Day to Day

Sorry. Still Alive. Thanks

1 Comment / Christmas, Daily Dose, Day to Day, Family Funk, Friends & Family /

I’ve been meaning to blog, really. I have. I was going to blog about the kids and Christmas and the teens at CVS pouring over the articles about Jamie Lynn and I was going to blog about Bhutto but now I’m not.

‘Cause even though The Plague is slowly releasing its hold on me, and I feel tons better – I still feel like crud and I’m wicked busy with work and we’re at the beach in this really fantastic beach house and all of my family is close by, (well except Chris, and he raked leaves at my house yesterday so I’m going to bring him lots of gifts when we go home).

So yea, still alive, thanks for asking. Light blogging at least ’til I get this resolutions post written, projects launched and contracts created. After that, we’ll see.

Photos and video are coming, that I can promise. New camera and loads of Flip Videos to share. Wii Boogie, hysterical to video tape – just sayin…

Sorry. Still Alive. Thanks Read More »

I’m all about the bling…

6 Comments / Christmas, Daily Dose, Day to Day, Family Funk, Love or Sex, Memories /

Ha. Not. So totally not about the bling.

The car for Christmas wasn’t inexpensive and it was nice but it wasn’t the best gift TW has given me.

The really expensive and very special 40th birthday party was fantastic (even if I did end up having to do all of the work for it, ahem) but again not the best present (sorry Melissa and travelers from far away.)

I’m not sure I know what the best gift was, there have been so many…

1) The photographs from the newspaper, printed and framed, that TW described to me in those very early days. (want to see a picture?)

2) The carved jack-o-lantern she sent to me via USPS for Halloween.

4) A little pillow book with TW marshmallowy sentiments tucked inside.

5) The quilt, oh lord the quilt. TW doesn’t sew – or even cut straight – but I have a tiny practice quilt and a full sized quilt made by her own little hands.

6) The little book of, well, more marshmallow fluffy conversations that she and I have had. Very sweet.

7) The socks. Errr. So I don’t actually have those yet. She’s been working on them for 9 months because, again, she doesn’t knit. Or she didn’t ’til she decided she needed to knit me a pair of socks. But, she’s working on them and I might have one sock by Valentine’s Day. And I will love that one sock a lot more than any piece of jewelry, not because I don’t really like jewelry but because it really IS the thought that counts.

Forget the bling, give me a sock instead.

I’m all about the bling… Read More »

IKEA Orlando

Daily Dose, Day to Day /

I just realized that I never blogged about our visit(s) to IKEA Orlando. Oops, my bad. I got really distracted by Jenn’s visit, TW’s trip to Atlanta and my own hectic work week. So let me try and hit the highlights for you.

First, IKEA Orlando does not have Swedish pancakes or lingonberries for sale in its cafeteria – yet. They just have the boring scrambled eggs etc… and cinnamon rolls. HMPH. The cafeteria workers have indicated they will be selling them, they just didn’t know when. I guess maybe they have to be taught how to make Swedish pancakes or something? Though TW made them from an IKEA mix this morning and they tasted exactly like IKEA’s so it doesn’t seem to hard. Whatever. I was disappointed.

Also, going to IKEA Orlando on a Thursday, a week after Thanksgiving, was not as horrible as I was afraid it was going to be. It wasn’t very crowded at all.

IKEA Orlando is either sold out of a bunch of stuff I would like to have had or they never got a shipment of those items in the first place. Not sure which it is but it was slightly troubling. How can they have Billy bookcases in brown/black but not have the height extension units? Annoying!

IKEA Orlando has self-checkout stations – a ton of them and they work OK but not super great, particularly if you purchase something from the “return – as/is” room. IKEA Orlando could use 2 fewer self service lines and 2 more cashiers, particularly on weekends.

