Isn’t this sand sculpture awesome? I really admire people who can look at a pile of sand on the beach envision a sculpted creature or character. Next time I have a chance to play in the sand, I make give something like this a try. Maybe the head of a T-Rex or something not quite as elaborate as these dinos, but surely I can come up with something better than a couple of castle walls and a moat.
This week was tough on my system administrator. We have a handful of web sites to we’ve accumulated over the years, and I don’t have to worry about much because I have a great geek friend who has been nice enough to volunteer his time occasionally as my system administrator.
Most of what he does for me is helps out when there is an upgrade that needs to be installed. Until recently, installing updates on the blogging software has been a real pain in the neck. The updates have been flying at us – new versions have been released sometimes as often as three within 2 weeks. I hate that! So to install the updates, my system administrator has had to back up each web site, download the update, unzip the update, install the update and then test post or verify that the site is working correctly.
Now that some of my web sites are picking up traffic, he has suggested moving all of them onto just one dedicated server. At first I didn’t understand the advantages of dedicated servers, but I found some good information on the webhostinggeeks.com web site that explains it in plain English and it is starting to make sense to me now. And if that makes things easier for my web administrator, than I am all for doing it.
When I lived in California, I watched TV at night on the hotel TV with very limited TV channels. The local news was the main thing I wanted to watch, and then I would watch a channel that had a few shows I’d never seen, such as “What Not to Wear” and “Monk.”
As soon as I saw the first Monk show, I was hooked. I love the simple story lines and the fact that it was supposedly based in San Francisco made being in San Francisco a little more real to me. That probably sounds strange, but living in a hotel room for several weeks does not make living there seem very real. It was nice, but not real.
Tonight I saw a commercial advertising the start of the final season of Monk is this week. That makes me so sad. I like that show and it is sad to see anything good come to an end.
I think it is cool that Obama invited the Dumb and Arrogant Harvard Professor and the Cop Who Acts Stupidly to have a beer with him at the White House.
The whole thing has been blown out of proportion about race, and frankly I sick of the black men and women playing the race card when nothing else seems to help them get their way. This is 2009, not 1959. There will always been people discriminated against for a variety of reasons: gender, race, age, social-economic status, etc.
The real issue at hand was not about race and no one seems to want to address that. But at least the men had a chance to sip a beer at the White House. Bravo!
Where can I buy these stick people? I see them all the time. Not this funny, but I see them. Who sells them?
As we were growing up, my parents began to acquire houses all over the metro area. Usually they were small houses in decent neighborhoods that were in a state of disrepair and sold for a bargain price. The owners did not or could not make repairs to the houses and just needed to sell them. So my parents would buy them cheap and fix them up, then rent them out for several years.
Now that the housing market has tanked in so many places, the opportunity is here to build a portfolio of bargain properties like my parents used to do. People who have access to cash or have good credit are in the best position to make these types of investments. But what these people must realize is that becoming a landlord is also a business, which requires special insurance coverages.
Business Insurance is available for landlords to cover the properties against damage – which is different from covering the furniture and contents. Of course there are other types of business coverage, such as what shop keepers need or what doctors need, but the main point is that you need a special type of insurance for any business venture and finding the right coverage limits is an important part of your decision making. So we all need to learn as much as we can about insurance and decide what we need to protect.
Have you noticed that the colors of new cars have changed slightly this year? There are a wide variety of yellows and oranges added to the line of black, white, and red standard colors. And the blues are now in a wide variety of shades and hues. It’s like the rainbow has expanded quite a bit. I don’t know if this is because of all the new manufacturers and models, or if the bigger manufacturers are just desperately trying to find something flashy to get people interested in buying a new car.
Personally, I like the color green. I have a green cargo van and a green CUV. I’ve had other green vehicles over the years, including a Ford LTD and a Jeep. If I can’t have a green car, I would probably choose a white car. White is a cooler car in the summer heat.
When I first got married, we moved into a small house with no furniture, so my mother said that I could take my bedroom furniture with me. The only problem with that is that my childhood bed was just a twin size bed, and hardly large enough for me and my new husband to share. So the very first furniture we had to buy was a new mattress.
At the time I did not know much about furniture, especially beds and mattresses. So we went to a good store and asked a lot of questions, and laid on dozens of floor models to try them out. I felt like Goldilocks and the three Bears, testing all the different mattresses. Some were too soft, some were too hard, and the Beautyrest were just right.
The smartest thing we did that first year of being married was to buy a Simmons Beautyrest queen size mattress. It was perfect for us.
There are photos and videos or other people who look incredibly like me that I see from time to time. The most striking double is someone in the Chicago area who goes to all the Cubs games and sits just to the right of the batter. Those are premo seats, so she must be someone very special to be at almost every game.
Here is a photo of a group in New Orleans with one of my doubles. Evidently this is the staff of Toomey’s Mardi Gras, where I buy all my beads, and the photo is at the top of their web site. My double is in the front row wearing the purple shirt. Crazy!
I showed this photo to three or four people who all agree that this woman looks exactly like me. So I have a double in New Orleans!
I’m going to start posting photos of my doubles on this blog to share them with you.
The last time I spent any time in New Orleans was before Hurricane Katrina wiped out so much of the city. We had friends that lived just across the bridge and they invited us to stay at their house during our visit. I knew Proud Mary from many months of chat on the internet and she was a wonderful hostess.
While we stayed with Proud Mary, her son was working on one of the floats for that year’s Mardi Gras. When we got ready to leave, we were delighted to find that he had left a huge pile of Mardi Gras Beads on our pillow for us to take home.
I love everything about Mardi Gras, and have even bought beads at home for private parties, because Mardi Gras usually falls very close to my birthday in February. Toomeys-mardigras is the perfect place to stock up on authentic Mardi Gras supplies. They have everything from beads to masks to party decor.