I love this blog

I really do. Never mind that I haven’t posted in years. I just always get a warm fuzzy feeling when I look at the layout. Maybe it’s the watercolor by Victoria… And I’m still getting comments from Incredimail victims. Maybe I’ll pick up again someday. For now, I’m just insanely busy homeschooling my 3 kids and tutoring kids in writing. Become a fan of Writing Foundations on facebook!

Red Envelope Day, March 31, 2009

Speak out for the unborn.

Even a 12 year old gets it.

abortion changes you

a powerful site

It’s so cute!

Here’s the original watercolor work by Victoria Usova that I bought today to frame for my office:

I love watercolor and I just love her work! I found her on Twitter! (which has been a delightful new thing that I will be posting about soon!)

My acquisition seems especially fitting since my finches, Mrs. Flotsy and Mr. Jetsy Finch, seem to have become new parents recently. I haven’t seen the babies yet, but Mommy is not leaving the nest, Daddy is very busy and on guard, and I heard yitty, bitty peepy noises up there this am! Unfortunately, the nest is tucked in the highest corner of a closet and blocked from humans by a book case, so I haven’t gotten a good look, yet.

a random welcome to 2009

I hate blogs with sound – those that automatically play music at you. grrr.

I just discovered that I’m starting a new phase in my life. Another chapter: menopause. I spent a few hours researching these mysterious, unexplainable symptoms:

extreme lethargy and apathy
arthritis-like aches and pains in arms and legs
erratic sleep
breakouts
hot, cold, hot, cold
weight gain despite working out and eating right
and a few other personal details I won’t go into…

I’m 45 this year. Looks like menopause is headed my way…

This outta be an interesting year…

Beautiful

I found this over at The Anchoress:

Eve and Mary by Sr. Grace Remington, O.C.S.O

O Eve!
My mother, my daughter, life-giving Eve,

Do not be ashamed, do not grieve.

The former things have passed away,

Our God has brought us to a New Day.

See, I am with Child,

Through whom all will be reconciled.

O Eve! My sister, my friend,

We will rejoice together

Forever

Life without end.
— Sr. Columba Guare copyright© 2005 Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey

NASA will never know me

I will never get to be an astronaut no matter how much I work out.

This morning I did a routine on the treadmill.  Believe it or not, it was hard!  Adam has it all configured with inclines up to 10 and speed/intensity to 8.  After 65 minutes, I was exhausted!  I think it’s supposed to take only 40 minutes, but no matter how great of shape I will ever be in, my legs are still shorter than most of the population’s, so I have to work really hard to keep up to speed.

I tend toward the klutzy end of the spectrum, so when I use the treadmill, I attach the safety cord to my shirt.  That way, if I get too far behind and slide down the track, the belt will automatically shut off.  Good thing too because at one point I was feeling the beat of my iPod as I ran and momentarily closed my eyes.  When I opened them again, I was at the end of the platform and about to slip off!

My particular talents work in the other direction too.  When I was done with Adam’s routine, I let the treadmill computer direct my cool down.  It stopped when I didn’t expect it, and I ran into the front end of the machine!

Getting off the treadmill is my greatest problem though.  If I step off right away and move of my own accord, the room spins and I feel all woozy.  It doesn’t matter if I’ve been on it for 6 minutes or 60, I feel like I’m still on it when I try to walk on solid ground.  So I just stand on it looking busy with the buttons for about 10 minutes until my brain starts to show some sign of stability again.

I’ve never been one for carnival rides either, so it’s a good thing that NASA doesn’t come knocking on my door.  I’d hate to fall down, throw up, or pass out on the shuttle.  Besides, they say that laughing is great for your health, and I wouldn’t want the people watching me at Anytime Fitness to get sick.

funny for the day 2

A: (eating strawberries) Mom, is this mold?

Mom: (noting the microscopic ball of fuzz) Just pick it off, then you can eat it.

J: Yeah, just like they do at fancy restaurants like PF Chang’s.

