What's New at DonnaYoung.org in 2011

New at DY in 2011

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What's New with Donna Young in 2011

Rotten Floors: The year 2011 brought many new things to me personally. Some of the things were a distraction from working on this website. Early in the year, we were midway through home repairs to fix rotten joists and sub floors, and finally we had a new tile floor installed. This was a big job and it took almost 3 months. During the entire time, I had no access to my usual work space or work computer because my office was a part of the area being repaired. I managed to produce the ZB set on an old laptop that my sister gave to me last year. I was teased by the carpenters for typing aaa, bbb, ccc, ..etc..

Retirement: My husband retired this year.

Tornadoes: Later we were in the April 27th tornadoes. Several tornados went through our town that day from morning to night, some of them were very powerful. In our county, over 500 homes were damaged and of those, almost 300 were somewhere between unlivable to destroyed. Nine people in this county died. We had minor damage from a small tornado that passed through our neighborhood that was parallel to an EF4 tornado that was passing through at the same time nearby. Because our power had been out for hours from earlier tornados, we had no idea what was coming our way until just a minute before it came through when my husband's sister called us to tell us that a tornado was headed our way. We sat (actually we stood) in the hall while it went by. We will never forget the sound of a tornado. It was loud and rhythmic - it sounded mechanical. We didn't hear the damage it was causing, all we could hear was the mechanical sound. It was a tense moment.

It turned out that an EF4 tornado went by just 1/8th of a mile away wiping out everything in its path, reducing trees to stubby leafless stumps. According to a neighbor who came knocking on our door to see if we were okay, a small tornado passed through our neighborhood and our backyard. It left a trail of damage in the neighborhood. It moved things around in our backyard, broke branches along its path and it pushed over a large tree in our yard. The picture below shows a tree that was pushed over during the tornado. The tree trunk was 12.6 feet in circumference. A piece of the tree was dropped on our back fence about 100 feet away, denting it. This tree "just" missed our house. It was over the house and behind the house. Several branches were just inches, 2 or 3 inches, above the roof. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the white line that is the edge of our roof.

SMART Scholarship: Amid all the chaos my son became an awardee of this: SMART Scholarship.

DonnaYoung.org's New Web Site Design: At some point during the first quarter of the year, I redesigned my css framework that determines in what order the various page parts load and I tweaked the look of my website. As of today, August 25th, 2011, I have applied this new framework to around 2/3 of my web site. I have to redo each and every page individually. My goal was simple - I wanted the important parts of the pages to load first. The important parts are those parts that the visitor wants to see - the page content and the file links. I also needed to reign in the ugly fluid right column - to make it a fixed width, but I needed the content in the middle to remain fluid . I worked with those goals and finally succeeded. Maybe by the end of this year I will have the entire website converted to the new design. I need to finish because, like always, I have more plans for this web site that I'd like to work on.

New Computer: Even later (July) I finally replaced my old, yet working, 2003 computer with a new computer. I've not written anything about it yet except to a few friends, but it is quite a piece of work. Naturally, like my 2003 computer, my new computer did not come from a store shelf nor is it a name brand. I do not buy name brand computers for work. This is how I buy a computer - I choose a company that specializes in building computers, I look over the available options and research all of them. After researching everything, I make my choices and then it gets built.