chatter

I just got a new keyboard today. Really I guess I didn’t need one. The one I had wasn’t really that old but it was a gunk catcher. For an Apple keyboard, it wasn’t really thought out very well. The keyboard before that had black keys and I couldn’t see them in the dark as I usually keep my room.

Anyway, this is also an Apple keyboard. I am posting here right now to try it out. It is cute and slim. Too slim actually so I have the box it came in under it so I can type past the wrist guards. Here let me take the box away and see how it types. Hmmm, got to get rid of the wrist guard or something. I just noticed the screws under the wrist guard, maybe I can take it off easily. Why do I always grab the manual screwdriver when I have a lovely battery operated one.

Ok there, got the wrist guard off and I think it is now much better.

I also ordered a new Magic Mouse for the only reason of coolness. I like my current mouse. I went to the Apple store to check it out but they didn’t have them in yet. I then pre-ordered from Amazon.com but canceled my order after reading a not so good review. I will wait until they are in stock to try them out before I order one.

Yep, I think I like this keyboard much better then the old one and it shouldn’t get gross and dirty.

I think I am good, the transfer from iPower to Bluehost is complete. On Friday I pulled the switch to change it over. I got this blog and the family one all set and good to go but the photo blogs still didn’t work and I was at a loss. I finally had to let it go so we could go camping. I was figuring I might have to revert and go back to iPower if I couldn’t get them to work because I have to have my photoblogs and besides that is the whole point of the host change in the first place. Also today is the five year anniversary of the photoblog, I needed to celebrate not be shut down.

On Saturday we camped. It was cold and while driving to look for fall fest fun, it snowed. Last I heard the weather forcast was for 54 and sunny. What the heck was this snow stuff? I just talked to mom and she said she didn’t see anything mentioned in the news about snow yesterday.

We were heading to Marengo for their Settlers days. It ended up being one of those small fairs with carnival rides and games. It was lame and cold. We left. We then headed to Stades Farm where we got exactly what we wanted for a fall fest. Hollace loved the apple cider donuts but the main attraction at least for RAW and Hollace was the pumpkin cannon. It was a good time.

We went back to the campground and fired up the furnace and hunker down. Well me and Hollace did at least while RAW sat outside by the fire.

Today we came home and I figured out what I needed to do to get the photo blogs working and with a quick call to support for one snag, it was successful for at least the main one. I still couldn’t see the photos for the old one, the one that turned 5 today. After I realized that the photos from that blog weren’t completely uploaded, I uploaded and that one was good too.

Hopefully in a few days I can give iPower the heave ho. At the very least they won’t get very far trying to charge my credit card on Oct 23 (the day of auto renewal) cause the card expired.

T0morrow I have off. I just want to hang out but I think a trip to Ikea and Dick Blick is in order.

Oh yeah, with my new host I get a free domain. I am perfectly happy keeping my current domains at GoDaddy so I tried to figure out what I should get for the free one. I was pleasantly surprised that nancysward.com was available so I swooped that up. You can now access this blog with that URL if you want until I can figure out where else I can use it instead.

My stuff is propagating the world to the new web site host. Suppose to take 24-72 hours but it has been only 7 hours or so since I changed the nameservers and I see my blogs might be over here now. This is a test. Suppose to be camping right now but it is too cold and damp. The camper is already at the site 12 miles away. We will go tomorrow.

iPower is driving me friggin nuts. Any of my blogs (this one included) are seriously slow. Last week they had a 12 hour outage which was the push I needed to make my move and find a new host. What a pain in the butt that will be but it will be so worth it in the end providing I pick a good one.

Getty Images which is a major stock photo company, through Flickr, has invited 6 of my photos into their collection. Pretty cool. I am finally part of the exclusive Getty club on Flickr and have my stuff for sale on at a prestigious stock photo house. Here is my set on Flickr that shows the pictures they selected. The pool and the farm photos need property releases which I may never get. Now I can only hope someone can “buy” or license the photos I did get up there.

Remember the day when I use to update things here? How long have I had this blog? At least 6 years I believe. Well the Photoblog is almost 5 years old and the text one went on much longer. Maybe 8 years?

Goll darn Facebook and Twitter for taking over my blogging in 140 character bites.

Really the only reason I am here tonight is because I cut my fingernails and I can type like the wind now.

So while I am here let me catch you up.

The neices Sarah (15) and Emma (10) have been here all week. Hollace and Emma have been unseparable. Sarah has been my buddy. Fortunately she is a big reader so she is never bored like when I am at work.

Work this week has been a bear. H. has been on vacation this week and I was left with her nutty work load preempting my already scheduled stuff. Monday and Tuesday I worked a few hours at night extra and on Wednesday I went in at 6 am.

