It’s a long weekend here in Indonesia due to Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha yesterday or some people will refer it as Lebaran Haji (Hajj Celebration Day). We have several Muslim relatives in our extended family, so we took time to visit and greet them yesterday. The first stop was to my SIL house, they are hajjes, so the day was even more special for them. She cooked plenty of special “mouth watering, spicy and filled with coconut milk” Lebaran food, such as ketupat, rendang, opor, sambal, etc. They looked delicious and very tempting! I said “tempting” because I could only see. I’m avoiding such food because I’m still nursing my baby, so ended up just having some fruits . Lucky husband and son, they really had a great time eating.

We made another two stops after my SIL before we headed to the nearest mall to do our first Christmas shopping for this year. My husband was not really sure with the idea, he said it was still November so too early for Christmas shops. But I insisted to give it a try. It only less than a month before Christmas, I argued. Besides, I was hungry after seeing those delicious food earlier, so I wanted to eat something at the mall.

It turned out my husband was right, there were only few Christmas items displayed at the mall yesterday. In fact the mall itself haven’t decorated for Christmas. I saw some stores began to unpack their Christmas stock but they were not ready for sale, others were still plain. I guess, like my husband said, it was still November, so too early for Christmas shopping! Or maybe we just went to the wrong mall. Anyway, I’m glad he didn’t say the words, “told ya!”

The only store that was ready for Christmas was… ACE-Hardware! which was definitely not on my list of stores I wanted to visit. However, we went in anyway and wasted some money bought not really necessary some Christmas decors and lights. I was actually looking for some new clothes for us to wear on Christmas and some baby items with Christmas theme on it.

Then we went to Pizza Hut for late lunch, but since the boys were still full from my SIL house, I just ordered take away bruschetta, pizza and milkshake for my late lunch. After that we went home. So much for my first Christmas shopping. I’ll try different mall tomorrow .

To customize a WordPress theme I mean. At least I could do that yesterday without ruining the template . Yes it’s more complicated than Blogger template but the basics are, more or less, the same. I managed to move the navigation bar from the top of the page to under the blog title and add a little Christmas countdown widget under it. Oh, by the way I think the widget doesn’t work well, or at least it’s not using the same time zone as mine. I’ll check it later. I also added an Adsense banner on top of the blog body section, who knows maybe some of you find it interesting and want to check on it , by pasting the code at index.php and single.php files. As for managing Adsense inside post, I use AdSense Integrator plugin.

I haven’t finished yet, still want to find out how to add a wider dynamic sidebar under those two sidebars where now I put an Adgitize widget on it. I pasted the Adgitize code directly at sidebar.php file, it worked, but didn’t like the result. I wanted it to appear similar to other widgets above it. Well, I’ll continue working on it later…

Today I will try to tweak this template a little bit. Will add some page elements on it and try out some plugins. In general I’m quite happy with this theme for its simple design and fast loading time. The color combination and header image are also nice. However, it looks so plain compare to the previous one, so I will try to add some bling-bling on it, like some adsense or banner on the sidebar for example.

I’m not yet familiar with WordPress theme so will need some time to do it. Let’s see if I can do that without ruining the whole template