New Addition to my blog

Well, I have had a rediscovery of fun and so..had to share. To the right of this post at the top of the blog is a youtube of The Hampster Dance. This is soo much fun I had to share. I brings a smile to my face. I hope it will bring a giggle to your belly as well.

So much to think about as we go into Easter

I sit here waiting for a install to finish and I realized that I haven't blogged in ages. So much has happened and we're moving toward Easter!? Wow! We just finished Christmas, right? :) Well Between replacing our entire roof on our house, getting new gutters, removing all the dry rot and now attempting to grow our new plants from seedlings, I am happy to report that the world is fairly normal for now. We've been working more with Marcus' Grandfather in recent weeks as we work with him and doctors to control his congestive heart failure (which he's been living with for years- this is nothing new). I remember getting into my car on my way to work today at lunch and realized how beautiful the day is. I am wishing to go home and sit outside and work - at least I enjoy one thing while getting the other stuff done.

I am also rediscovering the joy of scrap booking. I know *groan* not another person into this!? Well I got re-sucked in. I got sucked in a while ago, but nothing really came of it until now. Last November we did a Disneyland trip (Irene's first along with her cousins). I took 300+ pics. I bought a photo book that I swore I was going to put together. Soo...here I am! I've finished 2 pages. I am working on all sorts of different ones. It's going to take me forever I think cause it takes me a page a day with about 5 pictures each page. That's 60 pages..so 60 days, right? *rolling eyes*...maybe. :) We'll see. I am having fun and Irene enjoys taking the photos I don't end up using and making her own little pages. I think I need to get her a scrap book with some child safe stuff and work from there. Not sure how..but I am sure I'll figure it out. She's getting pretty good with the safety scissors these days. :)

Sunday, I had the most glorious day. I scrap booked all morning, and then after Irene's nap, we took her to a Sharks Hockey game. Naturally (for once) I took the camera. So I have a load of fun pics.

OH!! BTW: I have to say yet again..the Canon Digital Elph series is just awesome. Spent $400 and bought the SD 850. Got great reviews no matter what web site I looked at. I can now see why. I'll never look back except to say "wow..those were crappy pics with that other camera". :)

Anyway..application is just about finished updating now so I should get back to it. Miss you all out there!!!

A really wonderful discovery

Well many of you know that I am Harry Potter fan. HUGE? Maybe..but probably not nearly as much as others. I am slowly collecting the audio cd's of the wonderful set of books, but it's slow to come - they're expensive!!!

Anyway, I just finished Book 5 on CD today and was discussing with a friend of mine many differences between the book and movie. I really didn't realize how many differences there were. Wow! And she remarked that J.K. Rowling actually hand wrote 7 copies of the Tales of Beetle the Bard (referenced in the Book 7 that Dumbledore had given to Hermoine). Below is the link about the fact that Amazon was actually able to purchase through an auction this wonderful book. The description is positively amazing as she hand wrote this book and hand illustrated it as well. Apparently the book went for something like $7,000 *gasp*. We can only hope that Rowling might allow someone to allow her work to be re-created like she did at some point for general distribution. Talk about a wonderful piece of work.

http://www.amazon.com/beedlebard

Enjoy!!!

So much to catch up on...but first New Sofa BED

Well I have so much to share from dry rot repair on our house to roof replacement to rains in the middle of rain replacement...but first!! first!! I have to share an exciting thing (no..new roofs are not exciting). We replaced our SofaBed!!! YAY! and it's awesome.

Here is the couch in it's regular position:



But the big deal is that when you pull it out, the bed mattress has a blow up top on it, in order to protect the "user" from aching back because of pipes on the bottom syndrome ;).

I have to say, I am so surprised about the color. But when I took the color swatches home today and put them on our old couch just to get an idea of what it might look like, I was shocked. It pulled the wine color out of my sewing chair. I never even knew I had a wine color in my sewing chair. It was positively amazing! Anyway, I had share. Below is a shot of another sofa bed pulled out. What this shows is the lower regular mattress then you'll see a seam and then you'll see the air mattress that has been blown up for showing off purposes. You'll see in the upper right corner of the pic the air compressor that is used to actually pump air into the bed. It's totally awesome. I hope this will make people feel more comfortable when they come to visit and stay over night.




Anyway, it comes in on Friday, the 22nd. :)

Setting up a new machine - what a blast!

