Another roller coaster week. Worst points: Someone took my laptop charger while I was in lecture, my week 3 assessment was not my finest point, and I miss my cats something desperately. Best points: I worked with my two favorite pair-partners again because I couldn’t handle this week otherwise, I had an awesome girl’s lunch today with 4/5ths of the junior class women (there are 5 of us total), and I made a node.js server!

So I definitely felt my first crazy/not enough sleep/irrational emotions. When my power cord was jacked a couple of days ago I was devastated. In retrospect, I think I’m a little tired and cranky and, like I said previously, I am in desperate need of some kitty cuddle time. I’ve been in California now for over a month and I still love it, but it’s definitely getting more difficult. There are times I wish I could just zen out and I only really get that on the trains or at midnight in the dark when I should be sleeping so I can wake up and do it all again the next morning at 6am to catch my train.

I have never been more excited/motivated to get up in the morning in my life and I can’t get to sleep at night because code and other things are running through my head and along the way something had to give. I’ve discovered that when something has to give it’s my emotional stability. My actual sprints were amazeballs, especially since I had awesome pairs (Sara and Andy, respectively) for my Backbone and Node.js sprints. But in my quiet moments or while I was working solo the doubt and sadness came back.

So I did what I always do when I’m sad - I talked to my parents, a lot. I called them while waiting for the train, I called them sitting on the couch in the Hack Reactor lobby during lunch, and I called them while I drove home at 9pm every night. My dad especially is awesome at making me feel better. He’s always so proud of me and he’s always interested in what I’m doing. It’s hard sometimes here, but I have an amazing support system both in Oregon and here. My platonic life partner Ava and her husband John have been my rocks in more ways than one. My new awesome friends at Hack Reactor, especially the ladies of the Nov ‘13 cohort have been awesome to get to know. And I know all my family, friend, and former coworkers back in Oregon love me and miss me as much or more than I love and miss them.

Thinking about it and even writing about it has helped as well. Getting it off my chest makes it so I can breathe again. So I guess I just want to say, I love you all. Thank you for dealing with me! I really am happy even if I didn’t sound it sometimes this week. If I don’t just sleep all of tomorrow/spend my day in San Jose with other awesome people I love to pieces, I’m going to try to post a non-emotional/tired/whiny post, but honestly, I want to keep this blog real. For me as well as for you and this what has dominated my brain this week.

If you’ve tuned in for my regular poetic ramblings on life and web development for the past few days what you probably saw was a site in a bit of a mess. Instead of designing my own WordPress theme I had the zany notion that it would be quicker just to pick a theme and change some things. So instead of writing my own code I spent two days trying on themes like a teenage girl tries on prom dresses - none of them was just quite right. I eventually settled and looked for something that was responsive (meaning I could view it on my computer or my iPhone with ease) and whose structure and CSS was clean and easy to navigate. I settled on Tiny Forge. It was pretty right out of the box and I just tweaked some colors, threw up my own header image and added some of my widgets to the sidebar.

I have a feeling as I get busier I’ll have even less desire to mess with my personal projects, but currently the need make this site pretty is as strong as it was when I started creating websites, which is pretty cool because I never thought I’d get back there.

When I first became enamored with websites and building my own I, well, I sucked at it obviously. This was back in junior high when I was a part of the weird subculture of Petz (I link to the Wikipedia article because the current nature of Petz is sad and pathetic to those of us who started from the beginning) and had a tiny fan site all my own - long-lost to the internet. I can’t even remember what I called it and it was probably on GeoCities (RIP). I couldn’t figure out why images where all red X’s (I never actually uploaded them to the website) and those images I tried to link all had these ugly blue borders around them (oh CSS, how I came to love and despair you).

In 2004 for Christmas my parents bought me a web domain of my very own (this very one) and Leaena as a nickname and a website was born. I jumped quickly into blogs when they became a thing. From Blogger to MoveableType and back again while trying a billion others like Pivot, Textpattern, etc. Somewhere in there I tried WordPress and it stuck (sort of, I think I bounced around a bunch in between).

The problem with all of these blogs up until recently was nothing stuck. I’d write a few posts and then it would just be a static page that I would want to change the layout for once a month or so, but never actually update. So that’s what I did. I wish I had pictures of some of my old sites. I was generally always following the trends. From frames to iFrames to horizontal scrolls. From using CSS to only using Comic Sans at a very small font size (it looks cool tiny guys, promise) to learning box models and divs. All along I wondered why I didn’t actually want to post anything. There were people out there writing constantly about things! in there lives! that sounded neat! I can write, but they always say write what you know and I felt like I didn’t know much of anything.

Then all of this happened, I decided computer science was my way of life, I realized that I enjoyed reading other people writing about their coding and geeky lives, and I realized I could have that life and tell other people about it too. So here’s to the new leaena.com. I’m sure I will be changing layouts every month soon, but at least I’ll also be updating the content as well.