Going Public

I'm a little nervous about going public with my blog. I sent out the address with our holiday cards that were mailed today. We didn't get it together in time for Christmas cards so they're New Years cards. That's okay. One year we sent out Thanksgiving cards so it's okay to send New Year's cards this year. I'm just glad we got them out, whew! But anyway now that some people know about my blog I'm committed to posting more. I love the idea of blogging! It's a whole new medium of communication and I'm excited to be a part of it. I'm hoping and praying it will be a way of connecting with some dear friends that I don't get to connect with very often.

I love reading blogs. It's like having a little window into a peoples lives. I've been "blogsurfing" (is that a word?) the last few weeks. There are some really good professional news and commentary blogs. But the ones that I enjoy reading the most are just regular people who post some of the mundane details of their lives such as what their kids are doing, what they're going through and what they're learning. I connect most to the "mommybloggers". It makes me feel connected to a larger community of Moms like me and relate to their day to day experiences.

Like I said, it's like having a little window into someone's life. I was thinking this morning about how Chuck and I like to walk around the neighborhood and look at houses. Many times you can get a glimpse through a front window of the interior of a house. I don't consider it snooping unless you actually stop to gawk, but a quick look through an uncurtained window provides an enjoyable glimpse into someone else's style of living.

I'm excited about blogging, excited about 2006 and looking forward to God's abounding grace and mercy for the coming year. I pray a blessing on every friend and every stranger who may come to get a little glimpse of my life. My prayer is that they get a glimpse through the window of my soul and see the love of God.

I will put links to the blogs I enjoy on my blog as soon as I figure out how to do it.

Thanksgiving Traditions

It was a strange Thanksgiving for our family. I think everyone was worn out by a rather grueling Fall schedule which culminated on the Sunday before Thanksgiving with the State Gymnastics Championship for my daughter where she placed 7th all-around in her age-group. She had a great first competitive gymnastics season, placing 1st all-around in the North Sectional Championships.

She went into the State meet expecting to win and was extremely disappointed by finishing seventh. The Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving both my son and daughter were sick with the stomach flu; they were feeling better on Wednesday. Aimee felt well enough to go to gymnastics practice on Wednesday night. We shopped for Thanksgiving dinner food on Wednesday and Chuck made potatoes au gratin on Wednesday night while I stayed at the gym for four hours with Aimee. After an hour and a half drive home (fifteen miles on the LA freeway on the evening before Thanksgiving), I had a stomach-ache and went to bed without eating, hoping I’d feel better in the morning because I had to get up and marathon cook.

Okay, so I woke up feeling terrible. I won't go into the gory details but suffice it to say that it was the stomach flu. Strangely enough Chuck and I were both sick at the same time and neither of us were up to getting the turkey stuffed and in the oven. The kids were kind of amazed, "What no Thanksgiving dinner?, But it's Thanksgiving! My son Eric offered to do the cooking but I knew that despite his good intentions he would get stuck and need me to come help, and the thought of oyster stuffing, well you know.
We told them to fend for themselves, there was frozen pizza in the freezer, or heat up some potatoes au gratin and have some pumpkin pie.

The kids survived, we both felt well enough on Friday to cook and so we had Thanksgiving dinner a day late. I was really happy that I hadn't invited anyone to eat with us so no one was disappointed but our family and they got over it.

This brings me to the title of the post which is Thanksgiving traditions. Being sick on Thanksgiving is not one of our traditions thank God and I don't intend starting it now. But we do have a traditional New Orleans menu for Thanksgiving and Christmas and I wanted to share it here. I grew up in the suburbs of New Orlean and this is what I normally cook for Thanksgiving dinner:

Oyster stuffing
Turkey
Jambalaya
Potatoes au Gratin
Broccoli Casserole
Cranberry Sauce
Gravy
Salad
Homemade Bread or Dinner rolls

After dinner is over I pick the meat off the Turkey carcass and boil it for several hours to make the stock for gumbo. The day after Thanksgiving we have gumbo. I've been working for many years to try to duplicate my mother's recipe which I was didn't get from her before she passed away when I was 21. I still don't have it down but I am close.

