It’s a short month but lots of things happened.
I managed to get all the Y2K Quarterly submissions processed and on the dev site. Webflow’s stock form fills for text are a little difficult to wrangle once sent to you. I downloaded the results as a CSV which eats the formatting and ads symbols for punctuation which meant for each piece I accepted I had to copy/paste over to the site and cross reference with the emailed version from Webflow’s notifications.
Their setup is still new and designed more for storing emails, names, addresses,etc and not 1999 words of prose or carefully formatted poetry. For the next round I will just use a google form because, yeah, that ate up way more time than it should have. It did require me to send a proof over to each author to approve of so at least there won’t be too many post publishing adjustments on Friday.
So why am I using Webflow and not WordPress like every other small magazine? Even this site is WordPress. Well, it has to do with the custom stuff I have planned for later and the way I can easily drag and drop CMS objects into pages. For example, each “Issue” contains a list of “Works” by “Authors”, each one of those is an object that I can pull data from and add to a page anywhere I want without having to code PHP and hope I don’t whitescreen the site.
Anyway, form fills aren’t the end of the world and I want to eventually use Submittable once I can afford it. Having all my CSS work where and when I want it to is worth the learning curve and cost for Webflow. All that DOS styling is just CSS but would be a massive pain for me to write into a WP Theme.
Oldest son is getting better at driving his truck. I need to get it to the shop and have them install new front axles and suspension because while I can probably do it myself I have a buddy in town who owns a shop and would rather have him do it properly.
Youngest son is doing track this spring. Luckily it’s only 4 weeks long so it’s not as intense as football. He got 5th place in discus at the meet this week.
Oldest daughter is having a birthday party next month and the supplies I ordered for it are coming in. She wanted a Ninjago party but given it’s age the availability of plates and cupcake toppers is low. So we’ve compromised with a Ninja Painting party in the garage. I’m setting up tables with little easels and each kid gets a ninja headband and a canvas to paint on. Kinda like those sip-n-paint parties but with Capri Suns instead of boxed wine. Should be fun. I just need to clean out the garage.
Youngest daughter is now doing conversational speech. It’s wild to have her go from a few canned responses to instantly repeating new phrases with understanding. She is the only kid who didn’t get new shoes this month.
Each kid got their own Nalgene bottle for the spring/summer. The boys like to grab a glass from the cabinets, fill it, chug it, then put it in the sink. By the end of the day all the cups are dirty and they aren’t even home half of the time. I got the Nalgenes instead of the sippy straw kind or metal ones because I wanted to be able to chuck them in the dish washer and not have to clean components. Plus with the wide mouth bottles you can put ice in them.
Other than all that I took care of dad for a few nights while mom was out of town for work. I took on a couple of design side jobs. I also started my garden back up, ON TIME THIS TIME, and with way easier vegetables than before. I’ll do a post on those once I transplant the carrots and radishes this weekend. I’ve got cabbages, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, and onions going right now and our weather is going from 90F to 40F and back so we’ll see how they do.