Shower time and Happy Fourth of July

This last Thursday we had a blast! At least I know I had a blast and I think everyone else did too. Matt's two aunts on his dad's side, Shari and Lil, came over, Mirisa, her mom, and her sister Meghan came over, and we got to work on the shower invitations. What fun we had decorating! Lil showed me some good ideas and Mirisa and Meghan had fun going through the buttons... Even Matt made an invitation. Lil was given the title of "editor" since Mirisa and Meghan liked the buttons, but didn't like to do ribbons... LOL! They were all pretty neat, some were very, um, creative, yeah, that's it! The showers (ours and Mirisa's mom's) are less than 2 months away! I think they're going to be fun! I've got to dig out some more ideas for games, and get the door prizes, and get my house clean... (bleah), but I can't wait to see all the stuff the kids get. They're busy right now trying to find another place to live. I wouldn't want to be in their place right now. Rent is so expensive, plus you've got people scamming like crazy for rental property on places like Craig's list. I hope they can find something soon.

Meg was home for the weekend. That was so much fun. We played a couple games of Scrabble, one with grandma that was - interesting... lol! The weekend went by too quickly, that's for sure. Maybe it's because I'm working? Yeah, probably. My holiday was the fourth and it was my weekend, so I've been stuck at home since Thursday night. Steve took Meg back to camp today - too early for me to get up. I got up at 10:30 when somebody I don't know rang the doorbell... What's up with that? Visiting at 10:30 in the morning?

Toby gave us a little scare this weekend. He started bleeding and we discovered a huge lump right underneath his belly band. Turns out he had an infection. Of course our vet was busy and couldn't see him, but Steve took him to the vet clinic on Dodge Street where we had Sophie's nail fixed once and they did a good job, they drained it and irrigated it, and he seems to be doing much better now. Poor buddy. It probably didn't hurt him since he's paralyzed, but it scared us! He has to take some antibiotics for a week or so more. I'm just glad he' okay. He may be ornery as hell, but the house would sure be quiet without him!

Better get back to work - that's all the news that is news!

Ya gotta wonder

I had to laugh at one of my mom's facebook postings today - in response to my sister saying it had been 30 years since my grandma passed away - mom says. "I miss her too". Oh my heavens. I'm surprised that woman hasn't been struck dead yet. She MISSES her? I guess that means she misses telling her that she stinks and needs to take a bath, or she misses yelling at her for maning messes at the dinner table, or misses just being mean to her. When my grandmother came to live with my parents she had cancer and had fallen and could no longer live by herself. My mother made her life a living hell. Grandma smoked - a lot - probably second only to my mom, but mom made it pretty clear that grandma had to stay in her room - a 12 x 12 bedroom, gets pretty gross after you smoke 3 packs of cigarettes a day in it. When she would come out my mom would complain about the way the room smelled. Well what the heck to you expect? She would tell grandma, "You stink, go take a bath" in words that sounded like daggers. Never things like, "Mom, you need to go wash up". Never an offer to help her, as grandma was getting quite forgetful. No compassion whatsoever. She treated grandma like dirt. Then, after she had a stroke and mom put her in the nursing home, that was the end of that. On her birthday she sent grandma's birthday card to the nursing home with my other sister, didn't even call her own mother to wish her happy birthday. Grandma shed quite a few tears that year, that didn't bother mom in the least, I'm sure. At least she didn't have to deal with the "stink". And now mom misses her. I guss that's why she has grandma's ashes stick back in the back of her closet huh? What a hypocritical witch. But hey, it looks good to her friends of facebook, doesn't it? "Oh poor me, my mother's been dead 30 years and I miss her so much".... Bullshit. She probably didn't even realize it was the day until Melanie said something. And now Melanie wants to grow up to be just like her mommy. Wow. That's something to aspire to. Go for it Mel.

What the heck is the matter with me?

I was totally beaten down in a battle of wits with my comptuer tonight and I don't like it. I'm trying to decide when I became so stupid. Seriously. Was it the car accident where I was knocked out for half an hour? Is it because of all the darn medications I take, which I hate becauase I still feel like a pile of dog poo? What???!!!

