I needed to cut the grass on Saturday. My son is off to college, so the job is left to me. I've kidded my daughter about learning to use the lawn mower, but that hasn't gone anywhere. So, it's up to me.

But yesterday, I spent the day at the stables. After watching my daughter jump and semi-concentrating on a book about web design, I decided to help the trainer by digging a milk weed relative out of the horse paddocks. The weed is nasty. The horses won't eat it and it draws water into it's root system like a vacuum pump, drying out the surrounding soil. I managed to clear one paddock and two thirds of another before the heat became too intense. I spent the next half hour dangling my feet in the trainer's pool to cool off.

I also managed to spend time on the web site in the evening. Honestly, I was pretty tired, but I should have finished the yard. The sun was going down and it had cooled off considerably.  I was able to complete the web site framework, completing the finishing touches on the master page and style sheet. I've maintained the ice theme colors from my frontpage web, and the list graphic bullets are the same. But everything else is new (or at least new to me.) I've decided to stay with Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 for the main site. The blog and wiki still use .Net 2.0. I don't have any dynamic content yet, but by choosing to use VS 2008, I can develop dynamic content. If I had stayed with Frontpage, dynamic content development would be limited to client side javascript and asp pages. I also discovered that I can use Microsoft Expression Web to develop the frontend of the web site, and still use VS 2008 for code development. This is a good thing, because VS 2008 is a large program with a lot of execution overhead.

Here's a graphic I developed with The GIMP. I'm looking forward to developing some nice looking graphics for my web site.