I read an article in the local newspaper a couple weeks ago about the displaced children from New Orleans in schools in Los Angeles. When asked what they missed most about New Orleans almost every one of them mentioned the food and especially gumbo! It's that good!

I always encourage young adults I know to get their mother's traditional recipes while they have them available; learn how to make those special dishes. I wish I had. But like I said, I am getting close after 20 some years of trying.

organization issues

Coleridge is the supreme tragedy of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind
produce so little. He left Cambridge Uninversity to join the army; he left the
army because he could not rub down a horse; he returned to Oxford and left
without a degree. He began a paper called The Watchman which lived for
ten numbers and then died. It has been said of him: "he lost himself in visions
of work to be done, that always remained to be done. Colerige had every poetic
gift but one - the figt of sustained and concentrated effort." In his head and
in his mind he had all kinds of books, as he said, himself, "completed save for
transcription. I am on the even," he says "of sending to the press two octavo
volumes." But the books were vever composed outside Coldrige's mind, becuase he
wold not face the discipline of sitting down to write them out. No one ever
reached any eminence, and no one having reaced it ever maintained it, without
discipline.

From William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), p. 290 by way of Gordon MacDonald, Ordering Your Private World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984) p. 65.


I basically am in the midst of an organizational crisis. I was about to write that it started last week on Thanksgiving when I was sick in bed and had some time (albeit nauseated and feverish time) to reflect and pray about the current state of my life. Okay, it didn't actually start then; but the recognition of the crisis came then in the midst of feverish chills and stomach flu aches and pains. I realized that I needed to change some things to take back some kind of order in my life.

I was discourgaged about homeschool, about how well I'm doing with the important job of educating my kids, discouraged about my seeming inability to accomplish things, the state of disorder in my house, my relationships at home etc. In a word, I was discouraged. Of course being sick didn't help those feelings. But I realized that I needed to make some changes. I know it all starts with my attitude and then I can change some of the scheduling issues. Greater Expectations is a key phrase here. This is the name of a book we own about education. I think it's a book about public schools and the issue of lowering expectations to allow kids to feel good about themselves and how this is the cause of many of the problems with public education. (Is that a run-on sentence?)

It's not the book's contents so much but the title that speaks to me at this point in time. I need to expect more from myself and then I need to expect more from my kids. I had basically given up on the house. So anyway in those feverish hours I resolved to make some changes. The next morning I pulled out some of the books I own on organization to get inspired to make some changes and get some control over chaos. One of my favorite books on this subject is Gordon MacDonald's Ordering Your Private World, from which the quote at the top of the post comes. I don't want to end up like Coleridge, although at this point he has me beat in the production category because despite his time-management and organizational issues he is still one of the best known authors in history. But I have lots of ideas in my head and even more just waiting to break through if I had more discipline.

Another book I own called The Organized Home-Schooler by Vicki Caruna sent me the book of Proverbs to study diligence, prudence, order, haste, and confusion. After studying the Bible for awhile I realized what I most needed was the discipline to get out of bed early enough before the kids so I can spend time in the morning reading, praying, planning, and preparing for the day. This has been a thirty-year quest of mine, the early morning prayer time and I need it now more than ever.

I am resolved to make better use of my time, write more, read more, and yes, clean more and even better, make my children more responsible for helping with the cleaning and chores around the house. I will be like David the Psalmist when he faced opposition; I will encourage myself in the Lord and let His healing touch refresh and restore my great expectations for the future.

Computer Woes

Okay, I haven’t written for a while. I’m encountering a few technical difficulties. I’m using my husband’s work computer to write this because my normal computer that I use for everything is out of commission with a nasty virus. As soon as I log in to the computer a McAffee pop up-screen comes up.
Threat Detected
Failed to delete file
Threat: Adware virtumundo
File: opppq.dll
Path: C:\Windows\System32

Then it says the box will close in 30 seconds, of course as soon as it closes another one pops up so it’s almost impossible to do anything else on the computer. The night before it all started my 13 year old son was on thee computer using AIM and MySpace and whatever else he does to keep in touch with his friends online. The computer was acting strangely and I knew that the hard disk was running out of disk space but he wanted to upload another picture of himself to MySpace and he asked me to help him.