I bought a program last fall that was "so easy" and "so much fun" to use. Yeah. Whatever. Last fall it was frustrating but I figured I learned my lesson. Whatever. Consider it money spent and a lesson learned. Don't buy before you try.

Fast forward to this summer and I'm trying to get Mirisa's baby shower invitations to cut on my Cricut - because it will beat the heck out of handcutting tracing and cutting 35 invitations with arthritic hands! It sounds so easy.... Open your template in Inkscape and change the file type to .svg. Check. Open Sure Cuts A Lot, import your svg file and presto! It will cut on your Cricut! Wonderful! Except when I import my svg file and open it, there's nothing there. Nada. Okay, I sent the file to my friend in Arizona who also uses Sure Cuts A Lot - hereafter referred to as the damn program. She set up the file in svg cut it out herself on her Cricut, and sent it to me. It doesn't work on my Cricut. It cuts out 2 forms, one about 1/3 of an inch inside the other one, doesn't make the neck hole at all, and doesn't do the scoring line, but starts making about a hundred little cuts on the margin. What the heck? I thought maybe I needed to update my damn program, which did have an update when I checked. So I updated it. Guess what? Now the new file that Karen made comes up blank when I import it into the damn program.

I'm absolutely and completely baffled. I went to the SCAL forum and asked for help, but when I was looking at some of the answers to questions that others have asked, I'm not even sure that's going to help me!

See?
in InkscapeCheck the Outline View by selecting View>Display mode>Outlineto see if it looks like what you want to cut If the Outline View does not show as expected then...If you imported a bitmap (jpg, png, bmp, gif, etc.) did you autotrace it?If not, select it, then Path>Trace BitmapIf you autotraced, did you delete the bitmap version, and not the vector version. (You will see a red x in outline mode if you accidently deleted the vector copy)Did you convert text into objects?If not, select text then Path>Object to PathIf the Outline View does show as expectedthenHave you ungrouped everything?If not then select all then Object>Ungroup repeatedly until the message at bottom of screen says there are no objects to ungroup.(You can use Path>Combine but SCAL doesn't like Grouping)If the infobar indicates clipping, do object>clip>releaseIf none of that works then-Double check that the file you imported was really an SVG. Check this (and prevent future occurences) by not selecting "All Files" in the file type menu of the Import dialog box.-Make sure all objects are within the page boundaries. (Press 4 or View>Zoom>Drawing to check for stray objects or parts of the image that extend past the page boundaries.)-Make sure that all shapes are converted to paths (select each shape, then Path>Object to Path)-Make sure the image is made up of closed paths, Inkscape can not cut lines, per se.-Resave the document as Plain SVG (as opposed to Inkscape SVG)-Select all, then copy, then open a new document and paste.-Select all then change the colors (click the color bar at the bottom of the screen).


It's all greek to me! lol!

the end of a perfect weekend

We had a great weekend! Mom and Bob's subdivision had a garage sale this weekend so I sold some stuff, made some money, and bought some more baby stuff. I made more than anyone else at the sale, gotta love that! My best bargain when I was shopping myself was a nearly new play pen for 5 bucks! Woo hoo!

Last night Amber scared the crap out of me - calling at midnight to see if I could watch Vince today while she and Jason went to the North Carolina vs Arizona State CWS game. After I recovered from my heart attack I said, "Of course I will"... Can't lose that favorite aunt status... Not that it's particularly in jeopardy at this point in time. Steve was in Lincoln today shooting, so Vince and I had a good time. He didn't want to eat bologna for lunch until I told him it was a hot dog--really, what's the difference? Then he took a 3 hour nap! I kept checking on him and he kept sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping. What a good kid. He got up just before Steve got home, so we all spent some time outside - see above pictures! He's so darn cute! While we were outside he had a snack of graham crackers and milk, and just after we went in Amber and Jason got home, so it was a good day! The rest of the afternoon we just didn't do much of anything, finished watching a movie and read a book, and that was about it.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to tackle the Sure Cuts A Lot - again and if I can't get it to work I'll have to find someone who can help me. Maybe in their forum online. Steve finally figured out what I was doing wrong - trying to get the file to transfer from Inkscape to SCAL, but when I opened the file there was nothing there. Rats. We'll get it. We are not cutting out 30-some baby shower invitations. We are NOT!

