17August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Trips.
The sheeps have made it to Florida! The flight down wasn’t bad at all. It was scheduled to take about 2.5 hours, but our pilot musta been in a hurry cause we made down in only 2 hours. It felt even quicker than that though cause we watched a movie on the laptop on they way down.
After a quick trip to the store down the street we had some yummy dinner, checked out the motorcycles, went swimming, and had a bonfire. Tonight we’re supposed to head down the pub down the street, and tomorrow I think we’re heading to the ocean. Got a few photos so far, maybe we’ll try to get some posted this afternoon.
15August2007
Posted by Momma under: Thoughts.
Out of control… a completely foreign feeling to me. I thrive on the known! I need to know that things are planned and goals are set and this is the way the direction I am going. But then this thing called “Life” thinks it has some say so… Just to say you know Rachel, it doesn’t always have to go your way. Oh yeah, well who said?
I have an ideal, and forever I am trying to pursue that. An ideal on my level of happiness, my children’s happiness, the type of woman I strive to be, the type of mother I aim to be, my health, and the level of peace that I know comes from Him. Oh I fall short all the time, but for some reason I deal better with that, because I did it. It was not due to someone or something or some unknown that lead me there.
This week has been a trying week for me, simply because I had to throw up my hands in a couple areas in my life and say “For heavens sake Rachel your not in control this time”. Just sitting back now waiting for that peace that will come. In the not knowing the outcome… how will this or that turn out, oh you better believe I need tons of peace!
Another thought I have been thinking about this morning… I wonder why when things completely out of my control happen… Do I then take as mine. As if I should feel responsible, or there is something I could do to make that person better/right, or this thing go away… I guess it is all pretty simple in that I can not control everything in my life, no matter how hard I try. And you know what… I am sure the harder I try, the more He will make sure I know that I am not in control. That makes me smile…
I am grateful today for not being in control of these certain things in my life to which I am speaking to… For I know that if I tried to “fix” them… I could never do as good a job. So I am giving up, and giving it over. Just remind me this next week 
14August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Family; Kids.
Check out the sweet new signs we got for the pool in the back yard. We have become quite the beach combers. Out at Ford Beach one afternoon and found some great drift wood, and knew we wanted Diane to make a sign for our pool… well a brainstorming session took place as to what they should say (Pres helped) and this is what we came up with. You might ask yourself if I’ve really had such a big problem with these issues that I’ve had to create a sign to let people know they shouldn’t be doing this type of thing. Well to answer that 1) Nope at least I hope not 2) I think I would have known 3) Well actually a few times, when a certain someone decides to drink a little too much water instead of just swimming in it. LOL.
14August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Projects.
With only a few very minor details remaining, we’ve completed our project to re-do Michael and Nicks bedroom. Thank you to Momma for all the hours she spent up there painting away, and to Diane for the excellent decals that she applied to the dresser drawers. All the new photos are in the gallery, you can view them by clicking on the “sneak peak” photo below.
14August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Thoughts.
Some thoughts that were in my head over the last couple days or so. Some go back a little farther than that, like the ones about people who don’t listen, but you get the point - or at least my only point is… this is what’s in my head today.
- I hate it when people don’t listen. Not just like they’re ignoring you, but when they’re selective about what they hear you say or type. Almost like they have this pre-disposed idea in their head about how their going to respond to what you say, to the point that they don’t listen to what you say or what you’re actually asking them.
- I love it when I get wisdom from people around me. Not just from peope who’ve “been there and done that” but the kind of wisdom that comes from looking at things differently than I do. They have a different look at a certain situation and can give me advice and pointers on how to handle things.
- I hate it when people bring up things that are completely unrelated to a particular topic just to be mean, or to change the subject away from the truth. Yeah, the truth can really suck sometimes, but don’t be a sissy about it and try to change the subject in such a way that you make youself look like you’re grasping at straws, trying with every flail to poke them into skin.
- I love it when I change my old habits and tell people how I actually feel about something instead of hiding it because I am worried that it would make them “not like me”. I’ve spent many many years of my life living that way, and I’m not gunna do it anymore.
- I hate it when things can’t be fixed, or are drug out over a long period of time. When there’s a conflict between people, get it out there. Put it all out on the table and either fix it, or agree that it can’t be fixed and move on. Granted, putting everything out there all at once can really suck for a day or two. But it’s much better than putting things on the table one at a time and drawing it out for the course of weeks. I would much rather have one or two days that really suck, than two weeks worth of days that only suck a little bit. Get it out there, get it done, and move on.
- I love it when I can pray without saying anything. There are days when I pray and there are days when I do not. There are days when I have more peace within than I do on other days. I have found, that more often than not, when I’m having a really crappy day my prayers don’t require words. But when I’m having a good day the words come even though they’re not required.
