Boy, have I been wanting to refresh the look of my site for a long time. Since I’ve been digging in to CSS and site design more lately anyway, this weekend just seemed to work out. Elise Bauer’s Learning Movable Type site has been an invaluable resource, as have the various and sundry Good Samaritans who’ve been kind enough to post their tutorials and tips online. Thanks to you all!

I’m still tweaking and touching up the site here and there, but I think the look is about 80% there. One major thing I want to look at is the right-hand column. The links have been far more static than I would like, in part due to the fact that I really didn’t enjoy dealing with tweaking Movable Type’s Main Index through the web interface. Now, though, I’ve linked the index to an outside template, which should make re-writing it much easier.

I designed the logo in the banner a couple of years ago for my freelance business. Since I’ve recently updated my personal style, I figured the old logo would do just fine for Stumax.com.

Speaking of which, I’m looking for gainful employment, and as this blog doesn’t get a huge amount of traffic anyway, I suppose a bleg wouldn’t be too out of line. If you know of anyone who could use a copywriter, graphics assistance, or technical advice, send them to my online portfolio, would you? Full-time work in Seattle would be most welcome, as would tele-commuting freelance gigs anywhere.

More to come soon, I hope. The job hunt and other projects have slowed down my time for blogging, but I’m still committed to refining both the site and my contributions to the Noise Machine, if only for my own learning and enjoyment.

Hope your Sunday is peaceful and that you didn’t forget to get a little something for your sweetie for tomorrow. (It’s Valentine’s, don’t you know!)

First Draft noted tonight that actor Ossie Davis has died. In addition to being a leader in the civil rights movement, he was a great actor, who lent every role he played his immense heart and soul. He’ll be deeply missed.

(Blogcritics has a nice remembrance, as well.)

...within a 5-Mile radius of my house. Including the world headquarters.

Friday Catblogging…

George, dreaming of furry women.

George, a sweet Ragdoll with a purr that’ll keep you up at night, will be 17 in March. He’s been with me all the way from North Carolina to Florida, and across the country to Seattle. Despite surgery to remove a diseased colon in September, he’s still going strong. His sister, Gracie, died at 12. I expect George, like his namesake, to live a long, full life. In fact, if you know of anyone who’s interested in remaking Oh, God! with a cat in the title role, tell ‘em to get in touch.

Sometimes I write stuff on this blog that I’m really proud of. Other times, I cringe at how juvenile and amateurish I allow myself to be. My post on Friday about Jon Stewart is a good example of the latter. I look over that post now and I agree with the sentiment, but absolutely wince at the execution.

Look, I don’t know if at the end of the day I’ll ever be anything close to a good writer. The few folks who visit here notwithstanding (and I’m grateful that you guys check in every once in a while, believe me!), I don’t think I’ve created anything yet of lasting value or even immediate usefulness. The stuff you see here isn’t generally original or different or anything you couldn’t get from a million other blogs. Nor have I really seen it as my purpose to be any of that. Rather, this blog is something I do for me, as a record of what piques my interest, a catalog of the stuff that rises above the level of noise to what I pay attention to. But all that is no excuse for not making more of an effort. More importantly, even if I was the only one who ever read this blog, I would want to be prouder of the work I’m doing.

If how one writes is a reflection of how one thinks, I want my writing to start to reflect more of how I see myself: clear, insightful, funny, honest, with broad interests and strong opinions. Taking some time to develop a point or sitting on a post for a while to give my own thoughts a chance to mature will not be time wasted. Nor will the effort I put into the craft of writing be effort wasted.

I was living in North Bend, Washington, a tiny town nestled in the foothills of the Cascades about 45 minutes east of Seattle. My friend Danielle was visiting. She lived in Queens. She was out here to reconnect with me and to see a part of the country she hadn’t seen before. We were driving in to Bellevue, where she was going to drop me at work and take my car. We turned on NPR, kind of randomly, clueless. That’s when we heard the news.

What strikes me is how long it took for my understanding of the situation to develop. I was at work, in a small office, in a small office building. The news came in drips and drabs. There was little sense of danger or threat at first, and I didn’t see the pictures of the planes hitting the World Trade Center, or see the smoking wreckage at the Pentagon until I got home that evening.

For a couple of days we sat glued to the television set – as, I gather, did most everyone else. We spoke on the phone with friends from all over the country. Danielle tried to find out if her friends in New York City were safe and sound (all accounted for, all unharmed, thank God). I spoke with friends and family about what this all meant. I recall how sharply life had changed on that day. My friends were all from the comedy world, and all of a sudden comedy seemed a very hard thing to contemplate or achieve. We didn’t know when, or if, anything would be funny again.

I visited the World Trade Center site last Christmas. It simply looked like a construction site, except for the tributes lining the fence. I don’t have any personal memory of the towers except for a glimpse of them in passing when I visited New York in 1989. It’s hard for me to fully understand what happened on that day. Life ended then, and life goes on. It goes on and we pause and remember and honor the victims and the heroes of that day and the remembering makes life more precious. My life has changed in so many ways since that day. I’m married now, and I’m going to go back to bed and lie next to my sleeping wife and hold her tight and thank God for the time we have together, and pray for the victims once more.

