Bells and Whistles in a Happy Marriage

Steven and I are internet junkies. On days like yesterday (which was grey, raining and cold) we are most often found sitting behind a machine. Yes, we spent several hours, each on a different machine, communicating through messenger or shouts down the front hall, tweeking and making changes to the CSS and look of our web sites. For those who use Internet Explorer as your web browser you will have to make a slight effort to see the biggest change here. Add me to your favorites (bookmark me), close IE, reopen, come back to this web page. You should see a little red barn icon beside the URL. It should look like this: barn.jpg http://www.bigredcouch.org/blog If you are more web savvy and know that Internet Explorer is really a poor browser, you are using Firefox and you can see the icon with no effort what-so-ever. With some help from my resident geek husband the MT tags were added so that the catagories each entry is post under reads at the bottom of said entries and some CSS tweeking makes it look much nicer and conforms with the look I am trying to achieve. I must be honest. Getting those MT tags in the right place and getting it to look like I wanted was frustrating. My husband hears what I want to accomplish and he helps with a literal translation. He gave me the tags, showed me where they fit properly in page template, but what he did not do was hear that I wanted the output to be pretty and small and red. After much frustration, raised voice and seething rage, he help me add the CSS to make it exactly as I imagined. Yes, folks, I have no patience, get frustrated and it comes out in seething spats of conversation from between my gritted teeth and tight lips. However, Steven is a saint, who laughs at me and asks questions that only fuel the rage. "Whhaaaat?" he says. Smirky half grin. The look of one who can tweek and change with very little effort. The look of one who can write entire strings of code and make those words and symbols behave in any way he desires. The look of a geek who realizes his wife isn't as prolific in the areas of his geek expertise. A wife who gets frustrated which provides comedy for his future blogging pleasures. But also his wife, who is much better at graphic arts than he. A wife who hears his pain that the little picture he has is 32 x 32 and 256 colors that will not work. A wife who hears his unspoken desires to have a tractor icon that really looks like a tractor and not a walk behind lawn mower. A wife who sat and colored each and every pixel a compatable shade of green until he had a 16 x 16 green tractor icon that loads up at the top of the web browser right beside his URL. One that looks strikingly like this: greentractor2.jpg . Marriage is a partnership. Last night we complimented one another in the ways that partnership should work. Through barter and exchange, frustration and seething rage I got the code snippets I wanted. Through the heartfelt compassion of a wife who really wants her husbands web pages to look as her husband knows he imagines he got the icon of a little green tractor. You have to give a little to get a little, folks. We both gave and both got. We both gave and we both got what we wanted in the end but it is the journey to the destination in where memories are made. "Why are you so angry and shouting? I gave you the tags." "Because you do not listen. If you listened you would know I wanted it pretty and small and RED!"