Worms & Hyperness

Whenever it's raining I always feel really sorry for worms. They wait and wait for a rainy day to come up out of the ground and look around at the outside world and play in the rain and then they just get stepped on by a bunch of people too busy to look around or be aware of the worms they might be squishing. It just seems so sad to me. But then again, I'm the girl who dug up worms for pets in grade two and tried to sell them to the grade one-ers at recesstime. If I recall correctly, I even tried to bring one of my pet worms to a violin lesson around that time. Not sure if he actually made it into the lesson or not though. I guess maybe I just like worms.

And now, enough philosophising for today. Here is the promised continuation of my depressing Web design story. You can decide if the tone of part II differs from the tone of part I from yesterday. So today after Creative Writing, I hurried to the Mac lab to work as fast and furious as I could to try and get my Web site to look like something close to a normal Web site. I found Tyler and his friend, Nathan, in the lab redoing their Web sites. They are in the 9:30 section of the class so they had just got done class and were told to place their images are background images so the CSS worked better. I am ever so thankful for that because it pretty much saved my hide. I frantically asked Ty for some advice before he had to head off to his 11 a.m. class. He finished his work and then helped me out with as much as he could before leaving. Then I kept going on my own. The lab assistant hadn't arrived yet, so I kept interrupting Nathan to ask him different CSS-type questions when I discovered a problem. He tried to help as much as he could while also fixing his own site. I managed to place all of my background images just fine and then tried to work on making sure all the spacings were right so my design didn't have a bunch of holes in it when looked at on an actual Internet browser. Then, when Nathan had everything worked out on his Web site and came to sit beside me and helped me with my many questions. In less than one hour, he'd basically helped me turn my non-Web site into a fully functioning site with almost all of the CSS styles working perfectly. The only problems I still had with my site were text alignment issues with my nav bar, my body copy and my copyright info in my footer. Nathan said text was the one thing he hadn't really figured out yet and suggested I go see if our teacher had a few minutes to help me out with that. I thanked Nathan profusely, especially since I knew he had been planning to go right back to his room and go back to sleep after his class got out. I thought it was really super great of him to take the time to help me out. But I've noticed that with us Web design students, once we understand something, we're more than willing to help out another student work through their problems. Probably because we realize what it's like to be so utterly lost and confused that you just don't know what to do. Anyway, Nathan was thanked and thanked again. Then I headed to the SJ&C office and hunted down Ms. Chamberlain who did take about 5 minutes to show me the basics of how to manipulate text with CSS styles. Then I basically played around with that until Bryn and Ty got out of their class and came to see how I was fairing. Ty told me one more CSS style to help align my text and then I was pretty much set. I just played around with different text settings and wrote up my body text until my class started. I was just finishing up when our TA, Ryan started passing back our quizzes. As he handed me my quiz, he glanced at my computer screen and saw my finished Web page. He said, "Wow, you have a site! You didn't even have anything last night." I said, "Yeah I know. I basically got it done in the past hour and a half, with a little bit of help from some amazing people." He looked pretty impressed that I actually had something to show the class and slightly confused as to how I'd pulled that off. To tell you the truth, I was rather astonished as well.
(screen shot of Web site to come, probably by tomorrow)

After class I was so relieved that I'd got the project done that I got really, really hyper and kind of bounced around for a good portion of the afternoon. Then a group of us who, miraculously, all didn't have classes or homework or work, watched "Homeward Bound" together. It was awesome and epic and reminded me of the million other times I've watched that movie. It was so much fun to just all hang out with each other and quote practically the entire movie. Yeah, that is one awesome movie although the clothes sure do look amusing these days. Funny that they never used to...

And one more thing: Tonight after a particularly busy night in the Accent office, Jonathan and I decided we should test some of the great puddles that the sudden rain has made. So we drove his van (or he drove his van and I came along for the ride) to the Bi-Lo parking lot and had some fun giving the van (named the Tomato. Truly, just check out his license plate) a bath. It was a blast, but when we got out Jonathan noticed that somehow the water had bent his front license plate up parallel to the ground. It looked hilarious until he bent it back down to its normal position.