- I hate it when people think that just because they think they knew you “then” that they know you “now”. I recently had someone tell me that “I know how you were before, and that’s how you’re gunna be in the future”. Well you know what. You don’t know nuttin. You didn’t know me then and you don’t know me now so just stop it already.
- I love it when I have stuff to do but I can just sit down and relax (even if only for a few minutes) because I know that I have someone else on my side who will help carry me through.
- I hate it when you’re leaving for vacation on Thursday, and you have to go to work on Mon-Wed. It makes for some really long days.
12August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Site News.
I realize that some of you who read this really don’t have an understanding of what some of my “Site News” posts really mean. But I post them anyways as an outlet for my thoughts. I’ve spent about 2 days now trying to get my sitemap to be read by Google and I’m about to give up.
First problem I encountered was that I could not verify my site with Googles webmaster tools. You can do this one of two ways 1) create a file with a certain name in the root of your site 2) insert a specific META tag onto the main page of your site. I tried the file upload method first, but no matter what I did Google just couldn’t see the file. It was there, I could click the link to the file that Google displayed to me while going through the validation process, but when it would try to read the file for validation it would always say “Not Found”. So I tried the META tag route and that worked just fine, I was able to verify that this site is really my site.
The second thing I ran into, and this where I had sitemap problems, was that after creating the sitemap on the root of my site, and telling Google about it, it would return an error back to me stating that…
Network unreachable: robots.txt unreachable
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit
My robots.txt file is empty (or at least it was at the time) and I even used Googles tool to check out my robots.txt file and it says that it can read it fine and that it’s not blocking anything on my site. I also used two different tools to create a sitemap.xml file. I had thought that maybe my .htaccess file had something to do with it, so I did what was suggested on another site and I renamed it. But that didn’t work either. No matter what I’ve tried, Google just can’t seem to read the root of my site properly. So I’m gunna give up on this for now. Maybe I’ll come across a solution eventually but, it’s being moved to the back burner. Having a sitemap that’s working well isn’t something I need to have, I just thought it might help Google index my site a little faster (which they haven’t done since April 7th for some reason).
Update: Ok, so those of you who really know me, know that I can’t just give up on something that easily. If there’s something computer related that’s broken, and I can’t fix it because I don’t know how, it will completely drive me crazy until it’s done. From what I can tell, I was able to fix my problem by changing the persmissions on my .htaccess files. They were set extremely low (too low) for some reason and once I changed them and tried to re-submit my sitemap.xml file to Google it returned “OK”. Things were good, and all was well, from what I could tell. And then today, things got better… as the bots are coming around now. Both Google and Yahoo have been visiting us all day long.
12August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Site News.
A new version of Wordpress (2.2.2) was released a few days go, which fixed some (pretty big) security flaws in the previous version. I’ve upgraded the site to the new version and did some testing. Everything seems good to me. If you notice anything weird, let me know.
9August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Family.
It’s official. The “Sheeps” are heading down to Florida next week to visit my sister. We’ll be flying into Sanford / Orlando airport on Thursday and will be heading back home on Sunday. We’re all so looking forward to the trip. I haven’t been down there to visit them in three years, and they’re just as much looking forward to us coming as we are to going. It’s supposed to be hot as heck down there, but that doesn’t matter to me much - I just miss my sis.
9August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Thoughts.
Most everyone in our area has a brown yard from the grass being cooked by the sun (or they have a green yard and huge water bill). It’s been such a dry summer here… up until a few days ago. It’s rained at some point every day now for probably the last 4 days. The yards are all turning back to the color their supposed to be, and all has been well up until this morning when I woke up to find my laundry room submerged in about 2 inches of water.
It had rained at some point during the night. Only about an inch and a half of rain fell from what I can tell, but if you add that to the 4 inches or so we’ve got over the last few days, and things can get kinda yucky. I’m not completely sure I know where the water came from yet at this point, but I’m pretty sure it came up through the drain in the middle of the floor in the laundry room. There was so much water at one point, it also spread into the kitchen area.
Doesn’t look like any permanent damage to anything other than starting my day off on the wrong foot. But will be able to tell more when I get home from work today. There’s some fans and stuff running in the furnace room to dry out the areas of the floor in there that I couldn’t get to with a towel this morning.
There’s been at least two more storms that have gone over my house since I got to work today, so hopefully I don’t come home to another mess. I will have some mopping to do though (with plenty of bleach).
Update: Alright, home from work to find no more flooding! The fans have dried out the furnace closet area well. Time to get the mops and bleach out and get everything back to normal. BTW from the looks of the swimming pool, we got at least another 1/2 inch of rain today while I was at work - the pool is almost overflowing.
5August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Site News.
