I cut into a loaf of homemade bread as the dawn broke, like an egg, in a pink haze this morning. Spreading a thick glaze of peach preserves over my slice I contemplated on life. The haze illuminated my windows and made me think of all the blessings I had been given. Given in grace, like the flower store I used to volunteer at, “Given Grace.” This morning I poured some blueberry flavored coffee into my mug. The morning was crisp and the day held an unknown promise.
This is a picture of a grain pile near my house. I had no idea that corn was such a surplus during this time of year. So, I figured I ought to learn some about it. What do they say, “When in Rome do as the Romans do.” So here’s the article that I wrote about the corn harvest this year. I have yet to add an interview from a corn farmer as corn farming is a completely foreign concept to me. So please give it a read and tell me what you think, positive comments, please.
Corn bravely salute as the sharp ice cracks their cobs. The pumpkins are cloaked in an ethereal white, that, despite the likeness of snow, provides some comfort and insulation for this years crop.
The stalks look steadily upward as several shatter in answer to their salute. I think of the stalks and last nights almost instant destruction. And think it is very much like the human condition. We are pressed for time, money, and every notable thing, some of us stand and some of us fall. I’ve learned one important thing that gets me up every morning to fight to make a better life for myself and that is to be thankful for the life I’ve been given.
Whatever I’m struggling with God is on the other side and like those pumpkins God will will give them another chance. He will give the farmer another fresh start. I think of this like Confession. It is an awakening of our spirits to bury our bad habits and start again. Thankfully, a sin might not take a whole year to kick but sometimes it does. Thankfully, our God is very patient.
If life will build you up it can also cut you down like those corn stalks. In correlation to farming, as farm people nothing comes easy, we are at the mercy of God’s good grace. We are called to surrender our financial stability to nature and live with what we are blessed with. It’s a rough and tumble life to be sure but one I have come to greatly respect.
A round of shots rang out. My eyes flitted open nervously as I scoured the room looking for a threat. The white curtains were illuminated by the still pallor of the moon. It was a nightmare that woke me up in a cold sweat.
Reaching for my phone to check the time the screen cracked a little more shattering any image the phone had. Blackness. The wind picked up and a scuffling sounded from the window.
The cold linoleum pricked my bare feet in the still darkness. My kitchen was lit by an LED bulb that my most dutiful S.O. gave me. The darkness framed my windows. It was 4:30. Insomnia has its bouts of bitterness.
Fumbling around in the light of my lamp, because Lord knows, the average person who awakes at 4:30 is still in the process of waking. I happened across my lovers name tag. His name in straight Arial font gazed up at me in the glowing light. I was transfixed for a minute, wondering, wishing for his safety.
The oatmeal canister stood attention in the darkness of my cupboard, giving me the “How does the do!” of the morning. After fixing a plan bowl of oatmeal with a spoonful of brown sugar, because in my book Saturdays and brown sugar go together ;). My coffee pot began perking out the smells wafting through my kitchen of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and vanilla. A perfect mug of piping hot coffee. Yum!
The sun bravely started shining through my curtains as I began my 100 squat workout. Today, I switched things up after that jumping into a leg workout afterwards then abs. These were all provided by my lovely XHIT gals down there on youtube. I am a huge fan of XHIT!! Great way to get me going in the morning.
Largely the rest of my day consisted of brain training–focusing on memory and speed. Which I believe will be a great addition to my turtle-like RAM. Duolingo is a great asset for learning languages.
The goal of this new editor is to make adding rich content to WordPress simple and enjoyable. This whole post is composed of pieces of content—somewhat similar to LEGO bricks—that you can move around and interact with. Move your cursor around and you’ll notice the different blocks light up with outlines and arrows. Press the arrows to reposition blocks quickly, without fearing about losing things in the process of copying and pasting.
What you are reading now is a text block the most basic block of all. The text block has its own controls to be moved freely around the post…
… like this one, which is right aligned.
Headings are separate blocks as well, which helps with the outline and organization of your content.
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
Handling images and media with the utmost care is a primary focus of the new editor. Hopefully, you’ll find aspects of adding captions or going full-width with your pictures much easier and robust than before.
If your theme supports it, you’ll see the “wide” button on the image toolbar. Give it a try.
Try selecting and removing or editing the caption, now you don’t have to be careful about selecting the image or other text by mistake and ruining the presentation.
The Inserter Tool
Imagine everything that WordPress can do is available to you quickly and in the same place on the interface. No need to figure out HTML tags, classes, or remember complicated shortcode syntax. That’s the spirit behind the inserter—the (+) button you’ll see around the editor—which allows you to browse all available content blocks and add them into your post. Plugins and themes are able to register their own, opening up all sort of possibilities for rich editing and publishing.
Go give it a try, you may discover things WordPress can already add into your posts that you didn’t know about. Here’s a short list of what you can currently find there:
Text & Headings
Images & Videos
Galleries
Embeds, like YouTube, Tweets, or other WordPress posts.
Layout blocks, like Buttons, Hero Images, Separators, etc.
And Lists like this one of course 🙂
Visual Editing
A huge benefit of blocks is that you can edit them in place and manipulate your content directly. Instead of having fields for editing things like the source of a quote, or the text of a button, you can directly change the content. Try editing the following quote:
The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
Matt Mullenweg, 2017
The information corresponding to the source of the quote is a separate text field, similar to captions under images, so the structure of the quote is protected even if you select, modify, or remove the source. It’s always easy to add it back.
Blocks can be anything you need. For instance, you may want to add a subdued quote as part of the composition of your text, or you may prefer to display a giant stylized one. All of these options are available in the inserter.
You can change the amount of columns in your galleries by dragging a slider in the block inspector in the sidebar.
Media Rich
If you combine the new wide and full-wide alignments with galleries, you can create a very media rich layout, very quickly:
Sure, the full-wide image can be pretty big. But sometimes the image is worth it.
The above is a gallery with just two images. It’s an easier way to create visually appealing layouts, without having to deal with floats. You can also easily convert the gallery back to individual images again, by using the block switcher.
Any block can opt into these alignments. The embed block has them also, and is responsive out of the box:
You can build any block you like, static or dynamic, decorative or plain. Here’s a pullquote block:
Code is Poetry
The WordPress community
If you want to learn more about how to build additional blocks, or if you are interested in helping with the project, head over to the GitHub repository.
The alarm sounded at 4:47 am and my eyes blinked open. It was still dark. I enjoy early mornings though. Yesterday I started painting with coffee. I find myself drawing elephants quite a lot so I thought why not a coffee elephant?
I can see the train groaning through the fog. It’s wheels sputtering out mist. the cold temperatures lurking on its every wheel. This reminds me somewhat of life. Grumbling and grinding on, now not waiting for passengers. Get on or get off. A strict policy.
Life goes on and those who don’t share it are left out. As one of my favorite poems warns not to measure our lives out in coffee spoons. So, I try and keep mine as full as I can.
Around our parts there was a freeze last night. My family has some apple orchards, so I figured I might as well glean as many apples off the trees as I could.
I love picking apples!
The picture above I’m picking a Golden Russet apple. One of my favorites! Excellent for making pies or other baked goods and Lord knows I do enjoy baking.
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