The Blogess

I used to read Boobs, Injuries and Dr. Pepper before she decide to write a novel on her blog and lost her funny.

I recently discovered The Bloggess who is just like Boobs, before she got unfunny. The post I linked is about boobie mushrooms! You know you need to read this lady! LOL

Good things happening

Last Friday was our walk. Despite some rain, it was great success. I got there early and helped set up and then worked the hospitality tent until it was time for TB to see the exhibits and then walk. We made, pre-walk, over $11,000 to fund the PTA budget for the year and invest in Smartboards for all the classrooms! A local high school marching band showed up and marched with the kids and then played in front of the school for awhile. Their concert was sadly cut short because it started to rain. The second and third graders also had their time cut short for seeing the exhibits because of the rain but shortly after they packed everything up, it cleared off enough that they could walk. All of the volunteers and students were given shirts and I heard that some of the kids were so excited about getting their shirts the day of the walk, they started crying. We are talking shirt sponsors for next year to offset some of that cost, which is by far, the biggest expense of putting on the walk. Hopefully, we'll get a couple and our bottom line will come out looking even better.

Enormous thanks to all the companies who donated supplies, people who donated money and volunteers that donated their time to make this event a continued success. We simply couldn't do it without the community support that we receive!

The other good thing was that we bought a new van yesterday. The plan had been to keep RF's car another couple of years, pay a significant down payment on a new car that point and he would take my van, while I got the new car. Unfortunately, as tends to be the case, the plan went astray when RF's transmission went out. After looking at it, we determined that we did not want to put 3000 plus dollars into a 9 year old, that was only worth 3000 so the hunt for a new van began. We had anticipated trading it in and trying to a little bit out of it. Sadly, as RF and FIL were driving it to the dealer, the transmission went for real. There was a loud bang and something hit the floor of the car and when they coasted off the road, they went back and picked up pieces of the transmission that were scattered around the road. The mechanic that works on our cars might be interested in buying because he has another Saturn with a good transmission and a bad engine.

I knew that I wanted a few things, including power sliding doors, fold in floor seats and rear heat and air. We struggled a little to find a low milage vehicle that had those things in our price range. We found a few things that were "almost there" but weren't totally right. Fortunately, we were in a position to walk away from the not quite right ones until we found one that really worked. We found it last week, although it was a little outside our budget. I wanted FIL to take a look at it so we had him go with us yesterday morning, with the idea being that we would go back Thursday morning while MT was in school and do all the paper work. FIL gave his approval and I ask the guy if we could stat running the number and playing the waiting game and that we would come back today to finish up the paperwork and pick up the van. He said we could but then offered to "make us a deal" if we could get it finished yesterday since it was the last day of the month. I was willing to make a deal so we spent the entire day out there yesterday, doing the paperwork to buy the van.

MT was an absolute ROCK STAR about the whole thing. She played and chatted with the salesman (dude scored major brownie points because he was nice to her) and ate popcorn and walked around and only got whiny once, an HOUR after she normally eats lunch. We got there about 8:15 yesterday morning and I pulled off the lot at 2! Big thanks to my friend K, who I called at 12:30 and asked if she could get the boys at school, while she was there with her girls, since, as it turned out, there was no hope of me getting there on time!

My van is awesome. It is black with gray interior. It has my fold down seats so I can fold the seats into the floor and gain a ton of storage space or make it easier to get to the back seat but I still have them with me if I need the seating once I get somewhere. It also has power sliding doors, which are fantastic! I couldn't pay the kids to shut the door in the old van but now they fight over who gets to push the button. Eventually the novelty will wear off but even then, I'll have my buttons so I won't have to yell at them to close the doors all the time. It also has the rear heat and air so I don't have to listen to "I'm so hot" or "I'm so cold" all the time. Now, if I could just get them to quit touching the vents all the time!