(We learn a lot from eating at fancy restaurants – we went to PF Chang’s for my birthday (pre-raw days) and ordered the Great Wall of China chocolate cake with raspberry garnish for dessert. The waitress was snooty all along, but she took the cake (literally) when we found mold within a clump of berries. She grabbed the dessert from our table and came back 2 minutes later with the same piece of cake and a rearranged group of raspberries! At least the most moldy one was missing. I wanted to protest, but she was so put out already, I was afraid she’d deck me, and that’s not the way I wanted to remember my birthday!)

incredimail sucks

I have learned a very important and costly ($145 so far) lesson:  search software/application reviews before downloading/installing such things on your computer.

I teach writing lessons online, and one of my students sends me emails using the free version of Incredimail.  Because I work with kids online, it looked like a great idea for embellishing emails and making the lessons more fun.  The premium version was only $30, so as a business expense to get the full program without ads, I thought, why not?  Of course after a couple weeks, I wanted more pictures and animations, so I purchased the gold gallery for another $40.  (I know, I know, this has “sucker” written all over it.)

The Gold Gallery never worked. Every time I tried to access it, I just kept getting invited to purchase the gallery again. I spent 3 weeks with at least 3 different tech support people all running me through the same diagnostics. Finally, one tech sent me an email that said that the problem was Firefox3 and that they were coming out with a fix for that shortly. Actually, this was happening before I upgraded to Firefox3, but whatever…

In the meantime, my computer slowly started going insane. First my print spooler disappeared and I couldn’t access any printers over my home network. So I had to delete all the printers, but I don’t know how to set up the network again – an awesome friend had done it for me, but then moved to India for some crazy reason (probably because being my personal IT guru doesn’t pay that well). (ok, ok, it’s was all about obeying God, not me.)

Next I lost access to certain websites that I could access just fine before. Because I know only enough to function on a daily basis, these types of problems mystify me and drive me to distraction. It takes so much of my brain power to figure out things in the labyrinth of a computers innards, I cannot think about anything else at the same time. My stress level steadily rose as “Cordelia” continued to manifest more and more maniacal behaviors.

The kicker was when Times New Roman disappeared.  People could send me emails and documents in TNR, but I couldn’t see what they wrote unless I hit reply and changed the font to anything else.  My awesome friend helped me find info about garbled text, but none of the fixes in the font files helped.  As far as my font files were concerned, TNR was there in full form fine and dandy.  To work around it, I just avoided TNR, but it would mock me everytime I edited a paper and TNR was the default for making comments.  I’d be typing away only to look up and see nothing there!  aaauuuuuggggghhh!!!

When I switched back solely to Outlook for drafting emails, they embedded themselves in my inbox and told me I didn’t have authority to send them when I hit send. A host of other “unspecified errors” started popping up as well, and I knew it was time for professional help.

Thankfully, a local computer repair fellow became my knight in shining armor and my new best friend. I went in with my list of freaky anomalies, and he confirmed my suspicions about Incredimail. Cordelia needed a complete lobotomy. He gave me perfect directions on how to back up my computer and even put me forward in his queue so I wouldn’t get so far behind on my student emails. Cordelia was back in my lap in less than 30 hours! It’s taken me another 30 hours and counting, though, to get her rockin’ and rollin’ again with all the downloads, passwords, and configurations one must execute!

Now the really sucky part of Incredimail is that I have voiced my concerns, and then my complaints, and finally my requests for a refund. I am not happy with the product and want my money back. I have yet to achieve that. All I get are kind responses of their sincere desire to help me fix the problem, but it’ll be a mosquito-less day in MN before I ever put Incredimail on my computer again!

wash that green right outta your hair

When we picked up “my other daughter” (that’s what the stylist called her) this morning, we found out that A’s friend had gotten her hair cut into a bob over the weekend.  A loved it so much, she wanted hers cut right away.  With all the pool time lately, I was all for it.  The summer rush was weaving dreadlocks at the base of her neck no matter how we tried to keep up.

The first thing the stylist said when she looked at A’s head was, “Been spending a lot of time at the pool, huh?”  The green glow gave Miss Normally Goldy Locks away.  But instead of trying to sell me some $20/bottle of clarifying shampoo, she told me to go home and add baking soda to our $1.47 Suave special and it would work just as well.  So that’s what I did – poured about 1/2 cup baking soda into a couple bottles of shampoo.  It looked kind of like a lava lamp with a big bubble of soda in the middle at first.  Slowly, it mixed in though as we turned the bottles over and over and over…

I’ll let you know how it works after giving it a good try for a week or so…