I’m baa-aa-aack. Didja miss me?

Oy. I’ve spent a day getting back up to speed. I can’t believe the Swift Boat Veterans thing is still getting play. Hasn’t it been debunked yet? What the hell is wrong with our press corps?

Hope the past week has treated you well. If you’re ever in Vancouver, BC, may I recommend you check out Bin 941 Tapas Parlour (which also has a killer website). We ate there on Tuesday night and loved it so much we went back on Wednesday. The restaurant has a funky, urban vibe and the food is simply outstanding. Bin 941 is at Burrard and Davie, and its sister restaurant, Bin 942 is at Granville and Broadway. Killer food, worth a trip to Vancouver.

We’ve had a lot of luck with restaurants in Vancouver, including The Brass Monkey on Denman and Comox. In fact, I don’t think we’ve been disappointed in a meal yet in that city, save for one crappy experience at the Granville Market.

Special shout out to Jill & Cliff for watching the place and taking care of our poor sick kitty while we were gone. You guys are the best.

I swear I won’t make this a blog about my cat, but when I came across this website today, I had to record it.

My 16-year-old cat George is afflicted with a somewhat rare condition called megacolon, in which some or all of the large intestine loses its ability to contract. We’ve been managing it with medicine up ‘till now, but he had a pretty severe episode a few days ago which required an expensive vet visit, so I decided I would look up alternative treatments. A little Googling led me to the Celebrity Cat Interviews page of the Feline Health Society.

I’d usually find this stuff pretty stupid. Maybe you will, too, but something about it just made me laugh my ass off. The interviews are conducted by a cat named Charlie, and it’s written in “cat talk,” so “mommy” becomes “meowmie,” “you” becomes “mew,” and the cats greet each other with “Rawr rawr MERAW,” which I guess is the traditional cat salute. It seems like this stuff is really written by a vet, so the medical knowledge is pretty accurate, but the style is just hysterical. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I just have this vision in my head of someone off in the hinterlands tapping away at the keyboard with a kitty-ear headband and painted-on whiskers to – you know – get in the mood. Hysterical.

As much as I love Seattle, I do enjoy being back on the East Coast. I’ll have landed in or passed through some of the greatest cities in the country on this trip – Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, DC – even Mystic, Connecticut!

I’m really settling into the trip now. I feel I’m in my element on a train, a welcome break from the off-balance way I’ve existed for the past few days. Providence is lovely, but the conference folks were definitely from a different world.

The Acela Express trains are not quite up to the standard of their European counterparts – France’s TGV and others – but they are respectably appointed, comfortable, and fairly quiet. Zipping along at speeds of up to 150 mph, the usual clickety-clack of the wheels turns into something resembling the reassuring whirr of a piston engine.

It’s an interesting way to see the world, on board a train. In Europe, I was disappointed in my wish to see the countryside, as the high-speed trains there travel – quite understandably – between view-obscuring berms. There’s some of that to be experienced onboard the Acela, and there are the usual gritty industrial zones and gray, run-down residential areas that coagulate around the rail lines. However, there are also significant stretches of waterside villages with their marinas and harbors and houses for the wealthy. I was even able to glimpse a fog-shrouded Manhattan skyline at twilight, just as the lights of the Chrysler building came on.

Twenty minutes later, the train left Penn Station and emerged from the subterranean rail lines into the tunnel of darkness. Now, with the cabin lights dimmed, the lights tend to be only occasional pinpricks or glowing orange pockets of the odd settlement. At high speeds, the WHUMP of a passing train rattles the windows and cures us of our hiccups.

The one tiresome aspect of the voyage – only partly alleviated by the new iPod – is the cell phone conversations. For my part, I’m terribly embarrassed to have my one-way conversations full-volume even in an empty car, much less with other passengers surrounding me. Heck, I didn’t even want to sit in the Quiet Car -where cell phones and loud conversations are banned – for fear that the light typing I planned to do might disturb someone. But I must have a disease or a syndrome of some kind because others seem perfectly capable of carrying on all sorts of inane gab fests without the slightest hint of regret.

At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, I worry that these folks aren’t taking advantage of the great benefit that travel offers – perspective. Seeing the world at 100+ mph, at the slightly elevated height of the tracks, is to my mind one of the great opportunities of our modern life. When much of our lives are lived in the canyons of city blocks or the caves of our various dwellings, it’s essential to occasionally see the world differently. Look here and see where our old cars are piled up. Look there and see people in rags sitting on the stoop of their ramshackle cottage, next to the burned out husk of a brick apartment building. Watch a bird hang motionless over the mast of a sailboat. Watch grand cities turn into graffiti-covered suburbs, turn into lush forests, turn into beaches and quaint little downtowns, and back again. Put the phone down. Does your wife really need to know for the third time that you’ll be in at 10:30?