I wanted to sit down and check out what was going on with the computer but I ended up going to bed before my son, Eric was finished with his chatting. The next day was Friday, November 11, Veterans Day. My husband had the day off and he got up early and was at the computer to check his email. He called me to get up and take a look at the computer. I took a look and said something like “Great now no one can use it.” He took this as an attack against him and said something to me like “Okay now, can’t you just be nice?”

That set me off because I wasn’t really talking to him but to the computer because I hadn’t been able to do anything about the problems the night before and now it was completely unusable. He thought I was blaming him but I really wasn’t; if anything I blamed myself for letting my son use our school computer for chatting and music and all the other stuff that puts us in danger of attacks.

So we were without a computer for school for about a week, which is not good because our homeschool lessons are all online. I tried getting to the lessons with my old computer and I was able to get online with it but not to get email or use the online school site.
I actually started to write this a while ago while I was off-line on MS-Word on my husband’s work laptop. Since then I’ve got it set up for my email and accessing school assignments, although it doesn’t have a printer and many assignment need to be printed out, so we’re still not back to 100% on the school work.

Also, all my digital pictures from my new digital camera which I bought in September to take pictures of my daughter’s gymnastics meets are on the infected computer; also all my saved emails with important information are on the computer. Which brings me back to the problem of fixing the computer.

On Saturday, my husband Chuck called around to some computer support people to see if they could come to the house and remove viruses. They wanted about $250 a computer to come out so that option was out.

The first Monday after Veteran’s Day I called the tech support for the online school. The guy seemed about like I expected, clueless. He wanted to send me a disk to wipe the hard disk clean and start over. Not a real option; what about all my pictures and email and Eric’s music files for his Ipod (which is also on the fritz, another story)? So I started researching adware-virtumundo. I still haven’t found a description of what it really is (spyware?, malware? A virus?) and, why is McAffee so clueless against it even though I automatically update McAffee every time I dial-in? Is it really McAffee that is making my computer so slow and inoperable? I found nothing on McAfffee’s site and a search of their database came up with nothing on Virtumundo, which apparently is a real company who develop adware (Can I sue them for weeks of lost schoolwork and productivity as well as the hours I’m still spending trying to get my computer back?)

Let’s see, after this I ran the earthlink spyware scan on Eric’s computer, my old computer and my husband’s laptop, found adware on both Eric’s computer, and the old computer and adware cookies, only, on the laptop. I installed Earthlink’s spyware blocker on Eric’s computer and the laptop, was unable to install it on the old computer because of lack of memory and outdated operating system(Windows 98), couldn’t put it on the infected computer because of lack of hard disk space, not to mention the fact that it doesn’t hardly run.

I found some discussions about adware-virtumundo on various sites, some scans for it and some discussion about which spyware software deals with it best. The one that got the best press was Spy Sweeper from Webroot. I could download it for $24.95 but hesitated to do so because I didn’t think I could get it from one computer to the other. I’m still having trouble trying to write to the supposedly writable CD-Rom drive on the laptop and the floppy drive on the school computer doesn’t work. So I went to Circuit City and looked for Spy Sweeper, which they had. I bought it for the $29.95 retail price. Then I spent a good 2 and a half hours working on the agonizingly slow infected computer. First I had to run the install program from the CD; just when I was about to give up, I actually ran shut down on the computer because it had been about half and hour and nothing had happened but me clicking on the “Threat detected” pop-ups over and over. And as I was waiting for it to shut down the install screen showed up. Anyway it took another couple of hours to run the install and then the scan and sweep.

I was so excited that it was actually running! It found 2 adware programs:abetterinternet and ezsearchbar, and an atlas dmt cookie. It quarantined them and deleted them and I was hopeful! The computer actually restarted faster but still came up with the “threat detected” pop-up. Same old problem over and over.

So I went back to search some more. First I went to the Webroot home page to see how to get the promised tech support I purchased with the Spy Sweeper software. Can’t contact tech support until I register the software. Can’t register the software until I get online with the infected computer. Maybe I can, I need to try to dial-in. Or I could install it on the laptop and register it there. But, my question is, what if the license is limited to one computer only? don’t want to chance it until I know what the license is.

