Are you guys talking in code or something?

I got back from Tucson last week. While I was there, I spent a lot of time with my sister, Tina - easily the most time we've spent together, just the two of us, in years. It was awesome. Smack dab in the middle of my trip was her baby shower so a lot of our time was spent doing very awesome sister stuff - shopping, baking and eating. We ran around for two days on a never-ending search for lavender striped paper straws (which, by the way, don't exist in Tucson), stayed up until 2:00AM baking cupcakes in an oven not much more advanced than a fire pit and shared meals at my favorite Tucson restaurants. We even took a break to play arcade games at Golf n' Stuff. My sister and I do that whole non-verbal-communication-thing that sisters (and best friends) are typically known for. This form of communications is most commonly used by darting looks at each other from across the room to show our approval or distain for something. We were at Party City the morning of the baby shower, I was at the counter getting our balloons filled with helium, Tina picked something up from across the store and held it up for me to see - my reaction was sour face and I shook my head no, we both smiled. The employee helping me with the helium picked up on our little transmission and asked, "Sisters?" I was shocked, blown away, in total awe. In the past 29 years of us being sisters, no one has ever - not once - instinctively picked up that we are sisters. We look nothing alike - I take after our Armenian mother and she takes after our Irish father. I'm short and curvy with dark eyes and olive skin. Tina is tall and slender with green eyes and pale skin. Normally when people discover we're sisters, we're met with total disbelief. "What gave it away?" I asked the helium lady. "You guys were just talking in Sister Code," she replied matter-of-factly. Yes, yes we were. I couldn't help but smile. It's kind of crazy, but I really think that now that my sister is having a baby, we've become closer. Little no-name baby has tapped us into our sister sub-conscience and uncovered some sort of hidden bond that I've always known was there.

In between planning the baby shower and getting lassoed up, we squeezed in nursery furniture shopping at Ikea, painting the baby's room, picking out only the cutest of baby clothes and going wild at Babies R Us with the registry scanner (those things are awesome, by the way). While she was at work one day I even squeezed in a tattoo appointment with the insanely talented and awesome Ed Slocum. Other than that, there wasn't a whole lot of time for much else. This presented a problem because I had my two week Skillcrush 101 course that began Monday February 4th. I knew I wouldn't be able to work on any of it until at least Sunday the 11th, meaning I would have to squeeze 5 days worth of classes into one. At that point, I didn't care - I was bonding.

Fast forward to Sunday - I wake up early at my mom's house, set my computer up on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, pour myself some cereal and dive into Skillcrush to learn some code. Before I had signed up for the class, I checked out the website and was instantly impressed by the incredible, aesthetically pleasing design - it's just beautiful. After perusing the site, I had very high hopes for the course. I began my first lesson and was blown away by how user friendly the class was. Every lesson begins with a video tutorial led by the very likable and easy to understand Ada (of the site's Ask Ada column). The video tutorials are smart, funny and direct. The tutorial is followed up by a visual example and practice of the lesson, then another video recap and after that you apply the learned lesson on your mock-site. I built my own website! The course taught me HTML (everything from tags to attributes, elements to meta tags), CSS (to add style and design to our content we covered a whole lot here - colors, fonts, borders, margins, padding, etc), layouts (floating and positioning), cross-browser troubleshooting and how to buy my own domain to launch my site. Check out my mock-site here (I know it's ugly but I built it from scratch)! On top of it all, they give you awesome tools like boilerplates, recommendations for different web building programs and I get continued access to the lessons, videos and class materials even after the class schedule has concluded. When I had questions my instructors were just an email away. I was absolutely floored. I highly recommend checking out their class schedule and taking a class. It will not disappoint.

What else did I do in Tucson? I went into diabetic shock from too much Eegee's and I don't care.