Simple Blog Changes

I am enjoying the monthly change to my blog, simple enough to do with downloads from sites such as The Cutest Blog on the Block, then I can play around with the header on Scrapblog.com using my own pictures. The theme for this month is a combined I feel lucky and travel. At the end of the month, I will be taking another road trip down south with my parents and my #2 son. I am helping my parents out by sharing the drive to Florida where they will stay for a month. #2 son will be home on break and we will bring him back down to Savannah where we can enjoy a little sightseeing and some fresh shrimp. Forrest Gump has been on every night this week and those scenes with the Bubba shrimp has me wishing for warm sun and fresh shrimp.

And then, lucky me, I get to spend a week with my cousin in Florida where we will enjoy the sun and walks on the beach. There's even a lap pool at her complex where I hope to spend time each day. Will it be strange being on vacation without my immediate family, sure, but I know they will manage and I can't wait for sun. We have the sloppiest, wettest week going on right now and sun and sand are beckoning. The travel bug has bitten and I need to hit the road!

Jumping totally off topic, if you were to be in the Winter Olympics, what sport do you think you would want to do? For me, it would be Ice Hockey, I was born 10 years too early to enjoy hockey like my brother. All my playing was done in the street, but I could see myself on the ice. How about you?

Back to Blogging

Did you all miss me? Thank you for the notes. Nothing drastic kept me from blogging except life and it's complexities. We got through it, but I just wasn't in the mood to blog about my musings when my thoughts were occupied. We are all healthy, not any wealthier and hell of a lot wiser. Except for maybe the kittens, they still are a little dumb and no, we aren't ready to set them on fire!

Before getting back into the swing of blogging, I decided to put up a banner of some of my favorite things. Yea, I know, kind of hokey, but I really wanted to play with Appleworks which is now on my computer now that I have a brand new spanking big ole hard drive. I just don't get the idea behind a 60g hard drive when you are suppose to have at least 20g free to do any thing fun like an imovie or idvd on an apple. There was a slight scare and a road trip to the nearest Apple Genius bar ( 40 miles.....could be worse!) where they had to show me how to get my Iphoto library back up and running. But as you can see, there are a few glitches in the blog template and I guess I may have to ask for help.

Snow? Yep, our yards are covered. The snowman on our front step survived, but just barely. His hat is more like a derby than a top hat. Sunburnt? Yep, weatherman lied and the sun came out full blast today at a track meet. Ready for summer? You betcha, I hear Florida beckoning me.

What's new in my boring life? Got my hair highlighted- b/c winter has just been too damn long and I needed something bright in my life.
Nordic skiing is over and now it's track- two sons started, one son has since quit and that's okay.
It's been an interesting budget time with our school budget and I have become a little activist. There is no way that I will even mention what it is about, since our townpeople are google happy and that's all we need....
Got another afghan almost completed for Shelly.
Have read a bunch of books and am now dragging myself through Eat, Pray, Love which is not going to win any rave reviews from me. I guess others have loved it, but the author is just sharing way too much angst. On the other hand, I just read Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs which I enjoyed very much.
Work- is crazy busy, I have picked up a ton of hours.
Weight Watchers- bit the bullet and headed back to meetings, the 12 pounds I regained have got to go. ( but of course I joined after getting two lindt bars for my birthday....)
Heading down to Florida with a road trip up to Savannah to check out Savannah College of Art and Design and then another road trip to Orlando to check out Full Sail with my son and his friends. So I am not out solving the problems of the world, but just living a hectic life.

The Technological Goddess

You Are Aphrodite!

A total shining star with a ton of admirers And no wonder: you live life to the fullest! When things get bad, you can easily take off to a happier place But occasionally, you need to deal with problems head on

What Goddess Are You?

I know, another post all about me. But this weekend I just couldn't hold back and decided to tweek my blog template. Thanks to Comic Relief I now have drop down lists for links on my right column. By the way, if you are in need of a smile, there are some great jokes posted over at Comic's blog which I have been enjoying. But back to the topic of blog fixes....The drop down lists can be found in the web script pages at Floobie.com and can be tweaked to work with the design elements of your page.

The other blog tidbit that I learned this weekend was how to work with tables and pictures. Lately I have been trying to line up pictures and the table thing does work! That lesson came from another person's question to the Blogger Help Group regarding putting flickr badges side by side in a column. I had seen the blog post at Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta and was able to follow the directions to put the flickr badges and pictures into tables.

But last night put me into the Goddess category according to my sons. You see, sometimes I can be worthy of the honor and respect from their little male brains when I have the knowledge and skill along with patience to work through connection issues with their Playstation 3. While crocheting with my friend Rose on the backporch, I heard the rumblings of an argument brewing from within the gaming headquarter of my house. It was all about the Netgear router and ip addresses of which I control. (Sounds witchy, I know, but somebody has to take responsibility......) Based on a gaming forum, it appeared that we needed to do some port forwarding, are your eyes glazed over yet? Because I don't know what the hell that was, but with a few questions in google, a blond call to netgear...that's where you act dumb and they tell you how to connect to your router via the internet, I was on my way. And now my sons can play their latest soul sucking, or heart eating zombie type game on the internet. Does life truly get any better than that?

Do You Have a Wish List?

You know you do, even if you don't tell anyone!