So I got lucky enough to get a new 64-bit windows machine last week. I swear this is the most amazing thing! The silly screen is bigger than my 21" TV at home in the back bedroom! I was shocked! I so didn't expect anything like that nice!!! Wow. And I sit here setting this machine up and continue to be amazed. I have to say I *really* like this. It's fast (dual core 64-bit), beautiful monitor with so many card reading ports for digital cards I nearly fell over. 2 250 gig drives. It's positively amazing!

I sit here setting up the IM's and getting VMWare reinstalled and getting outlook setup and and and and and :D Can you tell I am having a blast? So something useful out of this blog? OK. What about tools? I am the tools freak of the world. These are Free BTW :)

7-Zip: open source zip extraction etc.

Trillian: IM that handles yahoo, IRC, ICQ, MSN, and AIM. I love this but doesn't have the bells and whistles of the original IM systems. But also not the memory hog like they are.

sync toy: a way to synchronize my folders of one machine onto an external drive or to another HD

ccleaner: great clean up of all the left over temp files and pretty good registry cleaner tool.
command prompt here: powertoy tool from Microsoft.

DeskLite: If your system has a dual monitor and you remote desktop in with a single monitor, what happens to those apps sitting on the 2nd monitor? This is your answer!

XanaNews: newgroup news reader made with Delphi.

There are loads more, but I should get back to doing the good stuff. :)
cheers!

Toy Story 3!!! In 3-D???

Well this was a cool little blurb. I am skeptical..and extremely curious to see this actually work. In all honesty, I have never found that 3-D has ever worked for me, no matter how hard I try. I seem to remember when we went to Disneyland (pre-Irene) that I actually saw it work with the Honey I Shrunk the kids stuff..but it's a fuzzy memory now. So I can't honestly remember anymore.

Anyway...here..see what you think:

http://www.movieweb.com/news/97/25997.php

Firefox - How to uninstall Stylefeeder junk from your toolbar

Man, I have to post about this because I found it annoying and got no response back from the people that create Stylefeeder - which I found through an applet in Facebook. When Iwent to install Stylefeeder I found I didn't find anything useful with it, so I wanted to uninstall it. Do you think I could figure out how to get rid of the toolbar it added to firefox? I sent email to their customer service site after much digging - no news. I would have blogged kindly saying YAY!! They helped me out. But noooo. So for anyone out there like me who hunted to try to find a way to get rid of StyleFeeder.com and their junk, do the following

1) Click Tools | Add-Ons
2) Click the Extensions button at the top
3) Find StyleFeeder
4) Click uninstall button
Restart Firefox and your issue is gone.

HTH's others. I know I was happy to get rid of it.

Nastalgia

Well, I am yet again, fixing a VM that got lost. I am having to create a Virtual Machine with Windows 98 on it. Can you believe it? It took me forever to remember the fact that I have fdisk a hard drive and then format it. I am spoiled!!! :)

Anyway, things are moving along. I am learning ActiveX OLE and COM these days. Been interesting. Still not too sure of myself. But at least the terms are coming a bit easier than before. Ok..back to reading!

Happy New Year - Welcome to 2008

Well we've gone through another year. This last one was calm and collected. It was happy for the most part with a few trials and tribulations that have worked out fine in the end. I've learned a few things in this year:
1) take the 2 weeks Christmas vacation - you'll need it to make it through the next year with a fresh mind.

2) Never try to do dry rot repair on the roof and around the house in November - no matter how much you don't think it's invasive to the house - you might just have to end up replacing the entire roof by January (like we're doing).

3) Cross Stitch is a necessary thing to remove stress

4) Music is a necessary importance in your life. It's relaxing, it's motivating, it's distracting, and focusing all at the same time.

That being said, we're moving to 2008. Resolutions you ask? Nah. I find I break them most of the time. We're working on the downstairs and getting it cleaned up and usable. We're cleaning out the garage to make it more usable. We're getting rid of crap that we no longer need. We're spending more time with family. All of these? These were goals for 2007... see what I mean? Hehe. Anyway, I wish you all a happy New Year.

hmmm note to self: finish postings about Disneyland in November before I completely forget :)

OH! the other change that is coming for this year! I've moved from QA in the IDE world to QA in the Activex world. I couldn't be happier. It's a completely new genre. I've started my reading and hope to prove more useful and goal oriented as the year progresses. I think I was burned. Glad Chris saw the need and made the change.

Anyway...Happy New Year to all! PS: those of you with Facebook add me to your list of friends :) I have been having a great deal of fun in that realm.

