Fa-La-La! and a Blog tip

Are you over all that food yet? We had a very festive day with lots of good food and time with family. There are 4 generations sitting at this table, Peter's daughter Stacey, Peter, his mom Barbara, and Grandma Eleanor. That's pretty neat! His two sons got busy with work and couldn't make the trip this time. All my food turned out great, how about yours?

I couldn't resist this cute set of oh-so-Christmasy kitchen towels at Homegoods recently. For $5, a great way to add a little punch in the kitchen this season. And the colors are perfect in my kitchen too. The Christmas boxes are now out of the attic and decorating is in full swing, so stay tuned for some fun. I'm starting with my foyer table and this year, the starring colors will be lime green and white!

Fa-La-La Ya'll!

We have a slightly important little football game today and I have just one thing to say about that....ROLL TIDE!

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BLOG TIP: How to Enlarge Pics

OK, here's a little tutorial on enlarging pics. If you didn't already know this little tidbit, it's best to load your pics first and then add your text. If you were wondering WHY your pics are not clickable for enlarging, then you've probably been dragging your pics around AFTER you have loaded them. You can't do that and keep them clickable. And to get large pics, here is all you do. When you are composing a new post, you'll see 2 tabs on your open post box, one for Edit Html and one for Compose. You mostly will use the Compose tab, but Edit Html comes in handy a lot too and you'll see why. Don't be scared of Html, it's your friend.

After you have uploaded your pics, click on the html tab. You will notice that each pic you uploaded will have a whole paragraph of text to identify it. I've found it's easier to go ahead and size those pics as soon as you upload them. Without any text in the way, you can easily identify where your pics are. You will need to count from the top if you are trying to enlarge only certain pics to make sure you are getting the right ones. There are 2 steps to enlarging pics this way. And you will need to change EACH and EVERY pic individually to enlarge them all, if you wish to do that. It sounds time consuming, but once you get the hang of it, it's not hard at all. You'll see lots of nonsense that won't make sense, but look for this in all the bits of text for each picture you load (STEP 1):

WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px;

or you will see something similar, just look for the WIDTH and HEIGHT part. You will need to TOTALLY delete that whole part, including CURSOR, all the way to the ;

It doesn't matter if your px numbers are a little different than mine, that's the part that needs to be deleted. Just highlight over it and hit delete.

(STEP 2) Then, look for a number like this in each pic's paragraph of text: /s400/

Change that 4 to an 8 and your pics will magically enlarge. Click on over to the Compose tab and you'll see it immediately. You can click back and forth as you are working on your post. Try it out in a practice post with a couple of pics at a time until you get the hang of it.

You will love it. Now, this takes a bit more time when you're composing, but it's totally worth it to me for those huge pics. You have to be careful if, like me, you have 3 columns on your blog. I usually don't enlarge my pics that are square, but only the ones that are taller (vertical) pics. I have to be careful that my pics don't run off the page, but the vertical ones work great being enlarged. Now, you can also enlarge your pics by clicking on each pic and dragging the handles on your pics in Compose mode and pulling your pics out and larger. I've been doing that the last couple of weeks since they messed up the other method, BUT I also noticed that when I manually drag the box and make it bigger that my pics were not clear (but grainy) and I was really frustrated with that. So, changing the code is the better method for clear and large pics!

You'll also notice that Blogger has changed the order that pics are loading. Don't know what to do about that, guess we'll just have to adjust and load them opposite of the old way. That part I can live with.

Try it out and you'll be hooked too!