Today we’re off on our multi-state Holiday Tour. I will be be with family in three states (OH, IL & MO) and will have limited time and internet access, so no posts are likely until January.
If the site gets flooded with spam while I’m gone, I’ll clean it up when I get back. 😛
Have a Merry Chrstmas and a Happy New Year.

As I was staring at this picture of my car on my desktop wall paper today, this site design popped into my head.
The new CSS design in MT 3.2 and Movalog’s Style Generator helped me get here. There are still some bugs to work out, but what do you think?

Just checking to see if everything works, I’m afraid I’ve completely borked my site. If you look at the old posts, you’ll notice a lot of extra question marks. That’s ’cause I misconfigured the character set when I upgraded. So I attempted to restore the old database, pre-MT 3.2. Then I couldn’t log in. At all.
Yikes.
So I put the new database back and crossed my fingers.
If you’re reading this it worked.
I have some cool things to talk about, but I’ve gotta get this issue resolved first. Stay tuned.

Looks different, Eh? MT 3.2 has a nifty little plug in built into it that lets you reset all the templates back to the default. So this is what MT 3.2 looks like out of the box. Not too bad.
Of course, you’ll also notice that the recent comments are gone. The calender is gone (and likely to stay gone). The Blogroll is gone. The Scripturizer auto-linking is gone. The subscription form is gone. The real time preview is gone. The formatting buttons are gone. Heck, the entire left side column is gone!
So I’ve got a little bit of work to do to put some stuff back. 🙂 But it’s a nice, clean look, don’t you think?
More changes later.

Well, it’s done. I thought by doing a clean install, following the great instructions at Learning Movable Type, that everything would be reset. I guess I was wrong. I’d kinda like a fresh start on my templates, so I’m going to dig into that a little more. Expect more changes to come.
You’ll also notice that there’s no more Secret Code. MT 3.2 has some more advanced anti-spam techniques that I hope will mean I don’t need that anymore. We’ll see.
Also, the formatting buttons are temporarily gone too. I hope to have a better version after a bit. I might put the old ones back up temporarily.

Well, I think I’m going to attempt the MT 3.2 upgrade today. It’s my birthday and I’ve got the day to myself. Things may get a little strange around here as a result. I’m going to do a fresh install instead of an upgrade, so my templates will get wiped out and I’ll end up with the MT defaults, so it will look different. It’ll likely take a few days to get everything back to normal, but hopefully it will work pretty quickly.
Wish me luck.

I wish my Moveable Type blog looked half as slick as Tim Challies’ challies.com, also built (I think) on Moveable Type (among other things). Very slick with wonderful details, a variety of fonts that work together and nice rich color palette (I sound like a graphic designer).
I’ve got colors. Four of them. Six if you count black & white.
I plan on upgrading to MT 3.2 in the near future, maybe after that I can spruce things up a bit.
I wonder how much Tim charges for a blog design …

It’s time I updated my blogroll. I use this as sort of my favorites list. These sites are places I visit regularly, particularly the Blogs and Forums, most of which I visit daily.
First, I’ve removed kendallball.net as Greg has decided to take a break from blogging. Hopefully he’ll be back soon.
I’ve also removed Messy Christian. This was particularly difficult as she is still actively blogging and I had never ‘de-linked’ and active site before. No, Messy did not offend me, nor did I find anything particularly disagreeable there. It’s simply that I found myself skipping over her link more often than not as I went through the blogroll each day, and when I did visit, I usually only skim the page. Since the purpose is to highlight sites I like to visit and regularly read, it seemed appropriate to remove the link.
Also gone is theologyblog.net. That site morphed long ago into Apollos.ws, an apollogetics resource. I haven’t visited much at all since the switch, so I’m removing it too.
I’ve returned Mysterium Tremendum to the list, the personal blog of Jared of the Thinklings. He’s returned from is hiatus and has turned it into a literary blog. I’m not sure in it’s current form I’ll keep it on the list as I’m not particularly interested in the art of writing, but I’ve missed it while he was away so I thought I’d give it a shot. He’s got another personal blog, the contemplative Shizuka Blog. I’ve added that to the blogroll as well.
I’ve also added The Happy Husband, a site dedicated to championing the cause of marraige, a cause I wholeheartedly support. The ‘About this blog‘ page says:

We live in a culture that is hostile to marriage as a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman. It celebrates weddings, yes, but it also celebrates divorces. Why wouldn’t it? We hear more about happy divorces than we do about happy marriages. And even bitter divorces serve to reinforce the idea that marriage makes people miserable—just think how much worse off those pitiful people would be had they stayed married.
I’m married, and I love it. I think marriage is a divine gift, the natural state of mankind, the only condition in which all but a very few people can live full lives—the first thing in creation that was not good was man’s aloneness. … On this blog, I plan to celebrate marriage, to share my joy with others, and to communicate things I’ve learned about being married. Mostly, though, I hope to encourage and be encouraged by others who might feel oppressed by the pervasive negative sentiments in our culture and to provide an opportunity for discussion among others who love marriage or want to love marriage.

