Tagalongs + Blog Updates

Posted by Lauren

Yo, yo, yo. I’m headed to Tahoe tonight with Kyle and Darrin to join our fabulous cabinmates for another weekend in the snow. It hasn’t really been snowing here… BUT! We did just get SIX INCHES so at least that’s something?

Not much has been going on with me this week besides the usual: eat, sleep, work, workout stuff. Oh! I suppose Wednesday night was an interesting one. For starters, I took my first lesson for the secret instrument I’m learning how to play. I’m terrible right now, but my teacher (Bill) didn’t storm off in agony. I practiced for a half hour this morning before work, a habit I hope to form on most weekdays. After the lesson, I joined Kit, Adrienne, and Kyle for trivia at St. Stephen’s Green. They have the perfect balance of easy and hard trivia, plus their food ain’t bad.

Stella for me and sweet potatoes for the table. Dipping fries in ranch dressing is a dangerously delicious combo!

Half way through trivia I ordered a bowl of the potato and leek soup, which came with two big slices of Irish soda bread. I loved this soup! I had already ate (see chicken + veggies below), but couldn’t resist the lure of more Irish soda bread after having a few samples at Vanessa’s house on Sunday. Is that stuff hard to make? Because I’m addicted.

The chicken + roasted veggies I had at my work desk for dinner on Wednesday and lunch on Thursday:

Looks boring, but tastes ok coated in hot sauce. (Random thought: What if our blog was called Hot Sauce Coated Sisters? 1. Eww and 2. I’m sure the search terms would be much different!)

Speaking of sugar coated… I ordered ONE box of tagalongs (aka peanut butter patties) from my coworker Margaret. The tagalongs and samoas/caramel delites are my faaaavorite Girl Scout cookies. After 24 hours, the box was empty! :( I couldn’t stop at just one two six. Heh. I only shared 3 of the 15 cookies because I’m stingy, but you better bet I’ll be buying more boxes from my step-sis, Katie!

Blog Updates

I’m participating in Katy Widrick‘s 28 day blog challenge on Challengeloop. One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to “maintain and grow the blog,” and this structured challenge is really helpful. I recommend you click over and read some of the comments – there are literally hundreds of helpful notes and ideas. Anyways, here are a few things I conquered so far (photos added just in case you’re reading via Google Reader – yay! thank you for subscribing by the way – and don’t want to click over).

1. We’re now running on the Platform theme! We were loyal Twenty Eleven theme users, but I was getting tired of it and found the three columns and footer area of Platform to be really attractive. I haven’t figured out how to show an entire full post while on the home page, so right now we’re stuck with the snippets. Does anyone have Platform experience and know how to do this?

2. Real social media buttons!! I don’t have Photoshop, so I decided to pay a designer on Etsy (Jessica from COSdedign) to create them for me. $7 for time well saved!

3. I verified our website for my Pinterest, but I am not sure if I need to do the same thing for Nicole’s Pinterest. I also added “Pin It” buttons when you hover over photos on the blog. I still need to clean up my Pinterest boards… saving that for a rainy day.

4. I applied to publish our blog to Kindle…. not sure if we’ll be accepted or what that really means.

5. I cleaned up the main menu bar to just include About, Contact Us, Races, and a new “There’s More” page.

You’ll find all of our category pages and other one-off pages there (Dining, Fitness, Blogroll, etc). I love the “So Random” photo! Ha.

6. All of the RSS feed links now point to our feed burner page, which has a much better user experience.

7. I struggled with the CSS editor in BlueHost and finally figured out how to make a more appealing search bar and increase the font size of the menu bar. Such simple changes took me longer than I care to admit.

Question: Favorite Girl Scout cookie? Were you ever in boy/girl scouts? I was in the Indian-Princesses with my dad for a few years… How have you changed your blog since you first started it? What would you like us to fix/add/change on ours?

-Lauren