I swear, some days my only interaction with the kid is to drive her to her appointments and her friends’ houses. On days like this I feel like my life isn’t my own. I suppose this is a common experience of parenthood, but that doesn’t make me feel any less used. What am I going to do, say no? By driving the kid around at least I know she isn’t taking a chance on riding with someone else.

Now that I am done driving for a while I have some time to do my own work. One of these days I need to take my computer over to the public library and try writing there. Libraries always inspire me to be productive. The best library situation, of course, was when I had a lockable study carrel at the UMass library during graduate school. Too bad they don’t extend library privileges to alumni. I would make the trek to UMass regularly if I could still conveniently use the library.

Instead, I am going to spend another day blogging and working on my coding skills. I know JavaScript is kicking my ass, but every little bit helps. One of these days I am going to find myself writing JavaScript with some confidence. For now, though, it is still a mystery to me. jQuery is a bit easier to understand, so for now I will focus on that. A lot of the functionality of jQuery is included in Bootstrap, so that is one way to start using it.

I want to try using tabbed navigation within a page. That would be one way to write a single-page site with multiple sections. That or a parallax-scrolling page. Or just a big-ass page with a scrollspy navigation menu. In fact, let me start working on that today. My portfolio site on GitHub pages would be the best place to do that. I don’t like what I have up at the moment, so I need to begin working on replacing it. The portfolio page has got to be the slickest site I have.

And again, let me comment on the usefulness of writing this current blog. My ability to pump out 500 words has improved greatly, allowing me to write with few stops and even fewer edits (in fact, I just edited a couple of things in this current sentence). I need to begin practicing the use of looping and any other strategies that will help me to improve upon my ability to get words onto the screen. What I have now, with this entire blog, is more than 80 pages of text, some very short, and many at around the 500 word mark. If those posts were thematically related I could easily edit and re-write them into one cohesive narrative.

In fact, one thing I may consider doing is purging the blog of unnecessary posts such as those where I am just testing out Markdown features or trying to “push out” another post that wasn’t being rendered (a useless exercise, by the way). I wouldn’t necessarily want to re-write the posts that I have written so far, but if I can go back through the posts I have published so far I might be able to expand upon them in new posts. In the end, I need to go through each post to copy and paste similar text into single-file essays.

Enough writing for now. Let me begin to work on an improved portfolio page.

(I’ve hit the 600 word mark today without breaking a sweat. More later.)