Zodomatica

Dear Maggie

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Tzaddi

I miss you.

It’s been a month since you died. I haven’t written until now because losing you has been such a powerful and profound experience for me. Maybe people who haven’t been as lucky as I have, who’ve experienced more losses in their lives, maybe they would be better at this than I am. Maybe they could write this without the tears. And yet, even though I feel like I’ve done a tremendous amount of healing in this month of mourning, I have been also feeling like there’s more stuck inside me that I need to get out. So I don’t know if I’ll even publish this or if anyone will care enough to read it, but I gotta do it. So I write and I cry.

At first it was the shock. How could our strong, beautiful, young dog be gone so quickly? Sick for a few short days, and then dead. Fucking dead. What?

We brought your body home from the vet, wrapped up in a blanket in the back of the car. God, you were still warm. I let Jack sniff you so he’d understand. He didn’t. Wouldn’t follow me away from the car. So I let him see you again, and then he did.

The next morning we picked a spot on the mountain for you and I carried you to it. You were so heavy but I needed to do that for some reason. We laid you there with your favourite red ball. Sometimes that ball seemed to be the only thing in the world that mattered more to you than I did.

And so you were buried.

I kept thinking: how do parents survive a loss of their child? If this is what it feels like to lose your dog, I could never survive that.

Then, it was guilt and blame. Did we miss the signs? Could we have prevented this? What if, what if, what if. Still.

I was thankful that we had Jack to cuddle but more importantly to force us back to the forest and the beach. We each had a good howl with him 2 days after you died. Cathartic acts for all of us.

Next came the existential thoughts. Life is so short. What is the purpose of my life?

How much you tried to teach me. You whole-heartedly threw your self, body and soul into everything you did. There is only now. Time to run? Run like hell. Time to relax? Find the warmest spot and get yourself in the most comfortable position and let your jowls hang out. There is only now, and we should be doing something important like chasing balls or cuddling or enjoying whatever’s in the oven making those really good smells.

It was almost like you knew there was no time to waste. Life is so damn short! So I wondered: what am I doing that matters? What matters to me? Why do I procrastinate on this or that? How can I appreciate NOW and THIS more?

So I guess in writing this, I am trying to be more present to all the thoughts that have been milling around in my head. To acknowledge that even if I’m done crying every damn day, I still have some more tears to shed. I still miss you.

Thanks for the lessons and the memories.

“Dog Days” video by Joanne Probyn June 2009

Get the Flash Player to see this video.

Posted in Life | 3 Comments

Three Years Later

Posted on April 11, 2010 by Tzaddi

Today marks 3 years of self employment for me. What an exciting ride it’s been!

I am so thankful to Christine, the queen of code monkeys, who helped me take the leap and has taught me immeasurable things.

I have learned so much in these 3 years. About web development, about myself, about handling clients, the joys and challenges of running my business, of working for myself at home. About starting new ventures.

It hasn’t been all sun & roses. It can be frustrating, scary, and lonely at times. I tend to work a lot more than I did at my corporate job. When you (mostly) love the work you do, that happens easily because it doesn’t all feel like work. On the flip side if I need to get out for a hike in the middle of the day, I often can.

Yet I can’t imagine giving it up for any traditional job. (Offer me one of those “best job in the world” gigs somewhere tropical for a year and I might change my tune ) I love being able to shape my direction, the freedom of my schedule, the variety of my clients and their projects.

Thank you to everyone who’s been so supportive of this journey!

To my husband who quietly brings me coffee or lunch (or makes me go take a nap) just when I need it…

To the clients who have such faith in me…

To the communities of the Sunshine Coast who’ve been so welcoming…

And my Twitter friends who give me a virtual water cooler and library and a good laugh…

A toast! Thank you!

Posted in Life | 2 Comments

Display a Google Map in a WordPress page without it breaking

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Tzaddi

If you’ve tried putting a Google map in your WordPress site’s contact page, you might have noticed that sometimes it breaks when you edit the page in visual mode later. Here’s a quick fix I just used in a site I’m working on.

This solution uses custom fields. Here’s a tutorial on custom fields in case you need it.

First, I took the code from Google Maps and put it into a custom field in my contact page.

Then I edited my theme by adding a bit of code into page.php, just after where the line which outputs my title. Yours would look something like this:
<h1>the title();</h1>

So after the title I inserted the following to get my custom field which I had called “floatright”:


$customField = get_post_custom_values("floatright");
if (isset($customField[0])) {
      echo '<div class="alignright">'.$customField[0].'</div>';
}

So basically that checks if I’ve set a value for that custom field in the current page, and if so it inserts the field wrapped in a div which is floated right.

Of course I could have just hard-coded the map into page.php when the page is “contact us”. But this is a flexible solution that could be used on other pages and for any item that we want to float over to the right. And, the client can update that map area if they want to later without breaking that wrapper HTML. If you’re savvy enough to do this on your own site you might just put the div into your custom field for even more flexibility.

Posted in WordPress Tips | 1 Comment

Beautifully animated music video – Neko Case

Posted on September 8, 2009 by Tzaddi

I’m loving this animation, and the song is quite catchy too. Thanks to Darren’s list of newest favourite songs for the discovery.

Posted in Art, Culture Consumed, Goofy, Fun & Cool | Comments Off

Fun Coffee images found on Flickr

Posted on August 22, 2009 by Tzaddi

While writing about why you should probably make time for Twitter and Facebook over on the ThriveWire blog, I searched for Creative Commons licensed photos on Flickr. Here’s some of the gems I found but didn’t end up using over there.