That's about it, I guess. The weather has been cool and not so rainy the past couple of day, only in the 70s... Nice. It rained all day Friday though, until early evening. Kind of drowned out the garage sale. I wonder how much more I would have made if the weather had been nice? Have a rheumatology appointment tomorrow with blood work and all the good stuff. Can't wait. We'll see how THAT goes! I hope she has some better ideas than Minocycline for this stuff. Wish me luck.

Dad had a cortisone shot in his knee a week ago Friday and on Tuesday this week he had an MRI, kind of anxious to see what they found out with that. I'll have to give him a call tomorrow and then his doc, if he hasn't heard yet. Hopefully they'll be able to decide if it's his back or his knee which is really causing the pain and we can find out how to take care of it. It seems like you're always waiting for something, doesn't it?

94 days and couting...

Until the baby is here. I know it probably feels like a long time to Mirisa, but it's going pretty quickly! Sis, Mirisa, Meghan (Mirisa's sister), and Beth (Mirisa's mom) and I all got together last weekend to make plans for the baby shower, which is only a little over a month away. Sis brought some darling invitations over with her that we're going to make. I'm going to get out my Cricut again this weekend - it's been in hiding since we cleaned the carpets, and see if I can't get my Sure Cuts A Lot to work with the template Sis had. When she helped someone else make the invitations that she brought over they cut them all out by hand.... Oh no. My hands wouldn't work for a month after all that cutting, so I'm hoping I can get the template to work. July 2, Sis, Gloria, Mirisa, and Beth are going to come over and we're going to work on decorating the invites. I'll have to post some pictures, they're darling!

Other than that not much else is new. We've had a ton of rain and it's been cool for June, so I've been aching like MAD! A couple years ago when Steve suggested I try to get disability I wasn't ready, I was hurting, but still pretty much able to work without too much pain. That's all changed in the past couple years, now I'm ready to try and the country is going bankrupt, so I really don't think I can! With my luck disability will dry up and then what would we do? In the meantime, I'll keep slogging through work and try to make the line count every day. I do great the first couple days of the week, but by Friday, my line count is dismal, which of course brings my weekly count down. Sigh. I'd look for another job, but what would I do?

On the bright side I did take some photos for a friend a couple weeks ago. Her son turned 6 months and she wanted some pictures. I told her I'd love to try, but didn't know how well they'd turn out. Not all of them were great, but we got enough good ones that I hope she was happy with them. She put them on Facebook and is using one of her and her little guy as her profile picture, so I think she was pleased. I had a good time visiting her too and got to know her a lot better. She's the Primary President in our ward - has been since Chantal moved back to Utah and this was really the first time I had really gotten the chance to sit down and have a good talk with her. It was fun. Wish I could do photography for a living! I love doing it. Maybe I should get my certificate in family studies or genealogy or whatever and work on that for other people. Something enjoyable for a change would be great!

Meg is up at Camp Cedars working at the Boy Scout camp for the summer. I think she's having fun. Hope she does find any ticks attached to her while she's there. She found one while she was house sitting in Crete - she was crying and really upset. I told her how to get the tick off without pulling its head off and once that was done she was vastly relieved! I can now call her "The Tickless Wonder". ;-)

Well, Steve is finally home from work this afternoon. I'm fairly certain all the garage sales in mom's neighborhood have been thoroughly washed out, so I'm going to head for Michael's or Archiver's and look for some double-sided cardstock for the invitations! Whoo hoo! Nothing like a little retail therapy to make a girl feel good!

And another dog dies because of an irresponsible owner.