Merry Christmas

Well, things are now on the side of happy slopes as opposed to uphill battles. We've made it through Christmas with some great memories. Irene is old enough now to really enjoy the wonder of Christmas. This included leaving Santa homemade cookies (this was a truly impressive process for Momma, BTW) decorated beautifully and a letter to Santa as well with the help of Dadda. I can't tell you how adorable this was. If I can figure out how to upload the movie from my camera to You Tube, I'll post the movie here. It's truly adorable.

I have to say this is the first time ever that I have participated in being Santa to the extent I have. The cookies were amazingly good and the reply from "Santa" had an enormous affect the next morning. The biggest appeal was the picture I got of Irene actually looking saucer-eyed at the cookie plate in amazement that Santa had actually come and brought her a Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer! She had asked for him on Santa's lap at the mall when she went to get her pic taken with Brookie (her buddy). We scrambled for days looking for one until Kerri (Brookie's mom) put us on to the link above. There was quite the issue with that but ultimately, Grammie and Tata came through for us and found it at a Walmart up in their area.

She found her stocking next - stuffed full of goodies. So much so that she was entertained for quite some time before she realized we got to open presents (2pm as a matter of fact) when family showed up. It was truly amazing. OH! She did get to open CandyLand (with Dora) earlier on in the morning and we played 4 rounds of that. :)

After that, we had 11 for dinner that night with all the goodies that go with it - 3 desserts ended up showing up. :) Ultimately I couldn't even have dessert believe it or not. Not because I was stuffed (I wasn't really). I just couldn't look at one more piece of food. :0) It was amazing.

My parents had come in on the 22nd. So they helped to put up a lot of what still needed to be done. My father got the outside rigged up with what he could. My mom helped me inside with all the decorations, the dishes, you name it. We had gone out to dinner Sat night and sunday morning. I cooked Cajun Flank Steak (from cooking light) Sunday night. I then made filet mignon for dinner Christmas Eve night. Mom and Dad tried to convince me that ordering Chinese food was an ok thing. I said no way to that one. My brother later suggested it might have been because they had no good Chinese restaurants in their area, but I chose to think it was because they felt it was too much work :). *shrug* either way we had filet's. Christmas Day breakfast was a Dutch Baby. Lunch was meats spread out on a counter and people making their own sandwiches. Dinner was the traditional turkey spread. :) All were satisfied it appeared and we were happy to have our house back to normal by the end of the evening. Mom was awesome and did a massive portion of the dishes so I didn't have to look at them the next day. And finally,Mom and Dad headed home the 26th.

I've since then been basking in the glow of the peaceful aftermath - doing a few exchanges, getting the dog food that should have been purchased before christmas, but we were able to stretch it. :) Otherwise I've been happily sitting in my chair watching Dark Shadows Collection 13 in bliss. I have to start a new Cross-Stitch piece. I am behind already. I wanted to start making those little Amish quilts cross-stitch minis for each of the teachers for June graduation (Irene goes to Kindergarten next year). I think I have to make 6 by the end. We'll see if I make it. :)

Anyway, that was Christmas in a nutshell. We now contemplate whether to go to Tahoe for New Years. We're still debating. I guess I had better nail Marcus' foot to the floor on that soon. ;)

Off to go see the new Dr. Who Christmas Special. Happy Holidays to all!

Just Shoot Me and get it over with

There comes a time in our lives when we're just fed up with everything around us ( as much as we love it ) and just hold out our arms wide and say "Shoot me". Today feels like that. I am so stressed out and soo tired that I can't deal with anymore. I can't even work. I slept well last night so I have no idea other than hormonal issues what is going on.

so I say: "Just Shoot Me".

Disneyland: Arrival Day Sunday

So Sunday we flew down to Ontario, CA airport and got a Budget Rent-a-car to take the three of us to the Inn in Anaheim. We decided long ago that we weren't going to tell Irene about going to Disneyland until after we had flown down (or at least on the plane). She figured out from over-hearing Dadda that we were going somewhere on a plane. We were fortunate she didn't pick up anything else. :)

She was fascinated by the idea of renting a car and kept asking questions about "the white car" and why we didn't have Momma's or Dadda's car. :) It's been funny what she fixates on. Anyway, half way down I-57 I turned around (I was not driving), pointed the camera at her and we told her together that we were going to Disneyland. Photo snapping ensued as she went from dawning of recognition of where she was going to, insane jubilation, to oh my goodness I can't control myself, to I'm the cutest of them all. I'll dig out the photos tonight and post them here. :) They're adorable.