IKEA Orlando on the first Sunday in December was frightening…from the parking lot. When we pulled in, there were cars parked in the empty field in front of IKEA. Scared the hell out of me. But as I drove through the parking lot I realized there was a ton of side parking and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. Still more crowded than our Thursday visit but not as bad as I’ve seen IKEA Atlanta on a Saturday.

IKEA Orlando felt smaller than IKEA Atlanta – is it? Or was it just my imagination?

IKEA Orlando changed a ton of “room” displays between the time I visited on a Thursday and the time I visited on Sunday – three days and a ton of rooms were completely different. I was really surprised. How often does IKEA change a room display in general???

IKEA Orlando’s returns & exchanges personnel were very fast and very friendly – BOTH times I had to visit them. On Sunday, there were 11 people ahead of me in line and I was afraid it was going to take hours. Instead, it took about 10 minutes. Amazing.

Overall impressions… pretty darn good and I’m not just saying that because I like the idea of a two hour drive better than a five hour drive.

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Flipping for Flip Video

2 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day /

For the last year or so I’ve been thinking about Flip Video. Not in any serious way just in an I’m sort of interested way. TW’s been thinking the same thing. Nothing ever pushed us into buying one and trying it it out, though. I should have taken one to BlogHer Con. We should have taken one to England when we visited the little kids. But we didn’t. We were still wondering about it and thinking about it.

Around Thanksgiving, I started to see Rosie blogging about Flip Video. Interesting. The woman takes a lot of photos and a lot of videos and here she is raving about Flip Video? I got interested all over again.

Then, we realized TW was going to be in Atlanta on the day of RJ’s holiday concert. I started thinking more about the Flip Video – particularly once I realized I was not going to Atlanta with her and Michelle’s video camera (that I’ve never learned to operate) had been loaned to one of her friends. I went back to Rosie’s blog and looked again at her videos… Flip Video wasn’t going to be the perfect solution to recording the missed moment for TW, but it was worth a try.

So, I headed out to Office Max (where they just happened to be on sale) and grabbed one. And it worked pretty damn well.

Even though I was like 15 rows away from the stage in less than ideal lighting. The sound was really good and the video quality was good enough from that distance that you could actually make out which kid was ours.

Awesome.

I don’t feel like I can post the videos publicly because there are tons of kids in these things who may not want to be blogged so we’ll make some little videos and I’ll share them as we go. In the meantime, if you’re wondering whether Flip Video is for you – check out Rosie’s videos, they’re all being done with the Flip – even this dolphin flick.

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Gratitudal Inspiration

4 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day /

Hmmm. Who came up with this question about gratitude? Definitely was not me. It’s not my style, obviously. I mean I can write about gratitude and I could even do it seriously but… I look at Mata’s post and I’m thinking anything I saw will fall a little flat. Mata’s post, it’s too much for me. (She’s like that on the phone too, by the way. Seriously. All real and spiritual and thankful and honest, that’s who she is and guess what… I’m grateful for that! Totally. I need people like Mata in my world.)

Anyway, back to my own gratitudal post. Is gratitudal a word? WordPress doesn’t seem to think so, but it doesn’t think wordpress is a word either, which always amuses me. I am easily amused, which I’m grateful for. It doesn’t take much to amuse me, or TW, or the kids. I like it when amusement comes easily. Working at amusing someone else, or myself, seems wrong. I’ve done that, tried too hard to amuse, and I’m grateful that I’ve learned my lesson and won’t be doing that again any time soon – or ever. (And no, it isn’t a word but an awful lot of people online seem to use it – maybe it should be added to the dictionary next year?)

Errr, I keep getting distracted from gratitude, don’t I? The obvious friends, family, health, etc… very obvious but I do realize that some people aren’t nearly as lucky as I am. I’m grateful, I swear. Even when some of those people drive me nuts (and they often do) or someone around here isn’t quite as healthy as we might like or someone else THINKS he/she is not as healthy as he/she might like (which also drives me nuts), I’m grateful. Yes, grateful for hypochondriac, drama kings and queens – definitely.

