This blog redesign has been in the works for many, many months… probably as early as May 2009 I was beginning to play with a variety of WordPress themes in search for the right balance of design, functionality… and design.
I finally settled on Thesis.
But Thesis is far too “plain” out of the box. Getting it to behave and display content as you see now took countless hours of tweaking and playing around. The positive is the experience gained: the hooks are tamed!
The direction of the blog itself, and frequency of posts, has been in flux as I scratch out ideas for content. The bottom-line is that I don’t want to have too much “work” stuff posted here.
[Going to cut this one short for now, it's late...]

You’re not kidding about taming the hooks… once you get those down, you’re golden :-)
Your new design looks great!
Devon, thank you for your comment :-) (First!)
Indeed, I’m on my fourth Thesis site now and am rarely referencing rtfm anymore. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I’ve never had such confidence while editing WP.
Thank you for your compliment!
Best wishes