I hope you all had a good week between Christmas and the New Year, and that those who are in school are enjoying their break. I am, but I’m also excited for school to start again. Did I ever mention that I started college classes? I’m still a technically a senior in high school, but I started dual credit classes at a community college this past fall.

My first semester went well, and I enjoyed my classes. That said, I’m not excited because I feel prepared for the next semester. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if the next couple weeks set their heels in the ground and dragged their feet all the way till the first day. But at the same time, there are things I did poorly last semester that I’m looking forward to improving.

Call it New Year’s optimism.

Because New Year’s Day is just the day when you shake off last year’s mistakes, wipe the slate clean so to speak, and start over. Or at least, try your hardest for two weeks before things go back to normal.

And one thing I want to clean up is my blog. I haven’t paid it much attention the past few years. And, even though I probably won’t be writing regular posts (besides continuing to post chapters of Banished), I feel it’s time to do some tidying up. Which mostly just means I’ll be finding a new theme over the next couple days and updating my About Me section (it’s going on four years old!), so don’t be surprised if things look different the next time you stop by.

Also, I plan to read 100 books in 2017. And to keep myself accountable (and to keep track of what I’ve read), I’ll be making short blog posts about each one. These won’t be full reviews, just comments on what stood out to me.

Other things to look forward to this year: Banished will continue to release weekly until it’s entirely on the blog, which will finish in late March (assuming I can count weeks), at which point I might take a short break before I start releasing Hunted. And while I’m not sure I’ll get it out before Banished finishes its run, you can expect the fourth and final Riddled Stone book to hit Amazon this spring.

I’m not sure what I’ll do once I finish the Riddled Stone series. Probably take a long nap.

Anyway, happy New Year!

Well, the end of a world was a big flop. No zombies, no aliens, no nothing! Not even the meteor shower that I was so looking forward to! 😦 This disappoints me very much.

On a brighter note, it’s Christmas! And this is a Christmas post! And sooooooooooooooooooooo:

How is/was your Christmas? Or whatever you celebrate. This year, as always, we had lots of food. Some of it we gave nick-names like “Beam-me-up-Scottie” (biscotti) and “Iced muffins”. Long story.

Here’s some of my presents:

• A logic puzzle book thing
• A coffee mug and yummy-looking chocolate mixes
• Panera gift card
• The Hunger Games (movie)
• X-Men Destiny for the WII
• And a couple other things

So, that’s all good and fun. And I vote that the game means I get to play on the WII today… Right?

What type of things did you get? I’m going to stuff myself with nuts, and put my things away, and then I’m going to think about writing a Christmas story. I have an IDEA… it’s just not complete yet. So I may or may not do it.

Also I have some pictures of Cimorene that I might put up sometime soon.

So, yeah, that was my Christmas, ttyl!

P.S. This might be my first ever Christmas Post that is actually posted on Christmas! Lol

Okay, so I was playing with website programming, and playing with CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), and I came across a bug. I couldn’t get my thing to work. It absolutely refused to obey me, and the text wouldn’t change colors. This is about what it looked like:

.Right {
color: blue;
font-size: 150%;

{

p {
color: red;

}

See my glitch? You might, but I didn’t. I went back and forth between my two things (one was the style sheet, the other was the content things), and then I finally noticed it.

Instead of putting a } at the end of my .Right class, I had a {. Fail. Just the simplest things are what tend to slip past our eyes the most *sigh*.

Oh, and by the way: If any of you are interested in website programming, I’d check out Creating A Website of The Missing Manual: The book that should have been in the box. The third edition is the latest (came out this year, I believe) . . . that I know of, anyway. Great book, well written, and Matthew MacDonald has other The Missing Manual books on other things such as Javascript or CSS (which he covers briefly in Creating a Website, but I guess they’re more detailed and what not. Haven’t actually checked one out. . .). Anyway, great author, great books, on with the plot!

As long as I’m linking you to website programming things, I might as well link you to this post by my close friend Climbing Gecko, who has recently reached his hundredth post, CONGRATS GECKO!

And finally

Now, as a final note on the programming track, I thought I’d share a quote from one of my sister’s shirts. It basically says (I can’t remember word for word, but this should be pretty close):

100 bugs in the system

Fix one, run it again

101 bugs in the system

😛 yep, that pretty much describes programming XD (now somebody’s bound to come along in the comments and post what it really was. . .).

Post three of my I WILL BE A BETTER POSTER frenzy. (How long do you think this one will last? Heh heh heh)

Are we sure it’s Spring?

Seriously, over here right now it’s SO hot. If this is what it feels like in late spring, I’m scared to see summer. July and August are going be nightmares in the form of hotness. Thank goodness for swimming!

However, I prefer heat that I’ll hopefully get used to (eventually, like right before we plunge back into cold), rather than constant rain and wetness and muddiness that means I can’t ride. Of course, I’d love to have an occasional rain to keep the wild plants healthy (and the corn and all, too), and hopefully to cool things down a bit (heh, fat chance of things being cooled down).

Hopefully this heat will not help to detour me from my determinedness to be better at getting stuff done (e.g. blogging, noveling, practice programming, school, chores, basically life :P). I mean, I get detoured easily enough without it being so hot, (as most people should know from my past patches of failing to post very much).

This said . . .

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