Three Things I'm Grateful for this Thanksgiving

 

I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart;

I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. Psalm 9:1

This year has proved to be quite eventful thus far. There have been many ups and a few downs to match, but by the grace of God we're still soldiering through. With thanksgiving being tomorrow, I've really been thinking over all that has happened in this past year that I am grateful for (like just about every other person in this fine country) and three things stand out to me at the  top of the list.

First, I graduated from college. I feel proud of all of the work I put into it and am grateful for the opportunity to give it my best shot. I am also grateful that I was blessed enough to be able to graduate debt-free thanks to scholarships, financial aid, and my awesome parents.

Second, I am grateful for the opportunity to pursue my passions as a career. As I said in my previous post, I am working at our library and am loving every minute of it. I am also teaching in my guitar studio of one. I always leave our lesson feeling refreshed and excited and reassured that that's what I want to do  for a living. 

Finally, I am grateful for the struggles that life seems to like to throw my way. I feel like each time I get the rug pulled out from under my feet, I end up feeling closer to my family and to God. Wether it's from an old wound, or the devil's latest curveball. Through God's grace, I end up stronger for it.

For these reasons, I am thankful.

My Life as a Wannabe Librarian

I'm back! If there's anyone out there in the world still keeping  up with these (Bueller? Bueller?), you know I've been gone awhile  and I deeply apologize. I had been hoping to start a thread of posts titled "My Life as a …" documenting different aspects of my life that make me who I am. However, my excitement was cut short by some issues I've been having with my computer as well as the fact that I have been very very busy with my job, which is what will actually be the topic of this post! Today we will be covering….

 Duh duh daaa! …  My Life as a Wannabe Librarian! 

For those of you who do not yet know me (AKA the vast majority of the world), I am a part-time Library-clerk in my hometown. Since my last post I have helped open  up a new library and have been very very busy ever since, as you can imagine, but this is not where I want to start. Let's take a few steps back into my childhood.

 I have always been  a bookworm. My first memories of reading are from when I was about four or five with a beginning reader that my mom had bought for me and my sister. That as well as many early memories of my mom sitting with us reading aloud from some of the best books: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, etc.

 When I was eleven, I determined to read every book that we owned, which was a fairly serious undertaking considering that we homeschooled and had several years of curriculum readers, history, literature, and science encyclopedias on the shelves. I had them all read by the next year. Many of the books I read then would be read again later on in high school and in college.  My family has always called me little librarian Mara, because I could tell you where every book in our house was, who it was by, and what it was about (Nerd alert).

 I have always said that I was born with a reading list so long that I could never finish it.  I was the kid who got in trouble for reading too much. My mom was constantly upset at me because I would take a book that was supposed to be spread in assignments throughout the next few weeks and finish it the same day I got it because I liked it so much.  I was constantly sleep deprived because I stayed up into the wee hours of the night reading. Books were banned at the dinner table because of me. You get the point. My mom was patient with me and soon got me started on a reading and writing intensive curriculum and fed my thirst for books as best as she could (YThank you mom!Y)

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a librarian (as well as many other things …"I should have been a great many things, Mr. Mayor") However, I was born a musician and pursued that into college,  but that's a story for another blog post...we'll get to that later. Throughout highschool  I went to a nearby library  many times to ask if I could volunteer only to be turned down, because the volunteer positions were all filled. However, once I graduated college, I caught one! A friend of mine told me that positions were opening in my hometown, since they were planning on opening a new library. I applied, and by the grace of God was accepted as a part-time clerk (for those of you who don't know, you need a degree to actually call yourself a Librarian...go figure!)

The Library always has been, and still is, my happy place. I love being surrounded by books! Since I started my job, there has rarely been a moment that I am not surrounded by books. During the move, I had the chance to really get up close and personal with pretty much every book in our local library. We had to unpack and check in new items, interfile them with the old. Re-shelve and shift, re-shelve and shift. I know almost every book in that library as a best friend (especially our upstairs nonfiction). I was so sore those first couple of months as we packed and moved and unpacked, but I have been so happy! My reading list is obviously growing longer and longer every minute I am there, and I  am totally okay with that! It has also opened up  thoughts of going back into school for a Masters in Library Science. 