Tonight we went bowling. We had the bumper guards up so there wouldn’t be any gutter balls. After that the group in the lane next to us must of seen ours and got them put up too (and they didn’t even have kids with them LOL) and then later another group on the other side did the same thing. We are such trend setters. 😉

I joined Weight Watchers about 6 weeks ago. I lost 5 lbs in the first 3 weeks (vacation fell inbetween) then nothing. I pigged out on 4th of July so I am not surprised.

The week before the 4th, Dorothy stayed with us for a week. Poor Cloudy has been stressing out over all these house guests. After years of her being a good crapper, she is now a constipated kitty like Eloise was. The constipation isn’t from the house guest, that happened earlier when she blew her glands, but RAW seems to think she isn’t using her litter box for anything. That I believe may be stress related.

Quick recap on vacation: We went to Missouri. We really had no plan and for a short bit wasn’t even sure we were going to go anywhere. I flubbed up when I told the Missiouri BYB’rs that we were coming down. We stopped at the first in Missiouri (Chivre River) and didn’t venture out much. We didn’t get to see Kelly or Sarah cause they were just outside our realm of our travel (and it was so hot) but found out after the fact that Cheryl only lived 15 minutes from where we camped.

Well, I don’t know. I guess I am caught up, you can now go about your business.

I took a chance and upgraded WordPress to 2.8 (from 2.65) and my iPod from 2 to 3. The iPod went alright as far as I can tell but this WordPress thing didn’t. Well eventually it did. Now I have to get use to the new interface and then upgrade my photo blog.

Just got back from vacation and have to recap the week here. I will try and do that real soon.

Yes, quiet, shy little ole me. Since I am not outgoing enough to demand it I am passive about it through the web.

I finally out taking photos again. Getting that new camera didn’t hurt. I now have a lot of pictures I am putting up on my photoblog and Flickr. But I am wondering what is the point since I don’t think anyone really sees my photoblog and comments (read: attention) is down on Flickr.

I am taking these photos I want someone to see them damn it 😉

I don’t really know what I want or why. Or why I put the energy I do into it.

I waste a lot of time on Facebook (and Twitter to some extent). This is another attempt at trying to get attention.

Last week was Jim’s retirement party. There were two women there that are on my FB friend list. Both separately mentioned how I show up all over their feed. If you have lots of friend on FB then I am probably not that noticable but if you don’t have that many friends then your feed page gets cluttered with my nonsence. I told them both to hit ignore on me LOL.

Last week Rebecca roped me into talking about Hollace’s creativity at the first CN creativity showcase. It went pretty well even though I am not a public speaker. I am sure Vic made note that I am attempting to try to increase my visibility since he was going to help me figure out how to make myself known.

Really my attention/invisible thing needs some real soul searching and a deeper mention here but right now isn’t the time as it is time for bed.

On the lighter note, went to the Flight of the Conchords concert last weekend. It was so cool to see Bret and Jemaine live doing their thing. I kept thinking, I know what those guys are doing at this exact moment. I am so obsessed. Seriously, I think that is the Aspergers in me.

Speaking of which Hollace spent the evening at Deb’s while were are the concert. Deb mentioned that her daughter who is 3 years older could not relate at all with Hollace and made note that Hollace was a walking encyclopedia.

Hollace amazing me with the level of detail of one of her projects.

Creature club has been around for awhile but didn’t really take off like it has until recently. I suppose on one level this has been inspired by Pokemon but I think the “creatures” have been part of a made up game she has played with kids before she got into Pokemon.

To me it seemed to really take off when I bought some half size index cards from Office Depot that was going out of business. I gave them to Hollace and she promptly started making data cards of all the creatures–a picture on one side and data about that creature on the other. She loved making up new creatures and encouraged those in the club to make some up too.

[Ok, I just had a deja vu moment. A couple years ago when they started throwing around the term Aspergers, I read about some famous people who had this. One was the creator of Pokemon. I then looked up his story and the way he started Pokemon is eerily similar to how Hollace is approaching this CC]

Anyway, Hollace started the club and officially signed up a few kids in class. Before long she had about 30 kids all wanted to be in the club both in school and on the bus. She wrote out this quiz to test people’s knowledge of creatures. It had really well thought out questions, some multiple choice and two essay questions. She wanted me to make 30 copies. She also wanted some folders so she could make personal files of the members.

On the home front, she started teaching me classes of creatures. I had 4 long sessions where I took pages of notes. There were not only different types of creatures but their different environment. I wish I could find my notes of them to share here but I was amazed at the level of detail and how organized Hollace was in her teaching of these creatures.

