Exceedingly Mundane

Whew, I finally finished going through all the digital photos I took on our vacation to Washington DC and got them uploaded to Snapfish. I haven’t used Snapfish before, and I’m crossing my fingers that the quality will be good and I’ll be happy with them. Because, I just uploaded 160 photos to be printed out and mailed to me. I hope I didn’t just goof up! At 12 cents a copy, the processing fee was good, but boy – they slapped a nice little shipping fee on me, over $8.00. All in all, not a bad deal, and it sure is nice to sit here and do it all from the comfort of my home and then have them show up in the mail. I hope they’ll be here in a week to 10 days. I’m anxious to see the quality and how they turn out! It sounds like a lot of pictures, but I took a whole lot more than that, and I had to whittle them down. The big thing is that we saw so many sights and went to so many museums, monuments and buildings. We covered a lot of ground in those 5 days!

I realize a lot of people that read my blog are not as “techy” as Tim and I are. I thought this was a mildly interesting article about just how many people out there (according to the latest survey) haven’t heard of and don’t know what the terms “RSS feed”, “podcast” and “phishing” mean. 🙂 Might make some of you guys feel better to know you’re totally NOT alone.

I, on the other hand, am familiar with all of these terms personally. I have been “phished” before, I upgraded to the latest version of iTunes so I could download podcasts (and I currently have two or three I download regularly and listen to, on my PC or iPod), and as long as I’ve been blogging, I have had an RSS aggregator that collects RSS feeds of some of the favorite blogs and sites I like. So there. 😛

Click here to go read it for yourself. In case the link is not working, I will post the text of the AP news story in the extended section of this post. Just click the -More- button to go read it.

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Next up, the Meme

Appetizer
What kind of car do you drive? If you could make an even trade for any other car, what would you want to drive? Currently driving our Pontiac Bonneville. She’s going to get traded in soon though, I think for a new Ford Explorer. I don’t have any kind of a dream car, so I don’t know what I would pick if money or gas mileage wasn’t an issue. 🙁

Soup
Take your phone number and add each number together separately (example: 8+6+7+5+3+0+9=38) – what’s the total?
Home: 33
Cell: 36

Salad
When were you last outside, and what were you doing? Went out a few minutes ago to make sure the attic fan had kicked on. Tim went up to the attic last night to look for something and said the fan was not running and the attic was hotter than hades (my words, he said it felt like it was 150º up there). I checked this morning, and it was running, which is good. We’ve replaced it once already, and I know Tim does not want to get up in the attic in July in Mississippi and put in a new fan!

Main Course
What is your favorite restaurant, and what do you usually order there? These questions are so hard for me, I can’t narrow it down to one. One cuisine maybe. OK, since I’m hungry for Chinese, I’ll say Golden Dragon in Madison, and get the Shrimp and Cabbage.

Dessert
Name 3 things in which you occasionally indulge. Tiramisu at Italian restaurants, Krispy Kreme donuts while we’re on vacation and new scrapbook supplies! 😀

Next one, from the Friday Fiver website:

Pet Connection

1. Are you a dog or cat person? Dog person, most definitely

2. How many pets do you have? Zero. At the moment, trying to patiently wait on Tim to get another dog. I want another dog. Soon. I miss Sally

3. What’s the best thing about your pets? The unconditional love and companionship they offer. Plus, dogs are such happy creatures, they are always like “Oh. My. Gosh. You’re HERE, I’m so happy to see you!”

4. What’s the weirdest thing your pet has done? Well, Sally used to “hump” her bed, so odd to see a female dog do, and it was rather embarrasing when people were over. We used to say she was scratching her butt. 😀 She mostly only did it when people came to visit, I think she was feeling awkward or something. The best thing she did was bring in the morning paper every day!

5. Plans for any more pets? Oh yes, I will always have dogs. I want one now, if you’re reading this Tim. 🙂

P.S. Click the -More- link if you’d like to see a picture of my sweet Sally girl, taken less than 2 months before she passed away. I still miss her so much 🙁

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Now, it’s a feast of memes on Friday! I haven’t been able to find as many lately, and I’ve been wondering if the way of the meme is dying a slow death in the blogosphere. Then, I go look this morning and find several I want to do.

