Can you judge a blog by its cover?

I know I just changed the look of my blog a couple of months ago, but as I was working on it this weekend, I found a couple new formatting ideas I had not seen before and decided to experiment with them a bit.

I think I found one I like and that should stick around a while. I really like the transparency of the form, allowing the background photograph to be visible. I think the text color makes it still readable without too much effort.

Hopefully I'm done tinkering with it for now, but if I find something else that looks neat, I may try it.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.