In my quest for more blog information, I found a site that I bookmarked to take some time to learn HTML and CSS. CeeCi at Geekystreak has taught herself and used the following book as a resource, HTML and CSS in 24 Hours. Off I went to Amazon and put it on my wish list so I could remember the title because the older I get, the more I forget. My wish is to understand the different parts of the template page.

Enough with the blog wishes, here is my simple wish shared by many women my age!

After a sleepless night, I wish for 8 hours of uninterupted sleep, which would mean no cat around my feet, not waking up when everyone decides to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and keeping my body at the same temperature. Gotta love those night sweats.

So what's on your wish list? Something Extravagant? Simple?

Friday Fiddle-Faddles

Here's my pile of books from the library last week next to paperwork I should be going through. But what have I done instead this morning? I have a cluster map and Tag Clouds on my blog!
I gave up on the zoom clouds after getting another internal server error and still no word from customer support. So,I did some google searching for tag clouds and reading through a couple of directions and ended up using directions from Phydeaux3 which has a link to the directions. There are 3 steps, but they were straightforward and easy to do.

The Cluster Map information came from BlogU and that was also easy to do. It should start updating tomorrow.

I did remove the Weight Loss Journey, since I post about it. Today was a great number on the scale, so far switching to Core has been good and it looks like I have lost 2 pounds since last week. Now it's the weekend and I just have to keep this going until Weigh in at my Weight Watchers meeting on Monday. Rather than feeling I can't eat certain foods, I just think about where I want my calories to come from during the day. Speaking of which, that was interesting information to come out about Soda, besides the sugar, it's the acid in the drinks hurting the teeth. Another reason to drink water.

#6 Thursday Thirteen Blog Wishes

Thirteen Blogging Wishes
I have enjoyed the Thursday Thirteens, but my travels to different blogs has created an envy or maybe better said, "a wish to learn more"

1. It all started with Shelly at This Eclectic Life with her Blog Tip Contest, she would like tips to increase traffic and we got to writing to each other about changes in our blogs.
2. A wish to change my blog - With Annie's help from Blogu, I worked out a 3 column template using the blogger Minima template and guidelines from her blog.
   
3. Wish to personalize my header - With Bizwhiz's help from Tips for New Bloggers Blog - I enlarged my picture to fit.
4. Wish to learn more CSS information and play with it on Dreamweaver. I did find this cheat sheet which I have saved from ILoveJackDaniels blog. ( now isn't that quite the name for a blog?)
   
5. Wish to learn HTML- just printed the cheat sheet from ILoveJackDaniels, so I can learn how to center pictures in my sidebars.
   
6. Wish to find the code for the scrolling box to have the TT13 blogroll fit into that so it scrolls rather than take a whole length of a page.
   
7. Wish to get ZoomClouds to work, I am registered, but keep getting error messages and no response from support, Adventures in Juggling has a very nice zoom cloud for tags, just the right size!
8. Wish to get a book list going on a side bar like Di's Book Blog has, it is very slick looking, speaking of sidebars, I think I might experiment on colors this week.
   
9. Wish to even just list a currently reading book on the sidebar, seen at More Than a Song.
10. Wish to have those tab things at the top of the blog like Scribbit's which are free, but I have to figure out how to put them in the template.
    
11. I wish to make ooodles of money on the adsense and amazon links.........LOL
    
12. I wish to continue finding blogs that have fun little games or contests like Blog my Blog which was going on at An Island Life or Amy's Question of the day, fun and thought provoking.
13. I wish for more time in the day!! Happy Thursday 13!
    

Links to other Thursday Thirteens!

Get the Thursday Thirteen code here!


The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It’s easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!

View More Thursday Thirteen Participants

Monday Muddle

Thanks to all who have been helping me change my template, Annie over at BlogU is awesome and has a great how to site. Biz Whiz from Tips for New bloggers mentioned that I could expand my header and with all the playing around I did this weekend, I was able to expand it.

The picture at the right is of the same location in my header picture but at high tide. It's what I call my little piece of heaven, it's located up in Nova Scotia where my family has been going for over 30 years, my grandmother grew up in the house beyond us. We brought our kayaks up this past summer and it was the best time. Notice the lack of other boats out there! Even the two younger boys took them out to go around the island.

Muddle for today because that's how I felt. I had to make changes to a brochure that I had made in publisher, that once public affairs saw, wanted to make it consistent with the rest of the organization. It did come out well, but we played with some of the sentences. My job is a lot of this and that with the Lab and our outside clients so on Mondays after having Friday off, it's catch up time. Good news is that I am picking up an extra shift in Blood Bank. And do you want to know why I have to pick up some shifts? It's called paying for medical insurance, since it is taking a huge chunk of change out of our take home pay. (Another rant for another day)

Weigh in tonight for Weight Watchers, thinking it will be a good one. I will have to talk to the leader about the Core program. The meetings are still incredibly busy, when are these people going to fall of the wagon? ( Ya, I know, it's mean of me) But sometimes I do like to think that it's all about me!

That's an interesting case that the Supreme Court got today. In my opinion, I think the principal went too far, it was not on school property and there was already history between the student and the administration. I think he got pulled into a power struggle and could have just gone up to the boy and told him that it was inappropriate. The public will be split on this one.
That's my muddled musing for a Monday!