Okay, so I went back to Google search. I found a tech support note about Spy Sweeper advising someone with a similar problem to go to the Webroot web site and download the latest definitions and to turn on various other options. I looked for a version number on the box and CD but didn’t find one. The Webroot web site says the latest version is 4.5. So I’m going to try getting online with my poor sick computer and downloading the upgrade, and then rerunning the sweep. What else can I do?

Did I mention how much fun this is? Did I mention that I used to be a computer geek before I quit my job five years ago and spent the last 5 years trying to recover from 10 years of working in computer support. Well that’s a story for another day. Pray for my computer and for my patience.

Oh yes, I think this is one of those seventy times seven times that Jesus said we’re supposed to forgive people who offend you. Well I am offended and I’m working on the forgiveness. I wish I knew who it was I needed to forgive so I could give them a piece of my mind and then ask for forgiveness. Actually I don’t think that’s what Jesus meant. This is one of those “all my ways” where I need to acknowledge Him and ask for wisdom, guidance and grace to do the right thing to get the computer up to speed again. God is good!

Rosa Parks, American Hero

I was flipping channels on the TV the other night and I was privileged to listen to some of Rosa Parks memorial service on CSPAN. (Actually I was enjoying a few moments of control of the remote while my husband and kids ran out to the store to buy some dog-food. I immediately flipped through the news channels and came upon the memorial service. I relinquished control soon after they came back, after several queries from my 13 year old son: "Do we have to watch this?" So much for my quick news fix.) I was struck by one of the speakers who recounted that Rosa Parks had told her that she was inspired to stand up for her rights and the rights of others on that day in Alabama because she had attended Christian camp meetings all summer. She heard daily from the preachers that "You are a child of God, and your life can make a difference." She chose to believe that gospel message. She said she heard that line whispered in her ear by a small voice as she was confronted by the bus driver and told to give up her seat to a white male. She was a child of God and her life did make a difference. At the right moment in time God used a shy black woman to influence the world for good. She could have backed down and taken the path of least resistance but she chose to stand up for justice and the Constitution of the United States of America, to be a lightening rod for social change. I also learned in that brief time I listened to her memorial service that others had stood up before her and been arrested but it was different this time because she chose to plead "not guilty" to the charges. She believed the current segregationist laws to be unjust and unconstitutional. The constitution of the United States declares that "all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator..." I thank God for women like Rosa Parks and the legacy that they leave to all generations of faith and courage in the face of injustice. I pray for courage like that. I am inspired to study more about her life and to make sure that my children know about her and her struggle for rights that seem so far removed from us today. We would still have Jim Crow with us if men and women of courage had not stood up against injustice.

Getting Started

I've been pondering over subjects to write about and I thought I'd start with a list of things I want to initially write about to I have something to shoot for. Sometimes a little organization goes a long way. Also, since I'm new to this blogging thing but I have been keeping a journal for a while I want to get used to this online thing.
Introducing myself
Choosing a blog name
Last weekend: Church, Tommy Tenney, Aimee's parties, Halloween, gift shopping
Answered prayer: gymnastics victory
Books I've read recently, reading in general, reading the classics
Thoughts and feelings on Katrina from a New Orleans native perspective.
Family: Being the Mom of a teenaged boy and a 7 year old girl.
Honoring my parents (in memoriam).
Being a gymnastics Mom
Stage Mom experiences
Homeschool
24 years of marital bliss
Vocation
Friendship
Philology

Okay, this list should keep me busy for awhile. I'll come back later and write about my weekend. Right now I have to get my kids up to start working on school. Did I mention homeschool?

Here I am

Okay, so I've created a blog. Now what? No, I've been wanting to do this for a while. I actually created a blog on some other site, livejournal, back in December 2004. Then I lost the login info for a while and just rediscovered it. But I've been looking at other blogs and I like blogger.com a lot. One of the Moms at my daughter's gymnastics has a blog that I've been reading and looking at her links and I have to give her credit for inspiring me to get started. Thanks Donna!
So here is my first post!