(no subject)

In every endeavor, you get the first flush of enthusiasm, and then the entirely-too-high ambitions, and then you run into the first thing you don't know how to do, and every attempt to solve the problem just further reveals the limitations of what you know how to do, and then you keep putting in new keywords into search engines to bang at this one little thing that won't come out the way you want it, and you get stuck in a trough of despair because to make any real progress would involve going back and trying to get a better ground-level understanding of things, and then you give up and decide you aren't going to learn Drupal after all.

Well, I'm going to go back and try things again, but it'll have to wait till I pull back from the whole trough-of-despair thing.

I'm also in the three months of the year when I can't use my desktop because my living room isn't air-conditioned, so that doesn't help.

I would really like to be a good enough just-for-myself/just-for-fun web designer that I can hack together something simple that looks good, without having to rely entirely on other people's themes and code. But I suspect it's like writing, where there are absolutely no shortcuts to good taste and trial-and-error successive approximations toward something that works.