So buckle your seat belt, here we go! As always, please feel free to post your answers in a comment, or put them on your own blog 😀

First up, from Stacy’s blog, the Aloha Friday Meme:

How often do you clean your house? Well, I have a routine of certain things I clean on certain days. For example – Mondays are vacuuming and dusting days. Tuesdays are towels and bathrooms day. Etc. You get the picture. I do something every day, cleaning or laundry or both, and try to stay ahead of the game. I don’t do “deep cleaning” very often – moving furniture to vacuum under them, cleaning windows inside or out (actually, I NEVER clean the windows), etc.

How much water do you drink every day? I’ve been working really hard on this lately. This week, I’ve aimed for 3 big bottles a day, 72 oz total. I hit that 2 or 3 days, and the other days I had at least two, which was 48 oz. It’s an uphill struggle for me, but I’m trying to climb it.

Mixing things up again…what DVD should we add to our summer viewing list? We just rented Miss Congeniality II the other day and I thought it was light and cute and sweet, similar to the first one, but maybe a wee bit better. One of my favorites out of our collection that is so heartwarming to me is the David Duchovny/Minnie Driver movie “Return to Me”. Very charming and sweet in an old-fashioned kind of way.

I’ve been working on a new style for my blog… I’m hoping everyone else sees it and not just me! Let me know if you see the same thing (blue, green and white) or if you see my new look.

By the way, if you do see it, there’s a nice little sentiment attached to the picture at the top. That’s an old barn with a really old hay rake in the middle, down the road from Tim’s parent’s house and church. We stopped there one day this year, late spring, when everything was pretty and green, and Tim let me take some photos. I really like that picture, and decided to see if I could incorporate it into my blog. So there it is! 😀

Apparently, my hummingbird feeder full of sugar water is attractive to all of the birds in the area, except for the actual hummingbirds. I’ve actually been trying off and on for a couple of weeks to take a picture of the sparrows that frequent my hummingbird feeder. I finally sneaked up on one today, which is odd. Normally, they fly off, and normally there are 2 or 3 on this feeder, rather than just one solitary bird.

Can anyone help me figure out how I can actually attract hummingbirds to this, instead of the sparrows? I mean, I have two bird seed feeders up around the yard for them, but they drink from this one all the time. Not that I mind, but the hummingbirds won’t eat their bird seed, it doesn’t seem fair that they drink all the hummingbird’s sugar water 🙂

I just won $1.00 on the instant prize at Iwon.com. It’s not much, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get it, but hey, it was nice to win and have them say they will send me my prize. Obviously, I’d much rather be winning bigger things, but hey — I’m the kind of person, after all, who will stop in a parking lot, bend over and pick up a penny I see on the ground. So, a buck ain’t too bad! 🙂

Stayed busy most of yesterday working on blog stuff and other stuff behind the scenes on Hambones. Always something there to keep me busy! Well, I should say us because Tim always ends up helping me out, and fixing stuff. Thanks Tim! 🙂

Elizabeth came over last night after work and hung out with us for a while. She did some laundry, tried a new recipe we had for supper (Italian Tortellini Stew – it was really good!), and then watched a movie with us (Wimbledon). She left to go rent some 24 discs from our Blockbuster. I hope she and Chris can come over soon and hang out; we miss seeing them.

I went this morning and got my hair cut. The lady that cuts my hair is having PC problems, so I offered to help her out and look at her PC. No promises, I might not be able to fix it, but I’m more than willing to try to help her out. She’ll probably call tomorrow morning when she gets to the salon, then I’ll go pick it up and see what I can do to help. I think she has spyware and viruses on there, so hopefully that all just needs cleaning up. She has some data that she hasn’t backed up, so I’ll try to get that backed up to a CD for her. I hope I can help her, we’ll see tomorrow.

OK, here’s a question and a comment for those of you who listen to audiobooks. I know audio books have been around for a while, but I had never actually tried listening to one.