The final good thing that happened was I went to the Make a day better blogger meetup last night. It was for local bloggers and was done in conjunction with Office Max's push to end teacher funded classrooms. It was great to finally put faces with screen names (the pictures don't do you justice, ladies!) and hang out with good friends as well. Besides all that, there was food donated from local businesses and fat bag full of post party swag! You can expect a future post with more details about the event and the swag, once I get the email with all the company links so I can link to everything properly. When I heard about the swag bags, I expected pens and notepads and other lame things that you get at all those free events. We got bottles of lotion, brownie mixes, water bottles, reusable bags, etc. And not the tiny little travel sizes either. Full sized stuff! With companies being that generous, the least they deserve is a shout out on my little blog :)

On the road again

Per RF's suggestion, I have created a blog specifically for travel reviews so they can be kept together and easily accessable. If you are interested in that sort of thing, feel free to subscribe :)

Freaky travels. Enjoy.

Drama

Have you ever known someone who was a complete attention whore, that CREATED drama for themselves just so they could talk about it? What about people who tell you one story (very dramatic) and then later on, add MAJOR details that completely change the story and make it ever so much more serious? Yeah, I know one of those people too (no one here and no one any of you know, just another blogger that bugs the crap out of me)

Have you ever been happily reading blogs, entertaining yourself when you come across a post that makes you want to scream and beat the poster with your computer? Yeah, me too. Random blog linked from another random blog brought up a serious hot button topic for me. It was an opposing viewpoint to mine (which isn't surprising since I rarely want to hit people that agree with me LOL), which I can accept but it was written in such a way that it was very inflamitory and just put me into a rage.

Sitemeter problems

Those of you that have sitemeter, you might want to take it down for a few days. Apparently, they are re do their code and it is messing up blogs all over the place. I took mine down and was actually able to see my page today.

Are you white?

White people are under a lot of pressure to like cooking. Everything in their culture tells them that they need to have a nice kitchen and that they need to cook with organic, fresh ingredients to make delicious, complicated food.

Though any great chef can prepare fantastic meals with a knife and a few pots, white people believe that they need a full cadre of appliances and gadgets in their kitchen in order to live up to the pressure.


Kitchen Gadets

They also have one about tea (which I'm almost out of and need to order some more (David, are you in?), Apple products (not me, dh), irony, etc. Apparently, I am not as white as I thought I was because I'm not into most of the things they say white people like :)

Long time, no post

First, I met Mrs. Chicken at the church playground on Thursday. I felt completely lame just going up to her and asking if she was who I thought she was but she was super nice :) The Poo is adorable and her and Lizzie are a LOT alike.

Second, no posts recently due to illness. About 8:30 Thursday night, I was in the dining room and C came in. He was crying and trying to tel me something. All of a sudden he coughed and I shoved him toward the trash can where he threw up :( He was up a couple more times during the night and has had diahrra (sp?) since then.

Friday afternoon, Lizzie got up from her nap crying and sobbing. She kept telling me that her ear itched so I would scratch it and she would be ok for a few minutes. Then she would start crying again. Finally she said it hurt and I gave her some Tylenol. When my dad got home from work (like 30 minutes after she got up), I took her to the doctor and found out that she had an ear infection in both ears. No other indication that anything was wrong. So now she is on meds for that and while still a bit grumpy (toss up whether that is just Lizzie being Lizzie or if the ear is bothering her) she seems to be feeling much better.

Finally, I was able to get my photo tagging software backed up and I was able to reformat my computer! When I bought my laptop, it was right before Vista came out so I got a free upgrade. I waited until over the summer to install it and regretted it from the get go. Backing up is such a pain in the rear though that I hadn't done anything about it. Finally, it got to the point that it was grinding to a halt and just wouldn't work right and I HAD to get it done. I got everything backed up and put XP back on last night. Dh spent a lot of time getting me new drivers and getting all my programs back up and running. Now, as soon as I figure out how to get my tagged files back on the computer, with tags (they are still on my EHD, where I store them but the tags are gone), I'll be completely done. And it is a good thing :)

New blog for scrapping

New scrapping blog

I decided to seperate my scrapping from my life so created a new blog for it. There isn't anything there yet because I have had time to get things moved but all the pages will move there and all future pages will be posted there as well.

New blog

I've been using LJ for awhile but I'm thinking it is time for a change. I'm going to try this out and see how I like it. More later.