I’ve also added two links to blogs pursuing Christian unity. Clarke of ClarkeComments is a member of a Portland Oregon Church of Christ (no, not that one) who writes regularly about the various flavors of restoration movement churches, their differences and how they might be brought together. I didn’t discover him, he discovered me. He’s linked to me for some time now as one of a few links representing the ICOC. Christian Unity is the blog of Alan Rouse, an elder in the Atlanta Church of Christ. Alan’s stated purpose for his blog is “I am searching for people with whom I should be having fellowship, but historically have not.”
Lastly, I’ve added another Moveable Type link, Learning Movable Type.
Whew, that’s a lot of changes. Give those sites a visit and see what you think.

Things have been sparse here at salguod.net for a few weeks. Let me tell you why.
I just got back from a week off of work to do a bunch of work around the house. We had a patio put in in the back yard. That’s the one thing I’m not doing, but I did have to do some running around looking at pavers.
We’ve also painted. A lot. We started by painting our master bedroom which has a vaulted ceiling, a plant ledge and an integral bathroom (read: lots of corners to cut in.) The girls thought it was pretty funny to see Daddy laying up on top of the plant ledge with a paint brush. We also painted all 3 girls rooms and Maria’s office. Maria came up with this cool idea, inspired by some scrapbook paper, to paint a border of circles in her office. 5 different size circles with 5 different colors all with a white border takes a long time to paint. It looks cool, though.
All this paint was in preparation for new carpet (no drop cloths to trip on). The carpet for the office, hall, stairs and master bedroom came on Wednesday. The rest will be in next week sometime. I’ve learned that getting new carpet is about 85% of the work of moving (move all the furniture out, move it all back in), but in the end instead of a brand new house you just have new carpet. Still nice though.
Of course, while we had our old wood frame full wave water bed taken down, it seemed prudent to replace the 13 year old mattress. Well, that turned into a shopping spree for a new soft-side water bed and then into all new bedroom furniture. That arrived on Saturday. The visits to furniture stores to look at beds led us to a can’t-refuse deal on a dining room table. We were considering one anyway, so why not? That comes on the 11th.
So I’ve been busy. The cool thing is that through the miracle of home equity, all this stuff plus a bit of credit card debt will cost us the same amount per month as we were putting toward that credit card debt, and it’ll get paid off sooner. Our goal is to prepare this home for the long haul. While we feel the pull toward bigger and better homes, we really like our home and neighborhood and have no desire to move again, ever. Once the kids get our of elementary school in 5 years, our needs may change, but we really like the idea of our ‘modest’ (by Columbus OH standards anyway) 4 bedroom home. The lower payment that goes with it will also allow us to do more charity giving as time goes by, something that I fell compelled to do, seeing how blessed we are to live here in the USA.
Now that the bulk of that is done, it’s time to do my homework. We head to Chicago on October 7th – 9th for training to be Family Dynamics facilitators. There are three couple from our church going and it looks to be an intense weekend. We will be in class from 8-5 on Friday and Saturday and from 1-7 on Sunday. We are told to expect 3-4 hours of homework each night on top of the class work. Before we head to Chicago, we are expected to read the bulk of the book His Needs, Her Needs and complete a section of the work book. There are a few people in Chicago that it would be neat to see, but it doesn’t sound like we’ll have much time.
So the bottom line is not much will likely be happening around here for a while. In the mean time, go read some of the fine blogs in my blogroll at left. In particular, read Greg’s post on a good kind of cynicism. This left me encouraged that perhaps I’m not the grouchy, curmudgeon, faultfinding naysayer that I fell like so often. Perhaps I’m just an idealist, longing for the church to live up to its promise and potential.
Also, Daniel talks about 7 years of marraige. Though I still plan to try to ignore him Pinakidion, ICOCinfo and ICOCnews continue to track the writings of Mr. McKean (if you care.) Also, you should check out the new and improved Blogs For God, a listing of Christian blogs. Or you could add a word to the Thinklings Blog Free Association.
That’s a lot of words to say why there hasn’t been and won’t be a lot of words around here for a bit.