New Daily Grind post!

A-woo-hoo! I was sat thinking the other week that I love Thursdays lately, mainly because How I Met Your Mother is on TV as well as Big Bang Theory and we love sitting down together and watching it, and I really wanted to capture that and I hadn’t actually done a Daily Grind/Day in the Life project in such a long time so I decided I was going to do one. It was also by chance that Ali Edwards posted about her monthly Day in the life, and it was going to be the same day as the day I chose without realising. Of course her photos are so much more nicer than mine, but this grind was done purely on my iPhone!

http://kirstybase.com/photolog/27-06-13/

My original hosting package was limited and so I moved my Grind over to google sites (100MB free space so I figured it would do at the time) but luckily I logged into my cpanel and viewed my host’s website and found out that I have had quite a boost to my hosting package! Well that was it, I moved my grind back over to my domain of course and instead of a regular site I have done it as another WordPress site. I have tried Joomla and Drupal, but quite frankly I loved the familiarity of WordPress (it turns out, I’ve been using it for about 8 years now! YIKES!) and ALL my sites are now WordPress. Ha! I have done a simple design for the site and I’m pleased with how it looks.

I know how nice it is to look back on how things used to be “back in the day” and seeing photos of my great grandmother sat at my nan’s house in her usual spot, and the fact that in all these years, I still love the chicken and baked bean combination for tea! Be it chicken kiev with beans, chicken chargrill with beans or my latest: cripsy chicken, chips & beans LOL! And when baby comes along, it’ll be even more special to remember this time we have just the two of us and have it documented.

And whilst listening to an episode of The Daily Digi podcast I heard about Jolicloud, and it’s so nice to think that all my free cloud storage is accessible in one place so that everything I have in all different places will be much easier to locate now 🙂 Please feel free to use my referral links as if you sign up you get free space and so do I:

Box – REFERRAL LINK

Dropbox – REFERRAL LINK

Autumnal

Well hello there. Yes I am still here, but to be fair I didn’t think there was much to blog about. I have come up with a few ideas for topics to get on my soapbox about the next time that happens. My car got fixed! I was so happy when it started back up thanks to wonderful uncle!

I have been entertaining all my Facebook friends with old family photographs, and as a result myself and 2 of my cousins have changed our profile pictures to old school ones. Well, all the kiddies are back to school and little Lauren had her first day so it seemed fitting. To be honest talking about old photos is another post in itself and I think I may save that topic for next week if things are the same old, same old.

The weather is certainly changing. I have been happily curled up on the sofa at home, apple & spice candle going with our small lamp on as the night draws in early. And eating beef casserole (Will have to get some part baked rolls for the cupboard!)

I have done a free website mockup class in photoshop which for me was a perfect excuse to have a play learning new techniques that I was doing the long way round so now I know a quicker way. Some of the tips will also help when I get around to doing a few other of my crafty bits (when time & inspiration allows it shall be a freebie kit and some more Hanson crafts). I’ve not scrapped in ages, but I want to focus a bit more on design right now. That’s where my head is at.

I had some fab news at the hospital as well: I definitely have more proctitis and because it’s only affecting 10cm in a few months they reckon I should be off the meds all together and in remission! So fingers crossed 🙂

Glad it’s over!

The whole experience at hospital itself wasn’t that bad, thanks to the drugs that’s for sure. I wasn’t quite away with the fairies as my UC buddies suggested, but I was woozy and it made the whole thing a little more… manageable.

No, what got me was the whole “prep” thing. I was sent a big bag of medicines by the hospital to take the day prior to my appointment, and oh my gosh. It was horrific. The medicine I hated the most out of all of it, moviprep, was a lemon and salt flavour powder that I had to mix with a litre of water and drink over an hour. On Sunday it took me well over 2 hours to drink it, but I somehow managed to chug it down. Monday morning at 6am I had to drink a further 1 litre over an hour. With 10 mins left on the clock, I barely drank a quarter of it when I just couldn’t physically drink anymore. My body was literally rebelling against me. “Just one more sip” I thought… I sipped… and I threw it ALL back up again.

It was a hard decision to not go swimming on Sunday morning, but at 10am I had to take  tablets and wash it down with 2 litres of water (and after that much water, swimming was just not happening!), and I had to explain to my 3 year old nephew that I wasn’t swimming as I had lots of medicines to take that day and drink a lot of water too. Then come lunch time as everyone tucked into their Sunday roasts… I had a small bowl of vanilla icecream, as no solid food was permitted, but some vanilla icecream was permitted. To be fair, I’m glad I had it because no food that day was HARD. By Monday morning I was just feeling terrible from the lack of food, not to mention I had hardly slept at all the entire night either.

I thought that I would have been positively ravenous afterwards but I really wasn’t. I happily ate the fruit shortbread biscuits and hot chocolate, but for the rest of the day I couldn’t manage a lot of food. Only today am I getting my appetite back, but I’m still not eating tea at night.

I also got rather excited when a friend of mine (a fellow UK Scrapper) posted for help on her WordPress site, and I absolutely jumped at the chance! I hadn’t designed anything in aaaaaaaages. So I did this design for her 🙂 Check out her site: Foxys Fancies.

