Today’s entry is going to be short, only because I have been diligently working on my first HTML document all day.
It started at 3:45 AM, when Colleen (my wife) and I woke up to get her to the airport. Today she flew to California to surprise her mother for her 60th birthday party. After dropping her off at departures, I made my way back home to continue my coding work. Despite my body wanting to go back to sleep, my mind couldn’t stop working out the definitions and various uses of element tags. Even in my sleep, I was thinking about how each element fit together on the page.
Today’s class was all about creating a boilerplate skeleton and then filling in details for an HTML document. The objective was to build a CatPhotoApp using the standard HTML element tags discussed in the previous chapters, plus a few new ones covered in today’s lesson. I worked until it was time to go to work, and just before my day began, I succeeded in making the CatPhotoApp (and, of course, shared it with all my cat-loving friends).
When I got home from work, I went right back to it. Part II of today’s HTML lesson was even more freeform. Rather than giving me a prompt, line-by-line for each section of the document, this time I was to fill out a blank sheet from scratch, meeting a specific list of criteria that I would be graded on. The prompt was to write out a recipe with an ingredients list and cooking instructions.
With Colleen out of town, our home is very cold and quiet. Usually, when she is home, there is music, maybe something on the television, a busy dog following her around, and, almost always, something simmering in the kitchen, filling the air with delicious smells that are unmistakably hers. Cooking is Colleen’s love language. While she’s away, my eating habits tend to fall by the wayside. As my stomach shrinks, my heart grows heavy and longs for her to return and fill our house with her magical presence again. But, as is tradition when she’s gone, I turn to her cookbook (humorously titled How To Feed A Walks Tall), because the closest I can get to being with her is by attempting one of her recipes. Her chili is so good and so easy to make, I even have the recipe saved on my phone, just in case I’m at the store and need to remember what ingredients to buy.
For today’s assignment, I wrote an HTML document for Colleen’s Killer Chili. I proudly sent her a copy too, though I imagine she’ll only skim the coding part with mild interest. Still, it feels pretty special that, on the very day she went out of town, my assignment revolved around something she loves: food. Through code, I was able to bring a bit of her cooking back into my life—if only on the world wide web—and I’m thrilled to have immortalized one of her most delicious recipes.
If you like chili, this is the BEST chili on earth.
And here is the raw code if you’re curious…
End of entry — Walks Tall
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