MissLeonie.com

I thought yesterday night would be a nice quiet evening, and it would have been had I not received an email from a girl I went to a Dutch uni with during the undergrad stuff. She was in town, at some random guy’s house, because my housemate was supposed to pick her up from the train station earlier in the afternoon, but she didn’t show. I don’t think I can be blamed for not seeing that one coming. As far as I knew, said housemate was away with her boyfriend for the weekend, so we arranged for her to make her way back to the train station, and for me to take her to our place from there. It all worked out, and I was even sung at on my way down (”Don’t walk so fast, I want to get to knoooow you!” Cue faster walking).

I mention this, because while we were walking back, I tried to explain our neighbourhood to her, our location within it in particular. We’re quite close to the Trent river, you see, so even though the neighbourhood is the definition of dodgy, we live on the edge of the dodginess. It’s a level of dodginess just inches shy of comfortable, those inches being formed by the amount of silverware one of the neighbours in this street has inserted into his head. “The river,” she asked, “do you have to swim home yet?” Little did I know that there’s been some massive flooding in middle England, flooding she witness from the train over.

So today, after a long afternoon nap, I decided to see if I should be digging out my swimmers yet. Turns out the river isn’t flooding yet, but it’s very, very close. Normally there are steps leading down to the water level. Today, you could barely see the top step. If the amount of rain keeps up upriver, I’d say we’ll have at least a small flood on the river bank on our hands soon. Be sure to click the photo and have a look at the largest version. Size does matter.

A random selection of things that really bug me:

• plucking my eyebrows - I think it’s not supposed to hurt as much as it hurts me, cause otherwise, why would women do it? That said, I’m pretty sure waxing hurts like a bitch, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone.
• getting less than eight hours of sleep a night - suffice to say that even if I didn’t hate it, everyone in my vicinity would.
• the smell of melting cheese - is there anything more revolting? And why would you spoil a perfectly good egg like that?
• Modernism - surely, if it’s incomprehensible, there’s little point in the communicative act of writing a book, except perhaps showing off how clever you think you are, think being the operative word.
• messiness - you use it, you clean it, everyone is happy. It is not a difficult concept.
• missing Liam and my family - normally I get to have at least one of the two.
• any and all forms of formal assessment - I am a perfectionist, you are making me cry.
• religious zealots of the type that profess the Bible states we put eternal salvation at risk by watching TV and drinking alcohol.

Hello! Things look a bit different since last time you visited, don’t they?

I’ve finally transferred the site to WordPress, which means I will no longer have to manually code every single entry, and, more importantly, every single archive link. Hurray! WordPress comes with more fanciness, like comments and RSS feeds, should you feel thus inclined. Lucky for me, WordPress for Leonie comes with the wonderful Liam helping me out occasionally. You don’t understand - PHP and CSS are Greek to me. No speaky.

I’m not happy with the design as it is right now, but I wanted the site up and running. At least it’s a little more personal than the standard WordPress default. I’ll work on the design later, though. I figured, the longer I wait with the big transfer, the more work it will be. This January, faced with having to add a little “January 2008″ link to every single page of the website, I decided enough was enough. The DNS server then decided to join me, because as far as I know, MissLeonie.com points at a funky cPanel screen right now. Anyway, this site, albeit a beta, now has all posts the previous one did (though that one still exists too, just in case).

Have a look around and feel free to leave me a comment about how you like the new format. Enjoy!

PS. And I swear I didn’t plan it: this first post on the new design is # 201.