I feel so sorry for this little boy and his family - and realize that he will carry these scars for life. However, I don't entirely blame the dog. I blame the owner for not having control of the dog and not having socialized it before this happened. Pit bulls aren't any more dangerous than any other large dog. Being so large and so strong they must be socialized and the owners MUST be responsible for their animals. Both of my sisters have owned pit bulls and they were both the most gentle, friendly dogs you could find and both were raised with children - one of my sisters had twins while they had the dog. The only time that dog showed any sign of aggression was one day when I was bringing my then infant nephew to my house - she wouldn't let me out of the house with the baby - even then all she did was growl and refuse to move from in front of the door.

I have dachshunds and while they have never bitten anyone, I have to say they are more likely to bite a stranger in my house than my sisters's pit bulls ever were, they're very protective of us. As a matter of fact, a Cox repairman was at our house today and he said the only time he'd been bitten on the job was by a dachshund. Any dog can and will bite, it's not just pit bulls. It's sad that this dog has to pay with its life because of an irresponsible owner. I hope the former owner buys a fish if he/she wants another pet.

Ferocious week from hell...

I hate the weekends I have to work. I know I've mentioned that already, but it doesn't seem to be getting any better. I'm grateful I have a job, I know a lot of people don't, but I still hate working weekends. Nothing gets done (workwise) on the weekend - she says while blogging when she should be working. Steve went to a gun show today in Grand Island - still not home at 5:40 p.m.! The cable guy had to come and work on our phone and was here for 2 hours. I had the dogs locked up in my office, so I couldn't work while he was here because I had to stay out of the office to keep them from getting riled up, plus he needed some help with figuring out whether the jacks in the house worked or not, so I was running from room to room plugging his little gizmo into the wall jacks while he worked on them downstairs.... Then Meg brought home food from Taco Bell - laugh if you want, but I like Taco Bell...

By the time the cable guy left, Meg went to to errands, and the dogs had been released from prison, it was 4 o'clock. So great, now I get to work until midnight again. Grrrr. I like to be done with work on Saturday by 9 or so. Oh well, that's life.

So achy today. The weather is finally warm, but we had a cold front come through last night and trigger some storms. More due tonight too. Yay. Hydrocodone is starting to become a staple in my diet. Not sure I like it, but whatever works.

Took dad to the doctor yesterday, he's doing great, but his knee is still bothering him. His orthopod thinks it's his back and not his knee, which it probably is. He rode a police motorcycle for years -and that was years ago. Motorcycles weren't made then the way they are now, I'm sure his back is screwed up. He had just gone to his regular doctor and found out he has arthritis in his back. I knot, too, that when my back is hurting it goes down my leg and makes my knee hurt. He goes on Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. (what the heck was I thinking?) to have an MRI of his lower back and left knee, just to make sure it's not the knee itself. He had another cortisone shot, but he would like something definitive done - unless it includes knee replacement, he doesn't want that! lol!

Mel spent a week with mom and went nutso on us again. I knew it was coming, she'd been acting squirrely for a couple weeks anyway, which she always does when she's around mom. She was going through another "I don't want to be married" phase and then went to see mom. So much for that marriage... Oh well, I'm not the only person who saw that coming. My mom is miserable, so she sure doesn't want anyone else to be happy, besides that, leaving your husband is so easy, why not? God forbid she our dear mother try to counsel her child to do the right thing. I have to laugh though because Mel has said time and again that she and John probably wouldn't have gotten divorced if mom hadn't stuck her nose into their marriage and tell Mel how John was never going to amount to anything and Mel would be better off without him. Now she's done the same thing with Dan - but mom is always right in Mel's eyes. That's too bad, really.

Anyway, she's cut off communication with all the rest of us - again. Dad is a little concerned since she's his power of attorney. Dad thinks she probably has told her mother all about dad's private things, and she probably has. On top of that all she won't answer anyone's phone calls, including dad - which makes her not a very reliable POA if we needed her for something. Exhausting. It's like living in a soap opera!

All is good though, we have our ups and downs and have a good life in spite of it all! All you can do is pray for strength, right?