My new look!

So, what do you think? Mom... Dad... it's me, Ellen! This is still my website! Just look down from the strawberries. Don't get confused. See, my name, right there? =) I have wanted something a little more customized instead of my blogger template, but I didn't think I had the technological skills to change. Well, I don't have the skills to change. Fortunately, there are lots of nice people out there who write code and design blog pages for free, and then they put them on the web with instructions that a trained monkey could follow. Voila! I look like a pro! I love the internet... I wanted something clean, easy to read, and best of all, something that wouldn't mash my text up into mush or erase the lines between my paragraphs. It was making me crazy, and I didn't know how to fix it. Problem solved... I hope.

About the strawberries.... Bowls of strawberries are an inside joke in our little family. About four years ago, David's mom came to visit us in Alabama, and we took a trip down to Tuscumbia, AL to see Helen Keller's birthplace. On the way there, we stopped at a roadside festival. There were tons of great antique booths set up that day under the trees, and I spotted this great bowl of kitschy '50s strawberries. I fell in love with them. They had to come home with me. David did not protest much. Since that time, I have periodically put them in the center of my kitchen table for a splash of tacky color. Over the years, he has grown to hate them, kindly, in a good-natured way. He has joked about "losing" them every time we've moved. He has pretended to stick them in a packing box with no paper; he has pretended to drop them from our balcony. I am just glad that they are still with us. He's a good man to put up with them, and he's a good man to put up with me. I feel a fondness for the strawberries. We're both colorful, battered, chipped, and tacky. And hopefully, we both can put a smile on your face and brighten up a drab room. =)