Revamping My Blog

So in case you haven't noticed, I've spent the last few days trying to ravamp my blog with a different template that is a little cleaner. My blog design is still definitely a work in progress, fighting the HTML code inside the pre-set CSS of a template gives me a headache. I can't quite seem to get the page link tabs at the top to fit correctly within their respective color tabs. I'm not quite sure why the paperclip is in the way, it seems like a poor design in the blog background picture. And I can't seem to format the "Recent Comments" part (on the top right) the way that I want to, it seems to be a linked list but the text keeps overflowing and looking awkward.

I've added several pages to my blog - created the "About" profile page, moved my Peace Corps Application timeline to the "Timeline" page, added a "Contact" page with my address in Ukraine, and compiled a "Packing List" page. Of course since I can't get the margins to resize to fit the length of the labels of each of these pages, the page names have been truncated to fit in the header. Ughh.

If any of you have ever been to Ukraine (or Eastern Europe) before, any thoughts or help on the packing list would be much appreciated!

I've also discovered the Peace Corps Facebook group for Ukraine Groups 39 & 40 so I've spent quite a good amount of time trolling the discussion boards and befriending new people. It looks like I am going to be one of the youngest people in the group, as well as one of the only non-liberal arts majors. Most of the people are from that liberal arts side of the world that I know very little about - English majors, International Studies, American Studies, History, Economics, Political Science, etc.

Teaching English at the secondary school level is certainly going to be more of a challenge than I thought, I am getting a little worried that I am going to behind everyone in terms of knowledge of things like American history and government. So I just read up on the U.S. citizenship test to quickly refresh my facts about the United States. Its amazing how some of these facts may be totally taken for granted by everyone living here, but I am really going to need to do some research to learn all this stuff about the equivalent political structure and history of Ukraine.

Its been quite a few years since I've lived somewhere where it gets cold enough for snow to really stick on the ground, 2 inches of snow and ice in Atlanta doesn't count. I lived in Madison and Brookfield, Wisconsin during elementary school for a number of years while my dad finished up grad school at the University of Wisconsin. All I remember about living there is having a sweet pink onesie snowsuit, playing around the Engineering buildings on campus, and riding the bus to school in 2nd grade at Wisconsin Hills. So Ukraine is going to be quite a change from Atlanta and San Francisco... yay for shopping for new clothes! Maybe I will get to build a real snow fort this year, haven't done that since I was about 7 :)