Shower woes

Our shower is fixed! In the UK showering is no simple matter. First of all, there is little pressure to speak of, so if you enjoy blasting yourself awake with water, you're obliged to invest in a power or electric shower. In most British homes neither plugs nor light switches are permitted in bathrooms. In our case, the lightswitch is located just outside the room, the shower is activated by a pullcord hanging from the ceiling, and because our power shower was not functioning properly, requiring us to turn on and off the water to the shower in the airing cupboard (to avoid the unnecessary waste of a precious natural resource), showering literally boggled the sleep-addled mind.

Think of it, not only did we have to stumble out of bed and remember first to turn on the light before entering the room, then pull the cord to the shower before getting in, but until recently, before all of the above, we had to find our bleary-eyed way to the airing cupboard outside in the hall.

Guests, rest assured, all has been remedied. (Knock wood.)

Web designers rejoice

As any savvy web designer knows, the best way to format a web document and certainly a website, no matter its size, is to rely on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for presentation: typeface, font size, paragraph spacing, even layout. Eric Meyer has long been my CSS inspiration with three of his books on my shelf. Recently Dan Cederholm's Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook has joined Meyer's books, stealing pride of place, in fact. Each chapter begins with a common web design task, such as styling a list, and works through the various standards-compliant solutions, presenting the pros and cons of each. The second half of the chapter focuses on invaluable tips and tricks, such as when to use the box model hack, how to stretch a column's background colour all the way to the bottom of the page, and using image replacement to spruce up text.

This book isn't for beginners. It's for web designers familiar with XHTML, CSS and web standards. If you're new to CSS and wonder what's the big deal, check out the css Zen Garden. With a simple click you can see for yourself the dramatic changes possible simply by using a different stylesheet. (The content and markup on the page does not change, only the CSS stylesheet.)

Nantwich Music Festival

We have no official statistics to confirm our claim, but we're pretty sure Nantwich has more pubs per capita than any other British market town its size. Saturday night was definitely hopping, in honour of the Nantwich Jazz, Blues and Folk Festival. A cool but dry evening, no one minded standing outside with a pint or two in hand to listen to music, in our case a Green Day tribute band. Hardly jazz, blues or folk, but great music just the same.

For more on Nantwich, check out the new, updated page devoted to the medieval market town at our Travels in the United Kingdom website:

http://www.jeannehaskett.com/travels/nantwich.html

Welcome to my new blog!

During Kassie's two-week Easter break I intend to steal a few minutes and transfer my current blog to this one, which will allow visitors to post comments.