I forgot to mention. We have a new computer desk.

It’s not Bush furniture but it’ll do us nicely. Already it’s proving a lot sturdier than the old one, and everyone who comes over agrees it’s a lot more us. Look how well it matches the computer ^_~ (because that’s what’s important). Actually what I like the most about this one is that it uses screws to hold together rather than dowels and glue. I wasn’t too keen on that while we were putting it together at times because the screws didn’t all want to go in, but it didn’t fall apart while I was assembling it like the other one did, and it’s actually a lot better laid out as far as where to put the modem and router so the munchkin can’t pull them down.

Borrowed blog? Blue blog. Well, this one is blue, and it’s my old blog but I’m trying to come up with a new layout. I work with layouts after the fashion of finding something with a similar layout to what I would like, making a new design and tweaking as necessary with the code.

I found a layout I liked to work with the new design I have planned, but the code is so wall-of-text that I can’t decipher which parts control what part of the layout so I think I’m going to scrap that one and find a different one.

Looking at the way this layout works I think I’m going to make the new layout three-column, but I’m debating about putting the text in the middle like on Genki Desu Yo or off to the side like Internet. Serious Business.

I have the three-column, text on one, links and widgets on the other on my business blog/website, and it seems to work okay, but I tend to feel that’s unbalanced. Of course that might also be because I have the image along the side on that, and on the blog here I’m going to do a header as it is now…and I intend to have the page links beneath the header in a line instead of as part of the column.

We’ll see how things work out? Any suggestions?

…but it’s one of those essentials that you have to do. The fun of having our own washer and dryer has worn off. Now it just means that the shirts, pants and underwear pile up in the laundry room instead of the bedroom.

I’ve had to do catch-up today though my friend gets here on Thursday and I don’t know how much time I’m going to have to clean over the next few days. Today “Gran” took the munchkin out to lunch with my sister so that I could work a purge on the house without him getting underfoot.

My husband says I should write a book series called “Helpful [Munchkin]” about all his efforts to be helpful which prove otherwise like his trying to run away with screws while we were attempting to fix the old desk, and him pulling clothes out of the dryer and scattering them about the house as fast as they get put in.

It’s been a busy few days. I almost thought that even though I took the picture last night with intent to post it that I wasn’t going to make it for the Self Portrait Sunday this week, but we’ve got some chill time this evening so I’m catching up with things.

We were over at our friend’s last night having some distraction from the events of the past few days, and my friend across the table commented that I had myself in the viewfinder while I was trying to take a picture of my son and husband. So, I snapped the shot. I hope Jer & Beckah don’t mind that I’m posting their wall on the internet ^_~

To see how others are spending their weekend and what cool adventures they’re getting up to check out this week’s self portrait. It doesn’t like like Cass has been having much fun. Hopefully others are having more.

We’re going to be having a lot of those over the next week.
My friend is coming in on the 4th for a visit from England. The first time I’ve seen her since my husband and I got married, plus now also we’ll have a lot of relatives coming in from up north for my mother-in-law’s funeral. It’s hectic. Seems like there will be quite a few trips to the airport. I’m going to be picking my friend up because hubbie will be at work, but last time his brother and family came down he went up in his car because with three people extra, and the baby seat…it was a bit of “Where are they going to put their luggage? Where are they going to put themselves for that matter?” My car is barely comfortable for three people to ride in…let alone four, and has no trunk space.

We’ve since discovered that my husband’s car needs some work on the tires given he almost did a death-spin on the turnpike coming back from the airport…so now I can see there being a taxi service invested in because we don’t want anyone having accidents while coming to a funeral…

It’s strange in the house this morning. I feel as though things are echoing. My husband is still sleeping, but will have to be up soon to go to the funeral home with his father. I’m going up to check on my Mum and hang out with her for a little while. My step-father finally hightailed it out of there.

I haven’t mentioned much of that situation on here because I was keeping it “out of the spotlight” I didn’t want the risk of me running a scathing diatribe about him that the wrong person might read and have it backfire against my mother.

The quick and easy version of that is that he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and he cheated on her, and then didn’t want to go through with the divorce because he loved my mother so much. There are many other things which I had disliked him for previously because of how he treated both me and my mother, but in the end it was the cheating on my Mum that drove me over the edge to things I really couldn’t look passed. As it was I was keeping away from him as much as I could since the munchkin was born because I didn’t want him influencing or harming my child in any way with his messed up attitude and “if he’s being bad you just need to hit him harder” type of talk.

He called me yesterday to say “Goodbye” and tell me how much “he loves me” but luckily (in some ways) for me I was on the phone with my MILs insurance company translating information for my FIL so they could sort out her death benefits and so let my cell phone go to voice mail.

As it is now he has, as my husband and I, suspected still been keeping in contact with the “floozy in TX” even though he was saying that he didn’t love her and didn’t do anything with her and was having nothing more to do with her, and that is in fact where he’s going. Apparently at one point he was not going up there because floozy’s boyfriend had called and threatened him with bodily harm. As Mum said yesterday it sounds like they deserve each other.

Last night we were blessed for the company of several friends. Two of our friends watched the munchkin so that we could have a break, after he’d woken up from his afternoon nap he was in a foul mood and just kept crying and screaming inconsolably which had everyone’s nerves even more on edge. At seventeen months he can’t be expected to know what’s going on, so Jer and his wife took him to hang out with their two children and have distraction so we could finish helping his Dad for a while longer.

Then we came home to let him rest, and tried to chill out ourselves. Another two of our friends came by and hung out with us, for a short while we debated about playing DDR on the PS2, but in the end opted to let the guys shoot it out on the freshly arrived Halo3, and Becky and I played Sims2 for a while, once the guys got tired of Halo3 they were going to turn the system over to us to play DDR, but that didn’t happen, as we had expected deep-down. There will be some dance-mat competition over the weekend though, next time they visit they’re going to bring their mat, and we’re going to trade out games, although I still haven’t finished two of the Karaoke Revolution games that she loaned me.

My mother-in-law lost her battle with cancer this morning.
She was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, terminal, just before the munchkin was born and defied the odds which said she would probably only have nine months to a year at best and survived seventeen months.

She and my father-in-law just had their 40th wedding anniversary last week.

She was an amazing woman, generous, kind, tolerant, faithful.

As it stands right now, depending on the meeting with the funeral director services will be next weekend.

I like to think that it’s not a secret that from time to time I get paid for blogging. I work now with about four different companies doing this, but Smorty is the newest one that I’ve joined up for.

I wish that I could earn all the money that I needed by doing things that I like. I wish that more could come in from the tarot side of things or from the hypnotherapy side of things, but with our housing situation and our family situation that’s not going to be the case. I supplement my husband’s income by looking at different sites and writing about them, reviewing their products or services and offering my opinions to those of you who are reading this site.

It’s not going to buy us a new house or fly us to Cabo, but it’s helped us out immensely since I started doing reviews in January. New sites pop up offering these services from time to time, some of them haven’t been so great, and others have a really wonderful way of offering their services. I like the way that Smorty operates. I’m having some great fun and have found out about some interesting things. Their interface is straight forward. I had no problems signing up and getting started as I’ve had with several other sites that I’ve worked through.

I’m looking forward to the new things that this is going to bring.

You may remember me mentioning before that a friend of mine is having a book published. I’ve written before about her struggle with cover choices.

Well, she has a cover now, and also she’s put together this very nifty video as a trailer for her book.

Check it out! I’m more and more excited to be able to read the full book in print this spring!