The K-T Boundary

It's First Friday Leesburg, which means: lecture night at the Loudoun Museum!

(This might be my last one - I expect to be very busy in June, and then I'm out of here! Possibly I should have done homework tonight instead, even.)

(I came home from work, took a nap, made coffee, and went to the museum. I'm still feeling very caffeinated.)

Tonight's lecture was about heritage gardens in Loudoun County. The speaker showed slides from several gardens she's created, including the one beside the museum, and described the practical uses of the flowers. She also provided a very detailed handout for taking notes, which was great, because I can never remember stuff unless I have notes to refer to!

This was probably the least well-attended lecture so far this summer, but there was still a respectable crowd, maybe about 20 or so, and everyone was interested in the material. There were some computer problems that I helped with (I wish more people under 30 would show up to these things!). They have a cute little Cupboard-under-the-Stair for storing chairs. (I think if they told people they have Harry Potter's bedroom they'd get more visitors!)

I'm going to miss volunteering at the lectures - I wish I'd started doing it earlier, and I wish I'd been able to help more than one evening a month. I wonder if I'll have enough spare time at grad school to find a museum that needs help? I want to try to be more connected to the community there, right from the start. We'll see how that goes.

Speaking of which -- I need to sign up for classes soon! I'll be taking two required courses - Methods and Theory - and then I can choose Research Methods in HistAnth or Public Archaeology. This may be my only chance for either of them, and I don't know which to pick! I'll probably go with Research Methods, because it seems like it would teach me more skills. I'm interested in Public Archaeology, but that's what LAF does (so I have some experience), and it seems like something that can be picked up on the fly? Oh, I don't know! (640, 665, 670, & 615.) (Or I could take them all. But 9 credits is full-time for grads, and I am going to take my time with this degree. So I won't.) (OMG, it's really happening, guys!)

I have a big weekend coming up. I have to visit a local historic site, and write six pages about how they interpret their material culture. I'm thinking Sully, since I haven't been yet. I want to get a big chunk of that done on Saturday, before I head to a game night at my friends' apartment. Then Sunday I can spend working on the LAF website and starting to sort through the giant bag of potsherds Dr. Clark brought me on Thursday night! I'm so excited to get started on those, eeeee! .. oh, and of course, I have to rewrite my projectile point classification forms. One more session left for each class ...

Getting back to tonight's lecture -- I'm a big fan of historic recipes. If you'd like to make a medieval salad, put these in:

* violet flowers * parsley * red mints * sage * wild onion * primrose buds * dandelion * red nettle * fennel *

Could you buy all these things at a farmer's market? Hmm!

(P.S. Bingley knocked over my water glass last night. Drink out of your bowl, not my cup, cat!)

Also: I have a LOT of dreamwidth invite codes left. Who wants them?

Does anyone out there know of a really good site, for explaining really *simple* adjustments to wordpress themes?

I just want to make this blog look vaguely like the main site.

Which means: I want the white bits to be dusky salmon. I want to put a table in the header, with a td background consisting of the red-rocks images (as I managed to do here). (It does have a table now - the image at the top is in the table - but something is canceling out the background image.) I want to *maybe* have the sidebar background also be red rocks.

That's all I want to do. It shouldn't be that difficult.

I know html and css and I'm *trying* to kludge my way through php, but the kludges I'm attempting are not having much of an effect. I haven't even been able to figure out how to move the header-background image to the top of the page (now that I've edited it and made it smaller), or get rid of that annoying red blob.

I am not very pleased that wordpress themes are harder to edit than gallery themes, and I'm sort of wishing I'd just bought an IJ (or a DW) for LAF and embedded it, because I know how to do that.

Sigh.

(Also: this is going to be a multi-user blog. How do I make it show "posted by: [user]" at the top of each post? I don't see it anywhere obvious in the admin area.)

(And, any recs for a posting interface that will be easy to use for someone who doesn't have any blogging experience?)