Now things are starting to settle down and settle in. Our new building is developing a new heartbeat of regular patrons coming in for the computers and their maximum of three DVDs (books???). My favorite days are when we have toddler time and children's events. I love to see the little ones running in yelling "Books! Books!", singing their songs with our Children's Librarian or her assistant,  crying when they have to hand over their books to be checked out, then happy again when they get them back. They're such funny little things!

I have learned to repair books, have cut thousands of pages of scrap paper (I shredded bags full of scrap paper during the move!), and have issued hundreds of new library cards, and am loving every minute of it so far!

Renovation Time Part 1

Hi everyone and anyone who may be out there as I'm just starting up this blog! I thought it would be fun to document my blog startup and renovation to give any new bloggers out there some ideas for basic HTML changes to pretty up your blogs. First off, just some disclaimers, I am not a professional programmer by ANY means!!!!! I am just writing about code that I have tweaked over and over in previous blogs that I have made over (I've linked both of my mom's homeschool blogs below).Also, nothing in this post is sponsored in any way, these are all just my personal opinions based on what I have experienced while trying to learn html.

 These blogs were both created through blogger using the template customizer as well as the HTML editor. I'll try and get a link to the posts that I have used that have helped me along the way by lending me chunks of code, giving me ideas for new ways of changing my blog and making it work well for my purposes.
To start, I am blogging through my blogger.com account and have purchased a domain through google. The reason I am using blogger and not wordpress is because I want to have total control over my layout. I think wordpress is a brilliant platform for people who want a gorgeous blog that is easy to use and design quickly for relatively little money, but I wanted something that would allow me to really dive into the source code behind my page and explore every aspect behind it and tweak it as I liked.
 I actually tried opening multifariousmara as a wordpress blog first, under the suggestion of my sister who really loves it. I was sad to find that to even begin editing the css you had to pay for their premium membership, when I knew from previous experience that I could do all that I was wanting to do with blogger for free. the downside was that I couldn't start with a template with features in place that I really liked. I would have to design all of the cool template feautures on my own and with the help of the good ol' interwebs. Since I am basically just learning as I go through trial and error, I try to keep a log of all of the changes I've made and code that I have taken out, or where I have put new code in, just in case I really mess something up and need to go back and undo something. If you're looking for a good starting point in understanding basic html, I would suggest checking out Eli the Computer Guy's video on HTML. His videos have really helped me in my journey of learning to program.
Okay, let's get to it! I started with the "Simple" template and did my best using the template customizer to make things as black and white and plain as possible. I also removed the blog navigation bar from the top, by going into the layout settings and setting it to "off".
Next, to remove the outer shadows surrounding the page, I went to the HTML editor, scrolled down to the css portion of the code that held the main content settings  (somewhere around line 180 in the "Simple" Template)

and removed this section of code:

.content-outer {

  -moz-box-shadow: 0 0 $(content.shadow.spread) rgba(0, 0, 0, .15);

  -webkit-box-shadow: 0 0 $(content.shadow.spread.webkit) rgba(0, 0, 0, .15);

  -goog-ms-box-shadow: 0 0 $(content.shadow.spread.ie) #333333;

  box-shadow: 0 0 $(content.shadow.spread) rgba(0, 0, 0, .15);

I could have just turned it off by commenting it out (for those of you who might not know, you do this by placing /* at the beginning of what you want to nullify and */ at the end), but I knew that I really like a clean looking blog and would probably never want to turn it on again, so I just cut it out and put it in my notesheet.
 Next, I wanted to neaten up and customize my About Me section of the sidebar. This took a lot of tweaking and trial and error for me to figure out when I first did it to my mom's blog. I really liked the look of it and decided to bring it over to this blog as well.