Funny enough, though she didn't talk about Disneyland after that. She needed to talk about the hotel we were going to stay out. She absolutely wanted to get into our hotel room. We arrived at the Fairfield Inn (see previous post for link) at around noonish. We were able to sign in, but our rooms would not be available until 4pm. Well... no nap for her today. We grimaced. April, Andrew, Mason, Geran, and a close friend - Brian, also were there. It was to be all the cousin's first time in going to Disneyland. They too grimaced as their 2 year old was sound asleep in the car outside. The hotel was kind enough to provide a spare room for them to put him down for a nap for a couple of hours. The rest of us ended up going to Downtown Disney for the afternoon and cruising. Much to Irene's distress, we didn't get to our room. She talked about it over and over and over for quite some time after that. :)

Our hotel is about 1.5 blocks away from the Disney entrance. Was a perfect walk (so long as you didn't have to carry around a 37lb child). We did nothing but walk while we were there. The car remained cold the entire time we were there...well cold to certain amount. It turned out to be 85 degrees down there the entire time we were there. Clothes had not been planned well *sigh*.

We walked down to Downtown Disney and spent $$$. Picked up a sweatshirt, t-shirt, and a photo book for a friend at Irene's pre-school. The store was huge!!! I took pics of the front of it. Again, I'll find and link here soon.

We walked further and found a French restaurant that made benet's (sp?). We all shared them and watched the kids dance to 80's music. Got tons of pics. Hubby then decides that the powdered sugar left in the goodie bag was too much to simply throw away and promptly ate most of it. :-O . Got pics of that too. :). We walked around some more. Saw the end of a wedding at the Disneyland hotel. Unfortunately I was too slow with the camera and ended up getting a blurry pic of Cinderella's carriage drawn by a horse with the couple in it going down a path. It was just beautiful!

We saw the Koi ponds around the Disneyland hotel and then went in and messed around at the arcade they had there. I realized that while we were walking around in there that it had been there that I had gone with my Junior High School Band to play. It was great to remember something for once. ;)

We finally got to our hotel and threw our shoes off for an hour to allow the steam to roll off. Irene was thrilled with the sleeping arrangements and we found that we had an adjoining door between ourselves and my hubby's sister and her family. So that was cool. The cousin's got to play a lot as a result.

April (Marcus' sister) had gotten reservations for 13 of us at the Naples restaurant in Downtown Disney that night. It was a nice Italian place that was entertaining from the point of view that the kids got to see them making Pizza. It was a lot of food. Irene had a hard time as she was on "borrowed time" with having had no nap. She wanted to do anything but sit still. A nice person came around offering to make animal balloons. She got a butterfly wand which thrilled her. Those that were there included Aunt Ellen, Uncle Kenny, Brian, Mason, Andrew, April, Marcus, Irene and myself. I think 4 of us got lost in the shuffle as they didn't end up making it till the following night to coordinate dinner etc. So 9 ended up being for dinner that night. We walked back to the hotel and prepped for the following day. We got Irene down for bed by 8:30pm and we followed around 9:15-ish.

Sunday: the beginning of a lot of fun yet to come. :)

Happiness is a child at Disneyland

Well we made it to Disneyland and had a blast. As you can see from the above picture, Irene just really enjoyed every single minute she could. I have so much to tell and probably should break this down to multiple posts. So I'll go with an overview of our schedule on this posting.

Sunday: Left morning from San Jose Airport and arrived in Ontario. We drove to Anaheim to our hotel called Fairfield Inn . It was located just across the street from Tomorrowland. We pretty much walked from there to Disney everyday - it was great! Spent the afternoon in Downtown Disney - the free way of walking around Disneyland without being in Disneyland directly. More details in another post.

Monday: Got up at 6am moaning and groaning because we were so sore from walking. Picked up a quick light breakfast at 7am so we could get into Disneyland at 8am. We hit Main Street first and ran into Pluto (above), got his autograph along with several others. We had reservations for Breakfast with the Characters at 9:50am. After that we were pretty much in Fantasyland and Tomorrowland for most of the day with a break mid-day for a nap. More details in another post.

Tuesday: Got up again at 6am, not nearly so sore. We were on our own today. Monday had a lot of people we were enjoying Disneyland with but didn't get through a lot of rides. So we made up for here. We got over there at 8am only to discover you had to have an early pass to get in, otherwise you got in at 10am. *sigh*. So we went to breakfast at IHOP instead. Expensive breakfast - don't go unless you're really that desperate to be in IHOP for the sake at being at IHOP. We made it into Disneyland at 10am and discovered our child was a speed demon. Matterhorn is her favorite ride, along with every other speedy ride she could make it through. No nap today as the park closes at 8pm. So we did *everything* we could and had a blast. Our closing part of the evening was getting onto the Peter Pan ride and then walking down Main Street. We stopped off in the Emporium there and got a scrapbook for the trip. During that short interval, Irene fell asleep in Daddy's arms and we had the perfect exit to a wonderful dream come true. I wish I had taken a picture of that one one. Didn't even think to. Oh! I did get a gig and half of other pics though ;).

