Yesterday, Valentine’s day, was a good day. After I dropped off the twins at pre-school, I wanted to find the German butcher and bakery near our house. We had been going to one European butcher nearby that we loved. In fact, it’s just like I remember growing up in Chicago. Patak Meats in Austell is unbelieveable. If you haven’t been you got to. Now, rumor has it the ex-butcher from Patak went to open his own place, called Weinerz. Our German friends said they prefered it to Patak so I have been wanting to check it out.

So, I found it. I stopped by Bernhard’s, the Germany bakery and picked up a loaf of German Sourdough Rye bread. The loaf weighed about 5lbs. Then I went over to the butcher and picked up some cabanossis, German ham, and a couple of beer brautwursts. I spent less than $10.

Then to top off the German morning I was having, I went to Aldi’s to pick up some other stuff. I got home, gave my wife her roses, and we both ate cabanossi’s and had a ham sandwich with some mustard; what a great way to start the day.

But I digress. I have been spending most of my time over the last few days becoming something of Drupal expert. I have volunteered to be the webmaster for our son’s school’s website. The website has potential to be a very effective portal. The PTO, teachers, and administration want to be able to post items to the site and have blogs. I looked at Joomla for awhile and finally I happened to see Drupal mentioned somewhere. The more I read about it the more I was convinced this could provide the solution I was looking for.

The last few days, I’ve been getting into theming Drupal. I modified an existing theme using mostly some heavy CSS. Remember when I said I learn best when I have a project? So, I was surprised to see how much I’ve learned about CSS in the last three days. Being obsessed and not having a job helps, but I have learned tons. I also found a whole bunch of great resources, but not just on CSS but also web design and XHTML. It’s been a great time.

When I was in art school, I love typography. When I was in art school, it was before computers were common place. When I was in art school, the Mac Quadra 800 just came out and was over $5k. But I still loved type and type faces. I was really good at kerning and even today, I like to do my own kerning in Photoshop. So one of the things I am really excited about is doing interesting things with type utilizing CSS. I think this is going to be very exiting for me.

In my reading of SEO one of the things that is recommended against it using images for content. To put it another way, if you have text in an image, that text will not be indexed by the search engines.

In my mind, using CSS will allow me to do some of the things I enjoyed about type in the print media, but have it rendered in a web browser.

My stomach still hurts after finishing off that last cabanossi; I don’t eat like that very often.