kadyellebee

I'm working on decorating my house. Not only for Christmas, but just getting things pretty in the house in general because my In-laws are coming for E's birthday in a few weekends. So of course, I put a lot of expectations on myself, wanting pictures on the walls and everything in its place. :D

I have two walls now with pictures on them, bathroom mats and towels that match in several places, and our house is really looking nice. We even have a blow-up matress for the guest bedroom, so that legitmately makes it a guest bedroom and not just the "extra box storage room with the extra couch and TV :tv: ." ;-)

Christmas decorations are fun in a new house; I got in a rut of doing the same thing for several years in a row in the last place, so its fun to start some new traditions. We got new Christmas tree ornaments and lights (pearlized button ones from Target that were pretty) and it took no less than 4 tries to get the lights on the tree.

1. First, I started putting them on and ran out of lights before I ran out of tree.
2. Then I put them up and they looked too sparse. We decided to wait and get a 3rd strand
3. Got the first 2 strands back on and looking pretty and plugged in the new third strand and only half of them worked, dispite E's playing to try and get the little metal leads in the first light spot to not be crooked as they were out of the box.
4. One more try, with only 2 strands, to try and make it not look sparce and not make E have to go and get another set. not bad.

Of course, when I do that, my hands and arms get all poked up - can you imagine how it works after 4 times? :D

Next big job is to figure out how to get the lights around the door outside to work. We have a plugin outside for the first time, and so I want them around the door, but it will require drilling some holes in the door frame to mount some little hookies to attach them with!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! :musica:

My to do list is actually getting crossed off :check: from the busy weekend of work, and that's really a relief. And in between that, we even started our Christmas shopping, so I have a good idea for almost everyone on the list, and some more ordering to do - I think that most everything else will be shipped, but I want it all in process by the 15th. Woo!

I don't think I'm gonna get to my pretty faux treatement I want to do on the small wall downstairs. I was hoping, but now with one more trip planned between now and then, I think I'll just concentrate on the things I know are important. One ugly wall left over from the last people isn't enough to stress about. I *do* have the paint now, though, so it won't be left too long after Christmas!

Getting ready to go to CA for a long weekend (and Thanksgiving with E's family). Until we get back, you can watch my TypePad moblog for on-the-trip posts and pictures. :)

I've even got a few of Leah from tonight to add to that, she was being a cutie as usual, and DUDE, she walked like 5 steps while we all sat in the livingroom and watched! It was her first real series of steps more than one or two little ones, and we smile and were so excited that Megan and me both had tears! I wish I had caught *that* with my camera!

Have a beautiful thanksgiving to all my friends who celebrate!

I've been so busy that I didn't even notice that my delicious links weren't showing up here for the last 5 or so days. Ooops. So if you missed me my links, scroll down a bit and you'll have a few nice days at once. :)

I put together a few pictures from Saturday night - Pumpkin Carving 2004... I had to take advantage of TypePad's new Halloween Photo Album Styles!!! :pumpkin:

Can you believe it, though? We had no trick-or-treaters! We live in a really nice condo complex, with kids that are here regularly, and nobody elses porch lights were on after dark, just us. We were *sure* we'd have some this year, so now we have a huge pile of candy. :LOL:

I had my first doctors appointment in a long time where I left and she was happy with me (think 3-4 years).

By now, you've probably noticed that my posts have looked a bit different lately. I've had a hard time keeping up with the things I want to share, and the time I've had to share them has been limited... So when I saw :meredith: starting to make posts with delicious, it cried out "copy me!!!" because it was easier than PIE! :)

del.icio.us is a link sharing tool. And they recently opened up a new way of automatically posting your bookmarked links of the day to your Weblog (using Movable Type, TypePad, and maybe Blogger).

You can do this too. By setting up your own del.icio.us account, and then going to http://del.icio.us/settings/USERNAME/daily where you replace USERNAME with your username, it gives you an option to set up your own "thingy" that posts the information to your weblog at a predetermined time. The instructions for each of these thingy controls can be found in a post on the delicious-discuss list: preview: post to an MT blog from delicious.

Now, once you have that set up, you can easily post by snatching one of the del.icio.us bookmarklets or use an extension in FireFox, or FeedDemon to make a fast post. With all these options, its easy to do a quick 30-second addition of something, including description.

Since I already had a category in kdlb-links for my link blog (Express Links), I just made a subcategory of that called delicious so it would easily be added into my blog. This uses a few plugins, Compare and Global Listings, to already put that one category from kdlb-links into kadyellebee. I added some CSS to enhance the listing to my main "basic.css" stylesheet that all skins load up.

When I want to talk about something cool I find, I click my bookmarklet or use whatever delicious tool is closest, and come up with the quickest tags (keywords that I think of when I access this link - usually something like "home improvement" would be written like homeimprovement to keep the spaces separating it from making a new category of home and improvement) and then a speedy comment like I would have in an Express Link. This literally takes no more than a minute, and then whenever delicious checks my bookmarks again, they get posted. No need to open a window of MT to post (my host has had some problems lately and I'm timing out a lot, so that needs my attention when I have time again!), it just does it.

A few things, though... Citations using this are harder because I'd always like to mention where I found it, but there's not a good place for that. So I've been putting a text URL in the commentary like via amanita.net even though it doesn't link back to :meredith: I'll have to do some more looking to see if I can find a better way to do this.

And its not real time, but that doesn't really matter as much - if I really want to share something instantly, I can still make my own post, no biggie.

So yeah, its been a happy week because even though I haven't gotten to blog much, I've been able to share a few quick links that were interesting to me. Yay!

Perodically, I come across a little quiz I just *have* to take :D It's made to go along with a book about cooking for a date but the images are fun and the questions made me smile.

I am the Girl Next Door

The Girl Next Door is from a small town, a large family, or both. She still has a healthy dose of what people 'round these parts call "family values." ... The defining characteristics of the Girl Next Door are simplicity and tradition.

Take the
"What Kind of Girl Are You?" quiz at CookingToHookup.com

Follow up on the The Third Annual Blogger Boobie-Thon for Breast Cancer - Our total raised...drumroll please...was $8696.30. That's over $1650 more than the total take for the 2003 event!.

That's just so awesome! :)

How do you know when you are really old? When your littlest brother turns sixteen. Maaaan, I can't barely believe that!

The kinda sad news to go along with that is that my parents got a notice to vacate their house in 30 days (from the 11th). We moved into this house right around Matthew's 5th birthday (11 years ago). So this was the last birthday party/holiday in the house that has been the most memorable for most of the kids. Hopefully they'll find somewhere they will be happy living, even if they have to move somewhere temporary while they look for something that will work to buy.

I love it when I see a commercial and *actually* can find out info about it by googling it. :)

Toyota has a commercial right now with a tire that drives around by itself, and there's a beautiful song going on in the background; the singer has a beautiful voice, totally my kind of music.

And so I googled for toyota moving forward commercial song and found one hit wonder's forums, where others mentioned this song. The singer is Kathy FischerFisher and its a song that will be on her album next year.

I'm gonna have to watch for that! :)

edited to fix the spelling mistake on her last name!