Well Dear Readers, 2025 isn’t starting off with a bang here @ thunderjetheaven.com. I had planned on a fairly significant redesign to the blog and to release it around this time with great fanfare, but 12 hours of work was all for naught; I was looking for better navigation and better readability, but nothing I found satisfied me, and when I embarked on trying to code my own, that rabbit hole just kept getting deeper and deeper. You would think that with all these themes-hundreds of them-I would find something that would please me. I didn’t, and attempts at gaining support when my coding went south yielded the usual “you’re using a 3rd party design that we can’t support” line.
So after that frustration, I dialed back my expectations and did a much more basic redesign which, while it did not give me the navigation sidebar I was seeking, did give me the chance to open up all my posts going back to day 1. So that, and a few color changes and other little readability improvements, would have made me happy, but in the end, I didn’t even get that; when it came time to migrate my “staging site” to my “prodution site,” well, nothing really happened! Log files indicate a migration is taking place, but its been going on for over 24 hours now, and while the logs keep logging, I haven’t seen a lick of change yet on the live site, so I can only assume that the upload process has failed or something went wrong. Don’t know, since I have little insight and can’t get any support that’s worth a damn.
So that’s WordPress for you! Would I recommend it to a friend? Why, no! No, I wouldn’t! So now I’m not sure what I’m going to do; maybe I’ll just forget about it and stick with things the way they are, since my goal is to work on-and blog about-my slot cars and die-casts and diorama, and not to become a web designer. Then again, I may get P.O.’d enough that I move to Wix or Yoast some other platform, but trying to migrate 5 years of blogging is likely to be an even bigger nightmare. And although I thought many times about hosting my own, I just don’t have the time to deal with that amount of setup and maintenance.
So that’s why you’re not seeing any of those changes that I promised for the new year! As for posts…well, now that I’m back from my holiday travels work starts up again, and while I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on most of my big projects, they’re not done yet, so time remains at a premium for a while yet. Even so, I have a LOT to do at the tracks, as these pics should show!
The Massive 2024 X-Mas Diecast Haul!
While there were no new slot cars received as gifts, you can see the die-cast haul right here! This was a banner year for the “Big Box” chains; for years I’ve avoided spending my money @ both Wallyworld and Tarjhey since I prefer to support smaller chains and independent stores, but over the last couple of years, several friends have broken down those defenses by dragging me to these stores, and there is one of each within almost walking distance of my house. While I’m usually unimpressed by each store’s toy aisle, it seems like they went all out this year! Every one I went into in both CO and AZ was packed to the gills with cool Hot Wheels and Matchboxes, and even a few Greenlights and Auto Worlds as well, and I found tons of stuff I wanted! This batch you see here is most of it, but I didn’t even get everything I wanted: there was so much of it that I had to hit the brakes!
As if all that weren’t enough, there’s more news from die-castland: a recent visit to the Waffle House in Parker scared me for a second when I looked across the street and saw that Colorado Diecast looked like it was closed down: the sign was gone from the front of the store and there was U-Haul backed up to the front door being loaded! However, checking Facecrook revealed that this was good news, not bad!
I had to pass on a chance to go to the grand opening today, although my friend Jason did make it, and said the new store seems like its twice the size of the original one! Their prices are understandably a lot higher than Wallyworld or Tarjhey, but I’ll be headed there soon enough when I recoop from my X-mas spending!
So NOW I turn my attention to finishing the carnival, but that’s not all: there’s some new T-Jets as well, and The Road Crew just got expanded again with some very rare original jewels that cost me a mint, and I’ll be profiling those soon! Whether or not there will wind up being any changes/improvements to the blog’s look and feel is still up in the air, but since its the content-and not the platform-that I hope you’re here for, stay tuned, because there’s more chills, spills, and thrills to come from DRAG CITY!
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