We finally got a note home from the teacher telling us that Creature Club was starting to impact the class. Apparently everyone was into it.

For a couple of weeks Hollace shifted focus by then creating her spork kitties.

Every day at lunch Hollace would collect everyone’s unused sporks to create two gangs of spork kitties, the house cats and the alley cats.

I had this circle puncher and Hollace decided that that with yellow constuction paper, it looked like coins so off she was making creature coins. CC was back.

All of a sudden CC was a commerce thing with all the kids trading CC coins for stuff. Hollace started coming home with cool little trinkets that she bought from other kids in the CC store.

Right before Spring Break however Hollace caught a couple kids counterfitting CC coins and was ready to shut down operations, she was mad. They said they were just trying to help but she didn’t like it. She said, you can so tell they were fake coins cause they cut them out freehand.

When school came back after break, the kids were so excited the CC store was back. One girl apparently dropped to the floor and hugged Hollace’s feet in excitement!

Today Hollace is ready to quit the CC because of how the kids only care about the store part and not the actual creatures.

On Friday I found a list in her folder called “Hollace’s Hatelist”

1. U.S.A (I have to ask her again what this one means, obviously not too ominous or I would remember)
2. Home work (common fact)
3. Creature Club
4. Eryn… (she erased the kid’s name here)
   
5. Koalas (lately she has told me several times her dislike of koalas so I am not surprised to see it here)
6. Math (another common fact except when asked, she realized she should of put spelling on this list)

While Hollace is a little heart broken over the commercialization of Creature Club, she hasn’t given up on the real gist of it. Today we went out and bought some fabric. She wants to learn how to sew so she can make a Creature plushie!

The kitchen is almost done. We just need to put the trim on and get a refrigerator.

I finally went to an ear doctor for my itchy, flaky ears. After 2+ years, I couldn’t take it anymore LOL.

While there the doctor though he felt my thyroid was enlarged so he ordered an ultrasound. He called the other day and told me yes I had a goiter on the left like he felt (I still see the old text book in school with a big bubble in some guy’s neck) but the other side I apparently have multi nodules and a possible parathyroid. I have been resisting the urge to google needlessly. I went to Mayo clinic’s site and got some information that has eased my mind a bit only because I don’t have any symptoms so more than likely they take a wait and see approach. I need to find an endocrinologist now, one who won’t rush to surgery. I am a bit freaked out about that and from what I read in my case (as I know it) it shouldn’t be necessary. Also I am a bit unsettled that I now have an official medical condition and a bit worried about what else might be lurking unbeknownst to me.

One thing I did read on one site I did google before I stepped away from the computer was that a lack of energy, lack of focus and memory problems are a symptom of hyperparathyroid. I am such a slug who doesn’t want to ever do anything and I am sure I have expressed here how I feel like I can’t focus, that I must have ADD. And lately I have been worrying about my memory. It is always exasperated after seeing my sisters and wondering why I don’t remember half of what they remember from childhood. Interesting if a medical condition is to blame.

Work has been good and busy. That said, the severe state of the economy still has me worried. I lose my job, we are screwed. It is a good thing I am in with a health care company, it is one of the industries that is thriving. Well it was until yesterday. Abbott’s stock is down $6 in two days. I am not sure what Obama has in his package that is influencing the sell off. I hope it is just knee jerk and it will come back up.

I have been contacted by a greeting card company. They want to use my picture of Pam’s cat drinking a beer. Because they only want to use the body (with a different head) they can only offer me a flat rate for 5 years of $800. SOLD!

The Flight of the Conchords are doing their thing and making me laugh during all the bad stuff going on in the world. Thank you guys! They came out with their 2nd season. While I don’t have HBO to watch their show, someone is posting their songs on Youtube every week and the songs are better then last season. I got tickets for the Baizes and us to go see them in May. Should be fun even if we can’t actually see them because all I could score was crappy seats.

I don’t think I have mentioned my new life saver when it comes getting to work during bad winter weather. The train! I don’t know why I never realized this before. Probably because I use to work in a building 3 miles off site but now that I am in the main building I take the train. I walk over to the train in the morning and a shuttle bus waits when I get off in Libertyville. It does get me to work 30 minutes late (and it leaves my normal quitting time) but it is pretty nice. I was feeling like the invisible girl in the red coat as the train conductor on the way home never took my ticket and the other Abbott-eers on the shuttle bus are cliquey. I have been getting to know a neighbor better. Hollace use to play with her daughter in the park and we would see them at the beach (they live across from the lake). Anyway, very nice woman. She has been taking the train every day for 3 years now. I doubt I will do that but it is nice on occassion.