I posted a while back about going down to one car. I’ve had some people express some curiosity about how I’m handling it, so I thought I’d update the situation. I’ll try and do this every here and there.

I’ll be honest. It’s not easy. But there are only two days most weeks where it takes any extra effort.

The first is on Thursday mornings. That’s the day we had already had Ariel signed up for gymnastics classes. They aren’t within walking distance and taking a cab is impractical when you think about dealing with car seats for two children.

So I take my husband to work first. The trick is that he is supposed to have a car, so I have to return it to him and have him drive us home after class. Read the rest of this entry »

Many people who want to work from home consider mystery shopping. The idea of being paid to shop sounds wonderful. But then you hear about some of the scams and just have to wonder if it’s really worthwhile.

Mystery shoppers go to assigned stores, restaurants, apartments and more to evaluate the service at each place. They may or may not be required to make a purchase. The shopper must carefully remember as many details as possible about the shop, most especially the names they deal with, and write a detailed report about it.

Despite it sounding pretty easy, not everyone will succeed as a mystery shopper. Sometimes you’re one of too many available mystery shoppers in your area, and the demand just isn’t there. Other times the available jobs just aren’t close enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Second time I’ve seen this on my own forum. Someone tried to spam it by making a post and creating a second account to reply to it, trying to make it look like someone was interested in the post.

Folks, these things just don’t work that well. Especially today’s, which was about something to carry laptops. Don’t bother looking for the post; I deleted it.

The first people who tried it fared somewhat better. I didn’t delete the post, just the link. You see, the post in that case would have been entirely acceptable if the link had been in the signature, rather than an obvious ad in the post.

[tags]forum spam[/tags]

Just kind of fun to see it up and about. Just follow this link if you want to see the Postie Carnival. Kind of fun to figure out what these carnivals are.

I’ll have to keep an eye on the carnivals to see how well they generate traffic and such. That’s always been one of the things I need to work harder on, so I’m always glad for a new tool in that area.

[tags]postie carnival[/tags]

This is an interesting idea, and I want to see how it will go.

I’ve submitted a couple posts to blog carnivals. One is a blog carnival just for people with PayPerPost, and if you want to join in, you just have to be a Postie. The deadline for this one is Sunday, 6 p.m., I think, so you’d have to hurry to join in.

If I like how these go I may try starting one for myself. It’s an interesting idea and it looks like people have a lot of fun with it.

[tags]blog carnival,payperpost,posties[/tags]

This week they started us off talking about the Poway school system’s PEPP program. I don’t recall what the letters stand for, but it’s a 2 year kindergarten program for kids who are on the young side for attending kindergarten. Pretty neat idea, as they explained the advantages.

The kids in PEPP are in a class together, so they don’t remain behind as classmates move ahead. It’s supposed to really help those kids who just aren’t emotionally or intellectually ready for kindergarten due to their age.

We did eventually get to the rest of the program. We talked a lot about how children learn from repetition. They had the kids sing three different versions of “Itsy Bitsy Spider”, changing it to the Great Big Spider and then the Very Happy Spider. So real quick I’ll share how I’ve been doing that one with my kids as a tickle game. I think you can figure out how the fingers and hand should go through the song: Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of those controversies that never ends. The question of whether it is better to be a working mother and provide a more comfortable life for your family or be a stay at home mother and always be there for your family.

Good arguments can be made either way. The reason for this is, to me, pretty simple. Whether it is right for a woman to work outside the home or stay at home depends on the woman and the situation.

In today’s world, not every woman is going to be happy or comfortable as a stay at home mom. Girls don’t grow up in this country with that as their only option. Asking them all to stay at home is demanding that many be miserable. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in early December I mentioned that I was getting a replacement mouse from Logitech. I was pretty happy at the time, and joked about getting it the slow way.

I didn’t mean that slow!

Yes, it finally arrived today. I had to call in again to find out what happened, still no idea exactly, but the guy did manage to tell the people in charge of it to get moving on my mouse.

On the plus side, it feels sooo good to have my mouse back.

[tags]logitech mouse[/tags]

They were talking about working moms versus stay at home moms. Pretty much the usual routine where both sides tend to criticize each other unmercifully.

One of the toughest points you have to think of with this is the situation many hiring managers deal with. It’s hard on a company to hire someone who then takes maternity leave and decides not to come back. My oldest sister works for Microsoft, and they were much concerned about whether or not she would come back after her maternity leave. It’s a big problem for business.

However, there’s nothing fair about making all women pay for the chance that they MIGHT choose to become stay at home moms. It’s like penalizing people because they might take the experience they get at your company then go work for someone else. That happens all the time too.

These shows rarely pay any attention to the work at home mom, and I always wonder why. I find it to be a great alternative to having to choose. Yes, there are sacrifices; you have a lot more to get done during the day and you do need to figure out how to cope with being a parent and working.

[tags]Oprah,stay at home moms versus working moms[/tags]

I think I’m going to have to implement this on all my blogs! I just love it!

If you blog for long at all, you quickly realize how completely out of control your archives can be. Mine were stretching down quite a distance on this site, longer than the posts on the main page of this blog. I really hated how it made the page look.

I found a page on the Wordpress site that tells you how to make a dropdown archive list. This after trying and failing with some plugins. You do have to be able to understand the HTML and PHP in your sidebar.php so that you can place things just right, but it’s really not that tough.

Probably the only thing that I’m not 100% satisfied with is that the right sidebar seems to be loading a bit slower. Aside from that it works beautifully.

[tags]wordpress,archives,dropdown menu[/tags]