Hey everyone, get out your party favors and hats, it’s time for another recession!

Okay, so maybe you can skip on the party favors and hats…and, cake and ice cream, and don’t even think about buying take-home treats.  Who has enough food to go around anyways these days?  No, it’s no 1929, welcome to 2008!  So, where does the soup line start around here? (Looks around)

Alright, so it probably won’t get that bad, but I’ve been reading articles all day, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Dow Jones will have to fall 6000 more points, and the housing market prices will have to fall by 50% before this recession corrects itself, otherwise we can all say buh-bye to our 401K.  And, for those who are lucky enough to just be out of college and just starting our 401K, we can say HURRAH FOR CASH!

I personally am considering becoming a hippie, but then I look at my finances and realize:

LOL.

Eh, scratch that idea.

So this past weekend I visited where I used to work at Illinois State University (ISU) and my parents house.  It was actually a really relaxing weekend overall.  Then, when I was driving home I saw a bunch of cars all over the side of the road. Not all at once like a car wreck or something, but every mile or so there would be another car on the side of the road.  It didn’t take very long before I realized what they were all stopping for:

And, that is just with my cellphone.  It felt like a scene from a movie:  I’m driving down the highway, and I see a Mustang up ahead - parked, alongside the road.  A woman is leaning against it, away from the traffic, throwing what looks like fruit snacks in the air and catching it like popcorn.  A guy is lying on the hood, his hands behind his head, facing the sun.  The sunset was so beautiful yesterday.  Not even a truck could ruin the sight:

This is actually my favorite picture, truck and all.  I like it because you can see the reflection of the pure darkness in my side mirror.  Just forget about the fact that it looks like I’m have a SEIZURE while taking that picture, obviously, I was driving so I couldn’t line it up- ah well.

I only wish I would have left slightly earlier from my parents house, so that I could have got a picture of the sunset as I went past the HUGE wind farm on my way back.  Unfortunately, by the time I got there all you could see was the blinking red lights in the darkness, signaling to any aircraft that there are windmills present.

Oh well.  I don’t know what everyone is getting so upset about for this market thing.  I’ll just be wheeling my coworkers in on wheelchairs at this rate in 15 years or so - no big deal.

I’m just going to sit back, relax, ride out this market, and hope for another beautiful sunset tomorrow.

(Blinks, looks around)  Wow, has it really almost been a month?  It seems just yesterday I was saying to myself “As punishment for taking so long to complete my website, I won’t blog until that website is FINISHED.”  Then, every week I would say “Alright, this week,” and then the next week I would say the same thing, and, OH LOOK, it’s September 20th and I haven’t blogged in a month.

So, it was about 11PM last night, when I finally completed my website.  I sat in disbelief for about an hour, and then I moved it over onto byjillian.com!  Wah-lah!  (Opens curtain, crickets chirping) Feel free to sing words of praise here. Alrighttt, I guess I’ll post a screenshot of it, for archival purposes:

Alrighttt, and I guess since the subpage is so different I’ll post it too:

And no, it doesn’t matter how wide your screen is, or how tall, it will look the same to everyone, using Firefox 2.0 and up, and IE (Internet Explorer) 7.0.   IE 6 does not display the footer properly, and, I can only please one person per day.

Creating the design for the website was probably the hardest part.  Once I got the design down, I spent about 2 weeks figuring out how to put the footer at the bottom of the website, and I would give up every five seconds, because it would work in Firefox and not in Internet Explorer.  Because, as we all know, Internet Explorer is the root of all evil.  Yes, ALL OF IT.

Well, except for pedophiles, and Ace of Base, not that the two are related. However, they are down on that “root of all evil” list as well.

I started realizing while looking through all of my folders, that I am really good at documenting the changes I made to my blog, with screenshots and saving all of my files in neat folders.  What I am not good at, is putting a DATE to any of this.  All I have on my blog folders is “Blog Version 1″, “Blog Version 2″, all the way up until this blog, which is “Version 4″.  Yeah, that’s nice, but when I’m trying to figure out a TIMELINE, it’s not so nice. So, I incorporated a very complex mathematical equation called ESTIMATION to put a time to each of the websites.

In a word: Fun.

Alright, so I guess I overdid it with the lame “My name is Jillian, and this is my website.” on every page, but, after working on it regularly for the past few weeks, I felt like the Well of Creativity was running dry.  And, maybe I went a little overboard with the whole thumbnail-images with a blown-up part of the image, that is, until the user clicks on it to view the actual image.  It was fun making them all though and choosing different spots of the larger image.

Oh, I just found the image I was looking for about web design:

[End of Shameless Self-Promotion]