Christmas and New Year
And it's the last day of the year already. Yikes.
Just waiting about on Barry getting up so we can head into town to do a bit of shopping with our Christmas money.
Christmas went well. Think we tried to do too much with the Christmas dinner. Need to cut back on food ideas next year, and probably forget about a dessert completely as, with all the junk food we end up with at this time of year, we don't need it.
I got a good few books this year. Fancy hardback editions of the complete Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collin's The Woman in White, a collection of Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales and the novel of The Princess Bride. As for anime, I got the Blu-Ray of the second Eden of the East movie, and the complete sets of House of Five Leaves and The Tatami Galaxy. Also got a lovely necklace, a cute wolf cuddly and a bottle of Disaronno.
December has been a pretty stressful month with Barry in a new job, him trying to clear off his remaining freelance work, and therefore me trying to take up the slack with Christmas planning and keeping the house together as well as normal work, as he hasn't had much free time. But at least it's time to relax now, at least until I start work again on Wednesday. Then it will be tax returns, work as well as figuring out where my career is going.
I'm very much thinking about moving away from web design and into more graphic design. Web design is becoming more about interaction, apps and UI, so while the user design is still very important (something less of an interest for me. I'd rather be given wireframes than design them), less focus is going on visual design. So I'd really need to start learning more in terms of UI, which I'm just not interested in. Plus there is more of a need to know the tech side of things. I'm an expert in HTML and CSS, but don't really enjoy doing them. I only do as it brings in cash, but because of that, I end up spending more time doing that than actual design. And end up cutting and building other people's designs for easy cash, which ends up not being easy cash as the people designing them are so bad that they haven't even thought of half the things they should have! Plus they send me designs that l would be embarrassed to submit as wireframes!
Other than that, I'd need to get better at jQuery and the likes. So, I've though what is the point in learning and keeping up to date with all this when I don't enjoy doing it, and it actually keeps me away from doing design. So I may still design websites, but I'm getting away from the coding side and branching out into other forms of design. I'm too old to keep doing the thing I left my las job to get away from.
Just waiting about on Barry getting up so we can head into town to do a bit of shopping with our Christmas money.
Christmas went well. Think we tried to do too much with the Christmas dinner. Need to cut back on food ideas next year, and probably forget about a dessert completely as, with all the junk food we end up with at this time of year, we don't need it.
I got a good few books this year. Fancy hardback editions of the complete Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collin's The Woman in White, a collection of Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales and the novel of The Princess Bride. As for anime, I got the Blu-Ray of the second Eden of the East movie, and the complete sets of House of Five Leaves and The Tatami Galaxy. Also got a lovely necklace, a cute wolf cuddly and a bottle of Disaronno.
December has been a pretty stressful month with Barry in a new job, him trying to clear off his remaining freelance work, and therefore me trying to take up the slack with Christmas planning and keeping the house together as well as normal work, as he hasn't had much free time. But at least it's time to relax now, at least until I start work again on Wednesday. Then it will be tax returns, work as well as figuring out where my career is going.
I'm very much thinking about moving away from web design and into more graphic design. Web design is becoming more about interaction, apps and UI, so while the user design is still very important (something less of an interest for me. I'd rather be given wireframes than design them), less focus is going on visual design. So I'd really need to start learning more in terms of UI, which I'm just not interested in. Plus there is more of a need to know the tech side of things. I'm an expert in HTML and CSS, but don't really enjoy doing them. I only do as it brings in cash, but because of that, I end up spending more time doing that than actual design. And end up cutting and building other people's designs for easy cash, which ends up not being easy cash as the people designing them are so bad that they haven't even thought of half the things they should have! Plus they send me designs that l would be embarrassed to submit as wireframes!
Other than that, I'd need to get better at jQuery and the likes. So, I've though what is the point in learning and keeping up to date with all this when I don't enjoy doing it, and it actually keeps me away from doing design. So I may still design websites, but I'm getting away from the coding side and branching out into other forms of design. I'm too old to keep doing the thing I left my las job to get away from.