the pure interest

This just made my day. Any time I see people rescuing animals or other people it breaks and mends my heart all at once. Look at those poor kitties - they just don’t know what to do

Today I am tired, a little embarrassed (for reasons I wont disclose here), feeling kind of sickish, and overwhelmed by the workload - hardly any of which I can pass on to anyone else. It would be ok but everyone is on the same schedule and want things NOW rather than a week from now or two weeks.

I’ll tell you what, I’m really starting to look forward to Myrtle Beach.

Fitness wise, I’m going to be fighting temptation all day as my boss brought in a huge and beautiful strawberry pie, one of my big weaknesses. But then the payoff happened as I was drinking my protein smoothie when a coworker said “you need to tell me how you are losing weight, you are looking very thin today.” So, keeping that in mind, I’m going to keep doing this for today and tomorrow, then gradually start bringing some of my favorite foods I’ve been denying back into my diet again!

Today’s Meals:

Breakfast: Cottage Cheese and Raspberries (doing yesterday’s tomato omelet)

Snack: Mango Yogurt Protein Smoothie (had a banana/peanut butter instead)

Lunch: Chicken Curry -Broiled chicken breast with long-grain brown rice, veggies (cauliflower, garlic, tomato paste, curry)

Ok seriously no one has time to cook like that on their lunch break. gah!!

Snack: Celery with Peanut Butter

Dinner: Hawaiian Chicken Kebabs — this is sort of what I made with turkey last week… too bad no pineapple left and our grocery budget is TOTALLY GONE for June. NO more food allowed to be bought so I’ll have to make do with what I need.  (chicken, onion, yellow pepper, pineapple,  cherry tomatoes, vinegar, olive oil)

This is an old picture I took of cherry trees a few years ago (surprise, right?). It’s peaceful to me.

In June, I actually have some “profit” from freelancing, and I was deciding between a Wacom tablet or the new Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac. After reading some not-very-good reviews on Office 08, I decided on the tablet. I ordered from Amazon one that had decent reviews, was medium sized, and not ridiculously costly - so I am excited to work with it. It’s supposed to be here today! I hope I can do some new types of illustration and it gives me some more freedom I’ve been looking for.

I went roller blading by myself last night, and it was ok. The only things I hate about blading/walking at the penninsula are the clouds of gnats. I had to have breathed some in because I would notice I was plowing into them way too late! I did 6 miles in 45 minutes, which meant I was going relatively fast. When I sat down in the car I wasn’t sure if I could get my blades off I was so exhausted . . . but somehow managed to. Then, I went home, had some veggies for dinner, and did “3T - Totally Tubular Turbo” . . . yeah, sounds cheesy but it’s a great workout using resistance tubing for weight/strength training. About 30 minutes after being done, I noticed I was having trouble lifting my limbs and walking up the stairs. I guess it can truly be said that I beat myself with working out yesterday! But I needed it so I am glad!!

This was mainly to make up for the fact I went to Olive Garden yesterday with my sis and my hubs and had the new Chicken Milanese. I did give about half to Bri and Amy, so that was good. But it was unbelievable. Worth every calorie, bite, and bloated feeling afterwards.

Also LOST last night? Wow. Some questions got answered, which was crazy, but somehow I have a really hard time putting it all together still. I depend on the short reviews for stupid people so I can sort of get a handle on what I saw!

Tonight we have small group which is always a pleasure, and I think some new folks will be joining, so I am excited about that! Brian and I also need to find an air conditioner this weekend, which needs to be a priority, and I am searching flyers for the best deals.

Oh and update: I have no accent, because Erie is awesome:

Have a happy Friday everyone!

Thank you so much for all your compliments yesterday everyone. They really mean a lot - when I post these things it’s not necessarily to get a bunch of praise, but feedback either way, and of course the positive stuff is always appreciated!

So I’ve decided to start a .mac trial (60 days - I like that they give you a full two months) mainly for the “Back to My Mac” feature, where you can connect and control two (or more) of your mac computers remotely. I’ve had this need for the last few months especially when sometimes I’ll end up needing to work on agency work from home, and I don’t have all the files, so I end up emailing them to myself, etc. It’s just not efficient. In theory, .mac allows me to have not only storage space online (which I can’t say I’ve been too thrilled with - a friend of mine and I use it to transfer sermon mp3s and it often crashes my computer if I try to copy too much at once), but remote management of both macs depending on where are at. You can do screen sharing, but I’d probably avoid this since on Mondays and Tuesday there is another designer sitting at this computer and I don’t think she’s appreciate her mouse and folders being taken over by me Anyway, for $100 a year, if this works, I think it will be super helpful and very worth it!

Anyone else have experience with .mac that they could weigh in on?

Thanks - and have a wonderful Wednesday! GE Shareowners meeting is today, (big deal in our town) so I hope to go down to the convention center later and get a look at all my agency and some other vendor’s in towns hard work in helping GE put it together!!

