It's Monday And It's Spring! Time For A Weekly Recap.

It's Monday!  The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and it's finally warm!  There's still some stubborn patches of snow left on the ground, but they're all that's left of the huge mountains of snow we had this winter.

*hee hee*  I feel evil :)

It's been a good (and tiring) week.  Dave and I have recently finished Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (he's surprising good at figuring out who the villain is supposed to be and why), and now we've started The Goblet Of Fire.  For the first time ever, I'm finally having an intelligent conversation about Harry Potter!  It's hard to have a really good online book discussion, and my friends and family have either never read the series, or they have and aren't as passionate about it as I am, so they don't want to spend their time talking about it.  

But Dave likes to talk about them!  At the end of each chapter I stop the audiobook and ask him his thoughts (just to make sure he was actually listening, because I still can't believe he's finally reading them), and to ask him if he wants to continue.  We then talk about what's happened so far, and sometimes we really get into a good, hefty discussion about the themes and the messages that Rowling provides.  We had an excellent talk about dementors the other day, when Dave noticed parallels between dementors and depression; we kept it going for so long that Dave ended up being a few minutes late for work!  I'm really loving the fact that we can talk about these books, and it's even more comforting to know that Dave really appreciates them as literature, and not as cute children's stories.  Ahh, weekday mornings couldn't get any better than this!

As for blogging, well, you might have noticed from my Wednesday Rantings that I'm starting to feel a little restricted by Blogger and its services.  Being still a beginner in website creation and design, I'm finding that I can't simply copy and paste code HTML anymore, or rely on Blogger templates to get what I want (I really want drop-down menus!) and other web developers aren't much better (Weebly is too rigid, Wix is too simplified for blog posts, and Wordpress refuses to run Javascript), so if I want my blog to look the way I want, I need to learn more about web design and writing code.

So I signed up with Lynda.com to do some web design courses!  Lynda.com has a bunch of video tutorials on just about everything related to web design, graphics, photography, videography, and more!  It requires a monthly fee in order to have full use of the site, and they're sneaky with auto-renewals, but I'm finding the videos really helpful and interesting so far! I just completed a course called "Web Design Fundamentals" and now I finally understand the differences between HTML, CSS, and Javascript.  I'm going to check out a course about the basics of HTML next (later this morning in fact) and then I'll move on to the basics of CSS and Javascript.  I'm really looking forward to this; it'll be nice to at least understand what I'm putting on my sites, and I can probably use this stuff for my business site as well.

Well, enough about my week, how about my reading?  Well, so far I've only finished two books, and both were on audiobook....and they're both part of a series.  Between listening to Harry Potter with Dave, and work, and adding more to the blog, and the new web design courses, I haven't really had time to sit down and read.  That's no excuse, though, I could most certainly make time, but it's hard when the book I'm supposed to be reading is a story I'm not yet 100% interested in.  Ah, well.  It's going to be a nice warm week, so maybe I'll take some time to read outside. :)

Books Read:

(Click on the covers for more)

Plan To Read:

(Click on the covers for more)

Well, I going to stop here for now.  I've got some reading and learning to do, and it's a gorgeous day!  Ciao!

-Lisa The Dancing Bookworm