Photoshop fun

I’ve been messing about this week in photoshop. I am determined to get back into web design, and most specifically, know more about designing wordpress themes that don’t revolve around what I normally make up. But I really needed to get into what’s “in” in design right now and peruse some of the popular sites to get a grasp on mock ups. Those pictures above are my “in progress” pieces 😉

This week will be particularly interesting. Our “routine” will be turned on its head & I shall be cooking a home cooked meal *nearly* every night (Gareth is out Wednesday so I may end up eating left overs by myself if I don’t settle on a jacket potato LOL!) So wish me luck as we begin our new routine 😉

Move more eat well March

So I have lost a pound each week in the first two weeks but didn’t lose a pound this week, however it wasn’t a weight gain which is all good and my BMI actually went down, so in my eyes that is still a victory!

That kit I was working on is pretty much completed and has been for a while, and on top of my wunderlist right now is to get the TOU written, split the kit between Hanson crowd & everyday crowd, zip, upload & link up 🙂 I thank you all for your patience & understanding as things have been busy & hectic as usual! On top of my main worries I have my mobile contract expiring soon & I need to cancel within the next 2 days, trying to adjust to new glasses but having issues with them and I had my eye test in tesco & glasses made in Boots so a headache of going between the 2 to sort out what the problem actually is, the weather is picking up now so chores are extending out into the garden where we have a flower border that is positively awful, constantly growing weeds and we have some things we’d like to plant. I’ve weeded a bunch already but still have a lot left to do. Oy.

I also need to sit down and sort out my domain, the current sites on it & how best to present & manage them as I still haven’t even got to finishing off my Hanson crafts site since Hanson.net cut their hosting and I’ve had to just sort of upload what I had over to my domain & figure “I’ll sort it out later as I have more important things to do right now”.

I did thoroughly enjoy my week of free Lynda .com training though. I did a refresher on web design fundamentals, did a website from photoshop to dreamweaver course & something that really took my fancy: hands on magazine workshop, doing a magazine spread in InDesign. I was positively giddy with learning & taking some time to sit & watch the videos. I vow to save up some money and take a month to learn some cool new things. Not at all career related but for me. I won’t need to learn how to do a logo (I have played around and made my own in the past!)  but I think it’s a cool skill to have, and making book covers in InDesign ready for the next installment of our trip report but of course 😉 and I want to brush up on my HTML skills. I remember back in the good old days when I spent entire Sundays coding my website  locked away in my bedroom and running it through the validator to check that it was good coding! Ah, the days back when we had Greymatter blogs and numerous “skins” that we coded in php so that the visitors could choose their favourite. I do miss those days, especially as I lost touch with it all and that’s a bad thing in an ever changing environment.

Well, many other things calling my name that needs to be done. People waiting on me to do my turn on Draw Something as well. All being well I hope to be back on Sunday with a little something for you all for being such superstars!

slight hiccup

For some unknown reason, my host has blocked my isp so I can’t view my blog (Nor their website ironically enough, so I’m having problems contacting them) so once this is resolved I shall be back with my Week In The Life pages. Yup, I’ve been busy working on them 🙂 I went the Ali template inspired, fully digital version, and will get them printed at photobox. It has been a lot of fun to do, but at the same time slightly relieved it’s over lol!

Themes

I have been working on redoing the couple of themes I had done and I’ve so far done a green photoblog theme for WordPress. I will be working on this one for Blogger very soon, but I will update you all on that once it’s done. Just wanted to post that I’m doing some new free themes 🙂  And my photoblog themes are Flash Fader ready as well so you can have a flash header like that in my photography blog. All you have to do is install the plugin to WordPress as you normally would do and the theme is already set to show the flash header over the header image.

Get this one: Green Photoblog theme

New Halloween Theme

For what us Brits lack in Halloween celebrating, I’m making up for in my new blog theme, and even more cooler is the fact that I’ve played with the widgets and as my themes are widget friendly, I’m having a blast lol! I am currently perusing the widgets now 🙂 

Even better, I’m going to branch out and do some Blogger themes including my all time favourite types: Photoblog themes. So that’s something to look forward to playing with tomorrow.

Anywho, the kitchen isn’t going to clean itself, nor is the lounge with all house info everywhere and I need to change the bed sheets as well once the washing that is in the machine is done. So glamourous! But the themes are giving me a welcome distraction 🙂

Introducing :)

I wonder just why I didn’t upgrade to the latest wordpress before… I’m so stuck in my ways haha.  But really though, I’ve been soooooooo busy doing website stuff, and after drooling over all of the professional photography blogs and finding out the template cost about $170 (or there abouts) I decided to heck with that I can do it myself.

And it has been very hard work, but after giving up on flash after over 5 and a half days trying to get it to work, I found a few other avenues to go down and the lovely people over at the WordPress forums, I have got some photoblog themes that can have a flash header if you download the plugin 🙂 there are 3 themes at the moment but I’m putting them up at my portal and that’s not completed yet, although the green theme is up and running at the photoblog, complete with a few pictures from yesterday in their full glory (the whole point of the photoblog 😉 ) you can check that out here: http://www.kirstybase.com/blog.

My personal blog is up and running over at kb.com but I tried everything to transfer over this blog with all the posts and it just won’t go. Poopy. I will pretty much post an entry when I’m moving over there though.

Anyway, now for photos.  Here’s Stewart and his mural in his son’s room:

The baby changing mat (not much longer til the little cutie makes his arrival – can’t wait to meet my nephew!)

Baby clothes :heart:

Buster soaking up the rays…

New domain

Hurrah!  Sadly I couldn’t transfer over all my old posts, I exported the SQL database but it was having none of it. Right, off to bed seeing as I’ve been working non-stop since I got home (this includes taking out the rubbish for collection, cooking and washing up – so I’ve not been on the computer the whole time 😉 )

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