It took a lot of code-reading before I finally found where to make the changes the first time, so I'll just tell you right now it makes it a whole lot easier if you click somewhere in the editor, press Ctrl+F or whatever your "find" shortcut is for your computer, then type in "profile1" and it will bring up the section that controls what the profile part of your sidebar looks like. Scroll down through the if statements until you find the "normal blog profile" section as seen below.

I then got rid of all of the code between <dt class='profile-data'> and <b:if cond= 'data:hasgoogleprofile'> and put in the following:

 This declares a new class called "mara" which holds  classes "aboutMe" and "profilepic". the aboutMe class holds my name which links to my profile. The profilepic class holds my profile picture with its specifications and links to my profile as well. I then added the following code in the CSS section to declare specifications for these new classes I created.

Reading from top to bottom, float:right; This tells it that I want my profile picture to align to the right of this cluster of information. border-radius:50px; This is one of my favorite commands. This tells it that I want my picture to be a circle! I declared the picture as 100px, so 50px radius gives me a perfect circle. If I wanted to, I could make the number smaller to give me a square with rounded corners. Next, I have the hover commands telling it that I want the picture to become slightly opaque when you hover over it. This isn't really necessary, but I think it's a nice touch! Then, in the aboutMe, I tell it that I want my name to align to the left  of this cluster, so it will be next to my picture. I changed the font, font-size, color, centering, and padded it to get it to sit exactly where I wanted it to as well as to give it space around. I also, declared a container width  for class mara. then I put "hover" and "visited" specifications for what would happen when you hover and click on my name.
Then, I wanted to change the color of my post titles. There is no option for editing this quickly in the template customizer, so I googled it and found out how to do it here!
That's all I have for now. I'll try and bring in updates every now and then as I change up my blog.

Taking Off

Hello world! Mara here, ready to take on the first blog that I will hopefully actually keep going for longer than a week!

I just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself and what I hope this blog will look like in the days and hopefully months, years, etc. to come.

Time and time again, I have started blogs following the usual "don't blog on too broad a topic" rule, with no success. I just have WAY too many interests!!! To name a few: I am, first of all, a Christian, and love serving the lord in children's ministry as well as through my music. I am a recent college graduate with a music degree in performance on the classical guitar (flamenco-y latin styles as well as Bach!). In college, I kind of rekindled an old love of languages and took three semesters in Greek as well as dabbled in some computer programming, spent every semester in the school choirs, and one in the Mariachi band (funny story). In my spare time I love to read, garden, listen to my favorite music ( a wide variety as you may soon find out), journal, play classical and contemporary guitar, read blogs, watercolor, learn new hairstyles, take pictures of everything, sing showtunes, daydream,  research random things that interest me…and that's not even half! I have tried making  gardening blogs and school blogs in the past, but I was quickly bored by them, because I wanted to include blog posts that were interesting to me, but sadly off-topic.

 I have always loved to journal and have stacks of old journals on my shelves and stashed away in my special memory box. It is my favorite way to unwind and unpack even the smallest events of my day. I have recently been experimenting with a form of public journaling with my art journal, I write in such a way that I don't mind leaving it out in the open to where my family can see both the artwork that I put in it as well as the journal entry itself.

 I would like to use this blog as something similar, but also different. Somewhere I can just put up whatever I want, but with more of a blogging style than a journal per se. I am also looking for an outlet for my recently acquired programming skills, and a blog seemed like a fun way to practice tweaking code, etc. What I hope this blog will be is a place I can write about stuff I have learned about and find interest in, my ideas, questions and answers, as well as a little bit of lifestyle journaling here and there. I want this to be a miscellany on purpose and hope that that will keep me coming back to blog! I hope you'll stick around for the ride too!

P.S. cool story- I was taking pictures of this crop-duster plane flying outside my window and accidentally captured a wasp that was also flying right outside my window. Lucky accident resulting in some cool shots!