I went to the library last Friday and checked out 2 audio cd’s, and have already ripped one to my PC and transferred it to my iPod. I started trying to listen to the audiobook last night at bedtime. Now, granted – I was in bed and getting sleepy. But boy, I had a terrible time trying to concentrate and retain anything I had heard. Is this common? Something I need to get used to? I seem to retain information a lot more, I am starting to realize, if I see it written. Is it just me, or is anyone else like that?

Chime in and let me know if you love audiobooks, hate them, couldn’t care less, and whether it took you a while to get used to “listening” to someone else read a book, rather than just reading the darn thing yourself!

Well, there’s not a lot going on worth blogging about. Well – not that there ever is! Let’s see – here’s a few tidbits:

1. The little bird we found last night didn’t make it, I don’t think. I checked on it till dark last night and it didn’t move. I went out first thing this morning and it was about 2 feet away and looked like it was dying. Apparently it’s mom or dad didn’t come back to put it back in the nest or take care of it. At least one of the neighborhood cats didn’t get it. I checked on it a couple of hours later and couldn’t find it… so, we’ll hope for the best, but I’m afraid the worst has happened to it. 🙁

2. I’ve been working today on my blog… look for a new style to come online shortly.

3. Also working on some other stuff for the main site of Hambones… look for those soon too. Including a surprise!!

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Along with the cute pictures that Amanda sent me of Ethan and Abby (that I posted about last night, and are now added to the photos section of Hambones), she also sent me a couple that had me in it.

Now, that might sound weird, but it’s not. I’m always behind my camera and there are hardly ever any pictures with me in it. Which, most of the time is fine by me. I’m not photogenic and I don’t particularly like to be in the picture. But, being a scrapbooker and looking back through pictures I have taken since I was 12 years old, I realize the need for me actually being in some of the pictures sometime! Otherwise, if I die, people might not remember me at all without a picture! 😯

Amanda was sweet enough to send me a good picture of me and my dad on Father’s Day, one of me by myself with my beloved little camera (which I’ll spare you of, since it was just me), and this one of me with Abby, who was not quite 5 months old, but such a big, pretty girl!

Thanks Amanda! 😀

I just loaded some new pictures on the Photos section of Hambones that Amanda sent me last night. She has some 4 month photos that she took of Abby a while back (she turns 6 months old in a few days!), and also some of Ethan dressed up at church, over the July 4th weekend. They are so cute, and really great pictures! Of course, I’m not in the slightest bit biased in any way. Go check them out and see for yourself!

Well, a few minutes after Tim brought me the flowers (which of couse, I took a picture of and was back in the computer room, trying to blog about) – he came back inside the house and started calling for me. I thought, gee, did he pick me more flowers or is something wrong?

The answer is ….

He found a baby bird out by the big tree in the front yard! He apparently scared it and he said it was trying to walk out into the street. He scooped it up and brought it inside for me to see. My first experience with a displaced or injured baby bird (no, I didn’t have much of a childhood!).

He got me to get a shoe box and put it in there and had me go look on the Internet to find out how to care for it. Well, every site I went to said first thing to “return the baby to its nest or the area you found it”, and its parents would take care of it. They all seemed to discourage keeping the baby bird and trying to care for it. I went back outside and told Tim, whom was none too pleased. As he pointed out to me, we have a lot of cats in our neighborhood, and that baby bird might be one of those cat’s supper. And he’s right – I went to put the bird back out by the tree where he found it, and sure enough, across the street, there is a cat peering up over its fence. I am afraid now that my baby bird won’t make it through the night. I sat out front for a while, hoping to see its parents come back, but no sign of any bird, just that darn cat.

Tim thinks it is a baby dove, by the way – what does it look like to you guys?

P.S. Ok – update, Tim is still out weedeating and edging and I keep going back and forth, checking on my baby bird. It hasn’t moved one inch. I’m afraid it’s hurt or its parents aren’t going to find it in time and one of these neighborhood cats is going to get it. 😥