Wednesday: Our trip home on the plane. We found out the night before that I-57 (one of the highways we had to go down to get to the ONT airport), was to be closed for a simulated terrorist attack on the Angel's stadium *rolling eyes*. So we got up at 6:30 or 7am. Brought quick McDonalds to our room and attempted to pack up all the goodies and our dirty laundry from the trip. We were able to do that and get ourselves to the airport before any issues occurred with the highway. We sat happily and had some snackies, played with our PSP's, watched Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on another PSP, and finally boarded our flight home in happiness.

I purchased a whole bunch of things for all of us, ranging from clothes to toys. I have to say it was the first vacation in years that I wasn't ready to go home afterwards from. There were a number of reasons, but the biggest one was: We were all together doing something as a family that involved us and only us.

I think I hate computers...

What do you think? Maybe a job change to east coast where I could actually make a living working in a stitching store???

*grumble*

Britain's Stupidest Laws

This was a great read! If you need a funny, click here.

Halloween 2007

Well, at this time last year, there was "much ado about nothing" to quote a phrase. Last year was the kicking and screaming child of 3 who was afraid to even go to the door to hand out candy. This year, you ask? Perhaps a pic would be helpful:


Yup..she's a happy camper. Needless to say we went to The Vineyards with Amber, Chris and the girls. It was adorable and fun. I had not been into Skypark or anything remotely similar so was not prepared for what I was going to encounter. It was truly a lot of fun. We went down only one square block of the place and still came out with a large stash. :) She came home and said, " Momma, I am veeerrrrry hungry." I asked her if she wanted a sandwich. She looked at me with a serious face and said, "Yes momma, I would please." And she snarfed and entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich. :) We then had to hit the neighborhood for a small amount of time after that.

Oh, during this time, we ended up leaving candy out for the kids asking them to take 2 per person. We found we were cleaned out when we got home (fortunately we didn't use the entire amount so we could still hand out some more). When moving around to the other houses around the neighborhood we talked with friends who said we didn't have a lot of kids...so we were cleaned out by ones that didn't understand the concept of honesty :(. Oh well. it's what I expected. I know Marilyn said last year they had even taken her nice bowl she had left out. I left out a ziplock container. That was left :)

OH!!! Pumpkins! I have to post our pumpkins! I did two this year.

Tinkerbell:














Malificent

Change and worry

So I have determined that Fate/God/ conspires to make sure that our household is shaken up when things are relatively calm and complete feeling. What is the point of this other than to create angst? To make us learn that change is a good thing?? What the heck!? All it does in my case is send my blood-pressure through the roof and bring the household down to it's knees because it's so disorganized I can no longer cope because change conspires to make me feel that this is so.

I know I don't make sense, that I am just rambling, but am trying to get the angst of change and the worry that goes with out out of my heart so I can think clearly. I really do love the people around me but every now and again there is something that goes astray and I just can't handle it.

I think it is time for Dark Shadows and cross-stitch to reenter my life again. I've lost my center of being.

4th birthday pics available

Well I finally got my act together and got Irene's 4th birthday pics up from a week ago Saturday. Still need to do the thank you notes - hopefully Sunday. I am making progress finally. Here is where to find the pics.:

Irene's 4th Birthday

Enjoy!

and yes..I am working on getting the La Fondue party pics up as well. Patience...patience

Getting excited about Irene's birthday

I am about ready to run around screaming I am so jazzed about our little one's 4th birthday. :) This morning I was way stressed out worrying about food and organizing everything. This afternoon after having a good lunch at El Palomar Taco bar, going over the list with Amber, and going to Trader Joes to find alternative lower fat foods for the party, I am finding things are much better now. :) Still debating on getting my entenmann's cream cheese coffee cake - we'll see who wins out...will power/pocket book or my need for my favorite coffee cake in the world! :)

Anyway..back to the grindstone..but had to pass it on. :)

Amish Quilt Picture

Well, here we go! Here is one of the latest pieces. This is the Rainbow Amish Quilt. I've added it to my Flikr photos. Hope you enjoy! Click here.

BTW: It ended up not staying in my house for very long. I ended up giving it away as a gift this weekend. :) I think I am destined to never keep the pieces I make. Oh well. I enjoy making them.