out with the old? not just yet . . .

so today . . .  you may notice that my blog still looks the same--or nearly the same.

i didn't blog this weekend so that i could spend some time freshening up the look of my blog.  i played around with different colors and patterns, but i found that i felt some attachment to the original look.  and as i started making changes, i realized that every change was being applied to all 400 previously written blogs!  so i had a problem.  my solution (according to one website) was to save the "code" of the original blog.  then i could always recreate that vintage look.  (yes, i said vintage.  because if i blog for the next 20 years, these early blogs will be "vintage.")  great! i thought.  so i saved the code, and then spent a couple of hours playing around with colors and backgrounds and layouts.  i found a look i kind of liked and hit the button that said "apply to blog."  and then i remembered . . .

before i hit that button, i was going to print out one of the old blogs, just so i would have a hard copy to remind me of where i started.  but i hadn't done it.  and now the blog looked very, very different.  ok, don't panic, i thought.  i will just use that "code" i so carefully downloaded, restore the original look, print a page, and then continue with my blog renovation.  which sounded like a really good idea.  except i couldn't find the code.  anywhere.

at this point, a normal person would probably just say, "oh well," and finish up the renovation.  but not me.  oh no, not me.  my brain needs everything to be perfectly ordered, and if i couldn't document the way my blog has looked for the last year, i was probably going to develop some sort of facial tic.  so i raced back to my blog and tried to remember how i had achieved that classic dark blue look.

the dark blue background turned out to be the easy part.  i couldn't remember what color anything else had been--i only knew i used bright colors.  so i started playing around, but nothing looked just right.  i did this for a couple of hours (don't worry--i was also doing laundry.)  i finally stopped and thought, "julie!  get a grip!!  it doesn't matter if the letters are light pink or light blue or medium green!"  but it did matter.  i thought about calling my mom.  she reads my blog every day and has a sort of photographic memory, but it was getting late . . .

i finally achieved a look that was pretty close, i think, to what it had been, and hit "print."  eleven pages later, i looked at what had printed, only to see black print on white paper.  yeah, apparently it only prints the text, not all the creative background and layout.  and it took eleven pages, because it didn't just print the blog--it also printed everything in the right-side column.  and have you seen how many labels i have used?!?!?

so now i am stuck.  i want to give my blog a face lift, but i also want to document the blog's current look before i move on.  if any of you computer people out there have an idea of how this could be done, i would really like to know.  because i found some cool backgrounds i could use . . .