What Happens When You Cut Back on Social Media - You Get Things Done!!!

I know I spend a lot of time on social media.  Finally being home for many days in a row and working on cleaning and decluttering the house for Confirmation last weekend, I was forced to get off social media and do more things that were on my to do list.  The house got mostly cleaned (except for a couple non-public areas), more real meals were made (with the help of my daughters and MIL and even today (our crockpot and stockpot)).

Having moved forward this week, we are trying to finish up school for the year, get the filing under control and decluttering some more before we have another weekend activity.  For my birthday I got a new label maker (handheld) because my old one only printed half of the words and I have been using it to label files and set up a filing system for all my homeschooling information and ideas.  About 1:30 today,  I ran it completely out of label tape.  Hoping I can find some at Shopko this afternoon so I can keep going with this project.

Next up is the office purging and filing.  Better get two label refills for that one.  Once the office is doing better,  Also making a list of curriculum to purchase for next year at the homeschool conference that is next weekend.  Always feels good when I have purchases our curriculum and can start planning out our next year.  Hard to believe but I have one graduating in 2 years and all three kids will graduate within 4 years.

Sadly, I have not posted on my blog for over 13 months!  Vowing to change that and hopefully spend a  little less time on Facebook.  I have always dreamt of writing and while I still want to write a book (I have ideas and notes started for two of them), I think blogging is a great foray into that realm to see if I really have as much to say as I think I do.

Hoping to set up a blog calendar of topics so I am reminded to blog more regularly.  Look for more pictures, more recipes (LOVE Pinterest ) and maybe even more political commentary (you can skip if you don't want to read it).

Did Ya Miss Me?

It has been 13 months since I blogged.  How bad is that?

Life gets hectic and while I come up with a lot of blog posts ideas in my mind, I rarely find (I mean make) the time to blog.  Probably because I feel it has to be something important or newsworthy or something worthing of making commentary on (ie. a current event).

I do a pretty good job of taking a lot of photos and need to do a better job of sharing them here. Business, homeschooling, church and other commitments keep our family on the go, a lot but we try to do as much as  we can as a family.  Today, we waited a bit before deciding, but did attend Homeschool Day at the Capitol in Des Moines and listened to several speakers.  Bill Federer has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of history and we could have listened to him all day.  We also listened to Steve Deace, who challenged us to not become complacent in being active in the political arena and being devoted to protecting our freedoms and not just talking about it once a year and not being eternally vigilant the rest of the time.

I hope to get on a regular schedule for blogging, so perhaps you will see more posts from me.

I Did It Again!!!

Yes, I have fallen off the blogging bandwagon! My life gets hectic and even though I take tons of pictures and take pictures nearly every day, I rarely seem to get them posted here. My camera dock has not been playing well lately with my laptop, so I am considering buying a card reader the next time I get to the city. Then there will be no more excuses.

I am in the process of learning to take over the webmaster position for our website: Thankful Harvest. We are still working on getting our shopping cart features workable and I will also be blogging there about our farm.

On the home front, there is much mowing to be done, laundry and cooking as always, trying to finish up a few school subjects in the next 2 weeks and getting a list of curriculum to buy for next year put together, so I don't go way over budget. This week we are doing swimming lessons (got rained out tonight, so we'll make that one up Wed. night), hosting a meeting and then have family and friends coming over the weekend.

So I will keep taking pictures and maybe someday I will get a bunch of posts done so you can see what we are up to around here.

Reminder to Self

Don't create 2 blogs and then fail to post on either one. When you finally post on your main blog, it will show up in the inactive blog with no template and you will think you have lost all of previous posts, pictures, blogrolls etc.

Thank goodness for cut and paste and the back arrow on the computer.

Don't have a heart attack, anybody that follows my blog. This is 2 posts in one day!!!

I will try to pace myself okay?!?

A Cool New Feature on Blogger

Perhaps you have already seen this, but in case you haven't, I thought I would share. There is now the capability for you to schedule posts.

Sheduling Blog Posts

I tend to do lots of blog posts in a short time and then don't do any for quite a while, so this will be very helpful to me in providing some consistency to my blogging. People get tired of checking your blog after about a week and some don't come back.

The other idea I had was to make a rough schedule of categories to blog on during the week: ie.
homeschooling, scrapbooking, ranching, kids projects, fun finds, etc. Perhaps I will work on that idea once the kids go to bed tonight.

Hope you find this helpful (well, if you use blogger and not typepad, wordpress, etc.)

Missing In Action

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much in the last month. Especially after the posting spree in January when I was participating in a scrapbook layout challenge.

February was very busy for us with some travelling when my husband spoke in Wisconsin, plus having a booth at a conference and homeschooling. Also I switched from the 8 year old desktop to my new-to-me (used) laptop. Took the computers in to get things transferred over and I got them back this week. So I got all my old photos transferred to the laptop, but need to install my camera software on the laptop so I can download the most recent ones.

While I was away from blogging for these last 6 weeks, my hubby was able to get the wireless network set up for our house, so now I am able to work on my laptop anywhere (WOOHOO!). Especially nice when we are doing schoolwork the basement and I need too moderate messages for the homeschool loop.

While my laptop was in the shop last weekend, the kids played Webkinz on dad's MacBook Pro. Now I am hearing "Daddy's computer is so much faster than yours!". That's alright. I am happy to have a laptop and it is light years faster than the 8 year old desktop. Hoping to locate the camera software this afternoon (haven't installed it since 6 years ago) and get back to using photos in my blog posts.

Busy, Busy Month for us

I will be attempting to post frequently this month, but not perhaps as frequently as I have been. The scrapbook challenge forced me to get my layouts photographed and uploaded daily and since I was already on the computer, it was easy to post to the blog.

We have a number of meetings that we will be attending this month. Hubby is speaking a couple of times and we'll be going with him. We are hoping to get some historical field trips in when we go with him, so will need to begin researching those things asap.

Headed to my nephew's birthday party after church tomorrow. Many many things to do before bed and church in the morning so I will sign off.

Just have to add, that we met the nicest family at the 2 day farming conference we had a booth at this weekend. They farm the same way we do, they homeschool and they have 4 children ranging in age from 8-14 (2 boys, 2 girls). Our kids attended the children's programming at the conference and immediately hit it off and will become penpals. It was so neat and we got to have dinner with the parents last night and found out we have so much in common. Thanks God! That was pretty cool!

I need to learn how to.....

overstrike words in my blog posts. Any of my readers that know how to do this, or can direct me to a spot on the web that explains it.

I posted my scrapbooking goals and would like to refer back to that post and mark things off as they are completed. I also plan to post goals for other areas of my life so it would handy to know how to do.

Thanks.

Finally Some Photos on my Blog

I let the digital pictures really pile up on my cameras digital card (like for 6 months). When I downloaded them, I wasn't able to send them online to be developed because the connections would time out (on their end evidently, because we have broadband), so I finally just took my card into Walmart and got them developed there. There were 376 photos (that was a chunk of developing cost all at once) in all!

When I got home I messed some more with things and got them download onto my ancient (but working wonderfully yet) computer that is getting old (for a computer), so I can back them up to a CD. Now that they are on the computer, it is much easier to access them to post with. So hopefully, in and around other committments this week, I can post some photos of the puppies, our field trips, etc.

Of course if you are a scrapbooker, you already realize that developing 376 photos presents another problem: that even if I was caught up with my scrapbooks (I am not), I would be instantly behind. Oh well, it will help me use up some of my huge stash of scrapbooking supplies (heaven knows that I have plenty!).