A Day In My Life

Some people hate to cook. Some, like my mother, seem indifferent, and some people, including myself, love to cook. I even enjoy cooking festive holiday meals for family and friends. My mother usually wants to go out to eat on holidays, so now she comes to our home, and is very complimentary about my efforts in the kitchen.

I am a dedicated list-maker. To Do lists, appointments, grocery lists and others keep me organized. Because of my computer’s recent down time, I have (re)discovered another handy use for lists. I had been keeping all of the zip files I downloaded in a folder on my hard drive, but when the drive needed to be reformatted, those files vanished. I have backups stored online, so I’m not too concerned about getting them back.

We moved into our home November 15. 2007.  What a year it’s been!  We celebrated with our next door neighbors, who moved in at the same time we did with a dinner Saturday. We signed a one year contract for our internet service provider (who was, at the time, the only one in the area) because internet access is essential.  The rates were fairly reasonable, but the service was not as dependable as I hoped for. So, when the contract expired, we found a new ISP. The new one costs less, service is much better, and there is no long term contract required.  Despite a glitch over the weekend that has been resolved, I am happy with the new ISP.

Ah, November!  So much is happening this month:

November 2: Back to Standard Time for most of the US. Did you set your clocks back?

November 3:  My stepdaughter’s birthday

November 4:  Election Day in the US, and our tenth wedding anniversary (and the anniversary of 13 years together…pretty nice being able to have two anniversaries in one.)

November 11: Veteran’s Day…Remember to thank a veteran for his/her service.

November 15:  The first anniversary of owning our home.

November 27:  Thanksgiving Day in the US.

And the countdown to Christmas begins . . .

I recently updated Firefox 3 when I was prompted to do so as I opened the browser. I forgot to backup my profile before I updated, so I’ve spent some time getting things in order. Normally, I use MozBackup, and I keep a copy of my bookmarks in a folder on my hard drive.

After a few weeks of being so frustrated I couldn’t even look at this blog, I decided to log in today when I was setting up a new online start page for Firefox.  I logged in, and…it just works. I even upgraded to the newest version of WordPress, and the sparkle is back in my day. I don’t like to be without my blog! And it’s so much better on my own domain.

This weekend, Jay hung the breadboards in the kitchen, and hung some utensils above the stove for easy access. He put borax into a smaller container that fits into my basket on the dryer. Today, I worked on organizing my personal cookbook (a loose leaf binder with divider tabs, with the recipes in plastic sheet protectors). It isn’t fancy, but at least I don’t have loose pages any more.  I’ll do more work on it as I go along.

I continue to be keenly interested in frugality and getting and keeping things organized since we bought our home.  This weekend, we moved a microwave cart that had been in the office into <gasp!> the kitchen so that we could move the microwave off the counter.  This opened up quite a bit of space so that we can work on the counters.  There’s still more to do, but it will be fine.  Organizing is an ongoing process.

I am sometimes not a patient person. I notice this when I am beginning any new project: I want it done…last week.  And so it is with this blog, since I’ve just signed up with a paid hosting company. I know, logically, that it will take time to get things set up and working the way I want them to be.  I just don’t like it not being done yet.  I need to back up a couple of steps and do some reading and study help files and such.  So it will be a while yet before I am ready to really start working on moving my other site to the paid host, never mind creating any new ones.