of manual work involved including a new category. I plan on making this easier for myself by automating the whole process with a form. Right now all categories are sorted be me, in the sidebar, the map, the back to links etc. Every time I had a new category I have to add a new if statement to all of these for the category, so it includes the right data. As well my sitemap is a mess, and adding a new category to that is very tricky. I have spent several days now formulating a plan. First I will need to figure out the exact process needed in adding a category, where I need to make changes and such and write it all down. I will then add 2 fields to the database for each page, child and parent. Right now each page has a map number, denoting its siblings, for example my home page is number 1, all it's children are numbered 2, and it gets more complicated after that. I will have to fill in a value for each page, denoting it's parent and child(ren). This will then allow me to add categories simply by changing other pages parent number, all of a sudden a page is now a parent, and they are its children. Then I would have to change its child number so it lists all the siblings of now children of the parent. Needless to say this is a big undertaking, and involves changing numerous pages/scripts in my admin area. I will of course be doing all of these changes on a test sub-domain as to not affect the main domain. I plan on having this task done by Oct 1, considering how little free time I have. I have found this necessary as I had all of my old journals my blog sidebar is getting way too long and I plan on breaking it up into several categories to stop it from listing over 200 links per page. I plan on sorting it by year, as any attempt to categorize by content will be monstrous as I am always all over the place in my blog entries. It was bad enough denoting what was site news and what was blog content. I have had to add categories before, and as it seems it might be a regular, or at least semi-regular task, I should make it a lot easier on myself before continuing.