6 Here’s Erin, with another high-contrast band as I finish up the back.

Yesterday, #1 daughter and I got haircuts and went to the farmer’s market for blueberries and vegetables, and thence to the local French antique store.

I was charmed by the little plates with “Cadet Roussel” printed on them, and the bigger majolica plates with eery green asparagus, but #1 daughter felt that charging $100 for a plate was morally repugnant.

Most of what they had in there, she said, could be had at flea markets.

True, said I, but I know the owners, and they happen to go to flea markets in France. This is expensive for them, what with all the restaurants and wine and so forth, and people are paying them for making the arduous journey.

6 We ran into an old friend who had gone to the market in search of tomatoes. Not yet.

I have one tomato that is almost red by now.

The market is always fun. You see old friends, there are always lots of cute dogs, there’s music, there are tables of people with petitions and pamphlets and things for an assortment of interesting causes.

Yesterday, we passed by the anti-evolution table, the Slow Food Movement table, the Peace table, the Humane Society, the table recruiting host families for foreign students, and several political candidates. The Legalize Marijuana guy was not there. He is an old man. I hope he hasn’t fallen ill or gotten tired and given up.

Not that I favor legalizing marijuana. It is not good for you, especially if you smoke it. But he seems like a nice old guy, and this is his only topic. I’ve met him socially. It doesn’t matter what you start talking about, it ends up with him talking about marijuana. So I figure that he wouldn’t have given up unless he were ill or disheartened or something.

6 Here is a Montezuma rose peering out of the jungle. Usually by now Montezuma is covered with blossoms. I thought he wasn’t going to bloom at all till I noticed this lone flower hiding in the undergrowth.

I really need to get out and weed that garden.

All the gardens.

But roses in particular aren’t supposed to have undergrowth.

I didn’t do any weeding at all yesterday.

After we got back with our shorter hair and our purchases (no $100 plates), I did the remaining grocery shopping, did a very little bit of housework, and worked on my CSS for a while.6

You can see that the caterpillars made lacework of the outer leaves of this poor cabbage, but it is still heading up nicely, and I think they will leave some for us.

In the evening, we watched Rebecca, which has not grown any less creepy over the years, and I worked on Erin.

My knitting has suffered a lot from my being rather busy.

So I was working on that page design that suddenly swam into my ken on Friday or whenever it was. This involved looking at a lot of code from other pages.

Let me just say that I really like CSS.6

The book makes quite a strong case for people (especially people like me who don’t have lots of old pages of HTML they’re responsible for) to go strict right now.

It’s hard to get over the feeling that writing strict code, rather than the transitional that I do, is somehow a claim. Like saying that you do something well, rather than merely saying that you don’t do those old-fashioned inelegant HTML style tags.

And — here’s the thing — you are supposed to announce at the top of your pages whether you are strict or transitional.

It’s as though, when you wrote your blog, you had to announce at the top whether you were going to write it in standard academic English or whether you planned to allow yourself a few errors. Except that the book claims it’s more like announcing that your page is going to be in English, rather than in Chinese. Which of course you also do.

I don’t know. It still feels like bragging.