I could talk about BlogHer but that would be bragging and really long and far to marshmallowy and I really don’t do marshmallowy, long, braggy posts. Just trust me – gratitude, serious gratitude, goes out to BlogHer – the site, The FOUNDERS! (ha, got that exclamation point in didn’t I?), (and the FOUNDERS! mothers), the editors, the readers, the bloggers, the commenters, the advertisers, the conference attendees (and Kristy)… Also, sometimes I’m even grateful for the BlogHer spammers. Seriously. Some of them are quite inventive and amusing (see that paragraph up there where I’m easily amused.) That gratitude goes out every single day because at some moment every single day, it never fails, something reminds me of my old life, my old job, my old world and… Amazing. Awesome. Grateful.

Life is good.

Now, anyone up for a list of things we ARE NOT grateful for? Or is that totally wrong?

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Something I hate more than leaves

5 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Pet Peeves /

Remember a few months ago when I raked and raked and raked and raked and I ranted about leaves? Well today I found something I hate even more than I hate leaves – acorns.

I’ve actually always hated acorns. TW likes to tease me about the sky falling ’cause I used to rant about acorns when I lived in South Carolina but this acorn problem in our yard right now, it’s much worse than a little bit of sky falling.

Raking up acorns. It’s the pits. And pretty much an impossible job. Unless there’s some special sort of acorn rake that I don’t know about. Is there such a thing?

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It’s a love/hate thing

4 Comments / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Family Funk, Kid Talk, Travel Log, Work /

Michelle had some long discussion with TW about me, my “new” job and my travel opportunities. Apparently Michelle is hoping that BlogHer will send me on many, many trips because she is sure I love to travel and have really missed traveling.

Errr, ummm, weird, right?

Michelle came to this conclusion because I am always encouraging HER to travel and she thinks this means I wish I had traveled more.

Dude. I traveled. A lot. And still travel. A lot. More than I’d like.

It’s not that I don’t like going to new places or visiting friends and family and really cool people (like the BlogHers on the west coast), it’s that I’m a creature of habit and it’s hard to maintain habit when I’m traveling.

Take this last trip to California. Awesome, except for the really crowded flights and that whole orange juice spilled all over me – twice – and the really annoying woman who not only spilled OJ on me – twice – but argued with the flight attendant and many travelers about our flight being delayed because she did not understand that her cell phone was displaying east coast time rather than west coast time.

Awesome except my carefully created schedule was out the window and I really hate that. I hate not getting up, getting a cup of coffee and getting to work on my email, my blogs, my boards, my life.

This is why I don’t do vacation very well. I always feel like I should be doing something else, like my email, my blogs, my boards, my life! Business travel makes me feel the same way. It’s a problem, I know. I should get over it and just chill. And I do, mostly. But there’s always some niggling little thought in my head that if I was at home, I’d be doing X and I really need to be doing X – that’s why I do it every darn day.

So no Michelle, I really don’t wamt BlogHer to send me traveling a lot. Once in awhile is good – really good, and fun. But I’d really rather stay home. I like it here. You, however… you should travel. A lot.

It’s a love/hate thing Read More »

Ikea fooled me

1 Comment / Daily Dose, Day to Day, Family Funk, Kid Talk, Pet Peeves /

Remember when we went to IKEA last month? Well one of the “children’s rooms” had a kraft paper roll hanging above a workspace. It was cool and I’ve been tempted to buy a paper roll/dispenser for Liz for years. So, we tracked down the silver paper roll that was displayed and grabbed a roll of paper.

I went upstairs yesterday to get it all set up and discovered IKEA had tricked us. The silver roll thingy is too fat for the paper roll. Huh. For a few minutes, Liz and I pondered the possibility of unrolling the paper enough to loosen the very tight center opening – but after rolling out about 20 feet of paper we realized that was not really a good solution.

Any idea what the solution to this problem might be?

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