new look

earrings - Berber handcraft, gift from Tunisia / purse - Athens tourist shop / dress (worn as top) - H&M / bracelet - Berber handcraft, gift from Tunisia / watch - La Mer / wide leg jeans - Banana Republic / shoes - Toms

I know Saturday night seems a rather inauspicious time to be blogging, but I'm afraid it can't be helped. I missed my regular post yesterday, because I was busy working hard.... redesigning my blog! That's right, pop on over from your RSS readers and check it out, because things are looking awfully fancy around here. (And then promptly pop back to your RSS readers and forget all about it, I know I would.) I've been wanting to redesign my layout for some time now - while I liked the minimalism of my old layout, it started to seem a bit dry to me (and, dare I say it, stale?), and didn't offer the kind of simple functionality I wanted. I pushed up my sleeves, found a base template I liked, and started working; I designed a header, custom buttons, modified my CSS, and got everything looking just stellar. And then I tried to install my Disqus commenting system, and things got real ugly. I fretted, I tweaked, and I Googled 'til I was blue in the face, but there was nothing to be done - I had to either give up on Disqus, or give up on my pretty, pretty layout.

So I scrapped it, and made a better one! And I am really happy with it - while it's certainly nothing fancy code-wise, I love the new look and think it will give me a lot of flexibility. There are a lot of new features you guys should check out, but my favorite is definitely my new on the map page - it shows everywhere we've been so far in our travels, along with handy links to my posts from each country. And, like my in the bag page, I'll be updating the map periodically as we keep visiting new places.

These photos are from the crazy 48 hours last week when Chris and I got Museum Passes - on our second day, we visited Sainte Chapelle, climbed (and, er, fell down) the towers at Notre Dame, stopped by the Insitut du Monde Arabe, and spent a few hours at the Centre Pompidou. Suffice to say, by the end of the day we were beat - particularly those of us who'd slid down some stairs that morning. Since I knew I'd be spending the entire day on my feet, I went for the always comfortable Toms and wide leg jeans combo, and decided to try wearing my new printed tunic dress tucked in as a top. I ended up quite liking the blousy silhouette - but it turns out it is way harder to neatly tuck in a dress in a public restroom stall than it is in front of the mirror in your apartment!