Well that was a barrel of monkeys! Oy Vei! After getting the quite wonderful Chameleon Theme up and running I upgraded to WordPress 2.04. Alotta love (booze, and swearing) later it’s all working. Dayum what an effort. Through it I learned about keeping proper backups (which I did), about how to modify Becks’ Cafe MySQL database (which I had to learn), how to hack CSS (not so bad really), and how to get around PHP (a bit different and frustrating but I got it).

So now back to regular posting instead of programming – yay!

(photo of woman elated with Beck’s Cafe running again from Quasimime’s Photos, used under Creative Commons License)

Well we’ve upgraded to the theme Chameleon then hacked that a bit. Then we upgraded to WordPress 2.04. Everying seemed okay until we tried to order the link list in the right hand side bar. As you can see that didn’t work so great, as the items that are supposed to be last in the list are first. We’re using some WordPress template tags and the mylinkorder WordPress plug-in from Geekly Weekly to try and solve this. Results? well, I’m drinking a martini right now so that should give you a hint to the frustration level.

The good news is I’m learning more about coding in WordPress, html and php. Thanks for your patience kind readers as we get the Cafe back in order.

(Women at Work constuction sign from aheaven’s photos, used via Creative Commons License)

If you’ve been clicking here at the Cafe to check out our fresh content and seemd to see the Cafe’s style change pretty often (especially late at night when we ought to be asleep) it’s due to some Summer renovation work we are doing I did some reading on accesibility and usability in blogs and felt the text area was a bit too wide for easy reading. So I’ve tried to narrow the reading area, keep the links column, make it readable in both Firefox and Internet Explorer and make some small code changes to increase the speed of the blog loading. It’s coming along ok I think, but if something seems amiss or horrible or you just want to drop me a comment on the changes, please do so

Right now I’m experimenting with the Chameleon Theme from Ainslie Johnson, and blog.txt theme from Scott Allan Wallick.

(picture of the two people doing some renovation work from Niklas’ Photos, used under license from Creative Commons)

Being trangender opens up all kinds of opportunities for comedic relief if you relax a bit and just say, “I’m sure I must be insane”. My most recent adventure was one of my most potentially embarrassing while being one that provided the best laughs. Hopefully you’ll be entertained.

First off I’m always “en femme” – I’m always Rebecca and genetically there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot I can do about it aside from a brain transplant. Even then who knows who’s brain I’d get? Teddy Roosevelt? Jeffrey Dallmer? Moe Fine? Groucho Marks? Best to stick with the cortex problems I have than get some other brain with it’s own baggage.

But I dont’ always present as a woman as I’m not “full time” yet, as we say in the community. But hey I prefer to present as “me” as we like to say in the community so when the chance came, I grabbed it thinking, “hey I’ll just change back in the parking garage, no biggie”. I would have been better off changing in a phone booth.

First of all, as most women know, changing clothes in a car is a challenge in itself. How do you get your jeans on when you have a skirt on? Well under the skirt silly then slip the skirt off. Ahhh of course! So here I am in my car, air conditioning on thank goodness, squiggling into my jeans under a perfectly fun skirt that I love that I am hoping desperately I don’t wrinkle, snag, or tear. Mission accomplished there. But the odd gyrations of my portly body in the car would have made a distant on looker wonder if the car I was in was on an earthquake fault: first one leg up against the steering wheel then YANK the jeans up then pull the skirt down then move a hip in the other direction to fit in a bit more. Imagine cramming a sausage full of the sausagy material that makes it so good but doing it by hand. You probably can imagine how I looked. Car swaying, my jeans getting caught over my backside, yanking them up. Good time had by all. Thank goodness there were no spectators – yet.

Removing my bra was no less an act in contorsionism. First unhook said bra then slither your arm out the arm hole then bring it back at an impossible angle so that the arm can actually fit out of the bra strap and then WHISK the bra deftly from your shirt. TA DA. Breasts freed from their imprisonment.

So far so good – piece o’ cake.

Then there’s the makeup. Ahhh the spackle. Some days it might just as well be that. A friend and I had talked earlier about this apparent obstacle, “makeup shmakeup; quick wipe down with a handy makeup removing wipe and be on your way”. On my way indeed! That’s when the spectators came by. As the first man walked past, I figured he wouldn’t notice as I was frantically scrubbing my face. I was right, he was oblivious. A second gentleman saw me from the corner of his eye, then looked away. No doubt he’d seen someone like me scrubbing their face in public before; nothing like a good face scrubbing in public to freshen one up, I’m sure he thought, and on his way he went, nothing unusual here. It was the third couple that got me.

Walking past my car, two women walked up to their oversized white SUV (the kind that could tow a small home) that happened to tower over my little car right next to theirs. As they got in I saw them out of the corner of my eye noticing that the person in the car next to them (that would be me) was doing a good impersonation of someone trying to scrub their face with steel wool. Curiosity got the best of them and they had to look for a bit! Fortunately they did not walk UP to the car and gawk at me through the window, faces pressed firmly to the glass to get every detail. Instead they just kept their distance, no doubt hoping that something worse wasn’t happneing in the car next to them, like my skin catching fire due to the friction I was creating from the scrub of the “gentle” cloth. They eventually left and so did I. Unscathed, save for a bit of embarrassment though clearly having provided the afternoons entainment.

My little life lesson from this? Just relax and be myself, there’s probably not a whole lot I can do about it anyway!

(Phone booth pic used from BenoitNewton’s Photos, under Creative Commons License)