Please prepare for a very linky post.

Thanks to KT for this font game reference. I was proud of myself for scoring 30 out of 34!! It’s interesting to see what you recognize. Some were easy, some trickier and had to be done through process of elimination.

Last night was spent watching some tv, American idol (I thought Mariah Carey was a great mentor), while online with my bloggy friend Tina who was helping me make the dynamic lightbox script work. I couldn’t figure out what i was doing wrong, and after about 5 tries of completely redoing the script, I finally just used Tina’s version, and it started working There are a few kinks in it, but I’m almost there, and Tina stuck with me for 2.5 hours online!! I seriously don’t know what I would do without my web designing and techy friends to ask for advice sometimes… thanks for being there for me. I’ve learned so much from you and you help me get out of sticky situations a lot, I owe you.

Yesterday was a little hard… my husband was discouraged about his job, and then I had sort of a depressing day for my business; I was scared because I was on hold on so many projects, I literally had nothing to work on. I have invoices out, and about 5 projects in the works… but I don’t know that any of them will be able to be paid in the next month, which means forgoing the small additional salary I give myself monthly out of my business account (I just paid estimated taxes so there isn’t much cushion). But then around 6:00 pm, I got a cold call from a referred client who wants me to help them do a small website in the next 2 weeks. This is such a blessing, and to top it off, it’s a Christian client who wants to promote his evangelism missions! It won’t be much, but it helped boost my confidence that God is providing work for me and to just keep calm, keep working on administrative things and promotion when I am slow, and trust that things will pick up. And the small cash flow will help. I also have two small wedding photography projects coming up that I know of this year, and that is also really fun stuff!!

It’s so funny because at my agency job, things are so crazy, I feel like I could work for weeks and not finish everything. And yet, here I am, blogging.

To work with me!!

Hey everyone! I had a rough day yesterday. I’m not sure where I caught it but I had the worst 24+ hour bug I can remember, complete with nausea, the desperate need for Immodium AD, no solid food, dehydration, and a 101.6 fever. My mom had to come over and take care of me while Brian was at work. It was just such a rough and weird day. I can’t describe the feeling of being so uncomfortable and weak, and unable to do a darn thing. Including so many plans of spring cleaning the yard and lots of work. The bright side is that I did drop 3 lbs from it!

Back to normal life today. Before the virus set in, I spent the weekend at IKEA then doing a small remodel of my kitchen! It was a small cost, $60 for the shelves and screws, $10 for Behr paint in Ashwood, and about $30 for a few new accessories for the shelves. I went from this blank and non-useful wall (old picture, sorry)

to this new fun shiny functional and cute wall:

Thank you, thank you Anyway. I need to make up for all the work I missed yesterday. So here I go!

Do you remember when I posted when I first started this blog how much I wanted one of these?  Well it only took 8+ months, but I finally picked one up from IKEA today! So far I really like it. The mechanism for putting it at a downward angle is a little annoying, because it’s either straight or down so much my mouse falls down. But other than that its really great and I love how I can raise and lower it so if I want to lay down on the couch I can put it at the right level, or if I’m sitting striaght up I can raise it to keep my back and a good posture.

• I’m also enjoying the new WordPress interface
• Saturday Night Live is actually quite amusing tonight
   

Next week I’m going to post about my kitchen renovation! It was only one wall but its been quite a project and so far I’m really excited about it.

My great friend and techy mastermind Sarah (css and tech mastermind of global erie and interactive designer for the washington post) told me about a fun little web program that will really flip you out.

(: ɹǝʇʇıʍʇ uı unɟ s,ʇı ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ʇı sdılɟ ʇı puɐ ƃuıɥʇʎuɐ uı ǝdʎʇ noʎ ʎllɐıʇuǝssǝ

So like I said in my title, things are crazy. I’m trying to juggle a lot and trying to figure out the best way to do it. I know I can though - officially after this weekend my stance is “no” on anything extra, as one of the things I’m trying to do in my life is ‘ruthlessly eliminate hurry’ . . . it is near impossible though when you work so many jobs and are so involved.

And truly, I think that if I improved my time management, the situation would improve all around. So t hat’s on the list too.

Also I started working on a new desktop background, so expect that next week!!

Have a great weekend everyone.

I know that I have been pretty M.I.A. the last few weeks.

Basically my weeks have been filled with this: (Most designs and by Danielle and implementation by me)

Basically the main photo bar takes you to a new section of our site. The campaign billboards are around Erie and direct you here to read true stories from real people in our church from all stages of life. Who is grace? We are grace. I am grace.

and this: (looking at these now i see some dust on my lens and i’m not happy about it)

and this (first time i’ve witnessed them on a bed “together”):

and many other non-photographic elements including web updates, grocery shopping, budget planning, laundry, kitty playing, husband and friend time, worshipping at church, volunteering, life life life life.

Can’t wait to get back in the game!