Alright, I think I’ve finally made up my mind on which photo gallery I’m gunna use. I’m back to what we were originally using, which is Coppermine. The features are there, I’ve found a way to easily deal with the duplicate photo problem, my only issue at this point is CPU usage with the hosting company. To get around that I’m going through all the albums tonight and re-uploading and re-processing all of the images in the gallery to a max size of 1024x. This should help speed up the gallery a lot and also reduce the load on the server. The only drawback is that it will decrease the max quality of the photos for those of you who want to download something and keep it. So to get around that, if there are any photos in the gallery that you think you want a larger version of, just shoot us an e-mail and we’ll send you the larger version. Some of the large versions are over 5mb in size so as long as you can accept such a large file by e-mail we should be good to go. I’m also gunna try to get some more photos added tonight, if I can fight off my sleepy-ness long enough.
Me and Momma had a great weekend. Friday we didn’t do much of anything except nap, Saturday we went on a hike and then over to the pub down the street, and on Sunday went to my moms for a hobo-dinner. Nice and relaxing. Hope to have the photos from our hike uploaded soon, and hope my legs start to feel better - we hiked about 3.5-4 miles and my legs are angry about it. Geez sometimes I feel really old.
3August2007
Posted by Momma under: Thoughts.
This has been so much fun for me. I am not a geek in the least bit, and half of what I am seeing and learning about is complete gibberish, but I am continously anticipating the next phase. Poppa you have done a wonderful job! You so smart :)
I really hope that our family and friends are able to stay more in touch with us now and what is going on in our everyday lives. I know the boys are out there somewhere and I just wanted to let them know… “Hey I am so excited for you guys to come home,… Hi Hi”.
Life is so very Rich right now. Honestly, I could have just pennies in my pocket, but my heart is full, my mind is at perfect peace, and I have a genuine Olive.
Olivesheep- Rachel Booh
3August2007
Posted by Poppa under: Site News.
Been testing out a new photo gallery plugin that integrates itself directly into Wordpress. I seem to like what it can do so far, but it will take a few more hours of hacking and testing to be sure. I’ve wrapped my current theme around it pretty well so far, but there are still a few presentation bugs I have to work out. I also have some functionality testing to do still, cause I’ve noticed a few things already that seem kinda flakey. So time will tell on this one (and I should stress the word “time” cause it’s been so long since I’ve been head down in code - but I’m coming up to speed pretty quick). You can check out progress so far by clicking the Gallery link above. If this new one fails in the end, I have some PHP code that I wrote for another site about a year and a half ago that I should be able to integrate into Wordpress pretty easily (and maybe even add some Lightbox functions). BTW, if I haven’t said it before, thank you to all of you who read these marks we’re leaving on the world. Have a wonderful weekend!
31July2007
Posted by Poppa under: Site News.
I think I’ve just about had it with the photo gallery software we’re currently using. First it just about got us kicked off of our web-host because when I uploaded like 500 images at one time it taxed the server so much that the moved us to a different spare server, and now last night I noticed that there are ton of duplicate images in there. I did some research on the duplicate images and it sounds like you have to manually go in and delete both images and then re-upload the photo that was borked. Not something that I’m looking forward to doing, especially with as many images as we have out there right now, and who even knows if it will happen again.
So I’m looking at a couple of other photo gallery packages. A couple that integrate directly into WordPress which would make my life easier if they actually work, and a couple of others that are stand-alone packages that actually will integrate into WordPress better than the way Coppermine does (it doesn’t really interface at all - no bridges are available). If and when I do switch, I’ll do my best to make it as transparent as possible and maybe run them both in line until I get everything updated on the new one.
30July2007
Posted by Poppa under: Projects.
Okay already. It’s now 10:44pm and we’re finally done for the night. Time to relax and maybe watch Ninja Warrior (it’s one of our “things”). But first, before we go for the the day, here’s a photo of Poppa hard at work trying to cut the stoopid knock down ceiling edge (below). What a PITA that was. Whoever did the knock down in that room musta thought to themselves… “watch this, let’s see how rough we can get it so the next time someone tries to paint this room, we can sit back and laugh at them”. But we got it done and it didn’t turn out too bad.
Oh, and one last thing before we go (and since the topic of this post is “Wood Finale’” after all…) a sneak preview (see photo below… again) of the cornice boards and a bit of the room as a whole. Momma did an awesome job on them! The room looks completely different, and once again I hope the boys are really suprised by it.
Over the next couple of days, we should have the final coat of paint on the dresser and Momma Diane should have the drawers done too. So more photos will be coming soon, and yes we’ll update the photo gallery too. Think I might re-organize the way I have the “Projects” section layed out, cause I’m not sure if it’s setup how I want it to be yet.
30July2007
Posted by Poppa under: Projects.
The cornice boards are coming along nicely. Dinner is done but we still haven’t eaten yet. It’s one of those things that the longer it sits the more flavor you get outta it. Here’s Momma hard at work attaching the batting to the boards getting them ready to be covered with fabric. Looks like someones been watching their fair share of “Trading Spaces”.
