Monthly Archives: April 2005

Comings and Goings

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Frank is away on a short trip. He sent me a few photos he took with his cell phone. I haven’t gotten them online yet, but will later tonight I think. I’ll link that here if/when I do.

Frank also told me on the phone earlier that someone might be offering him a job soon. Someone particular that he’s worked with before. It isn’t exactly a need, or a desire, it’s just a possibility of being something interesting. Not exactly that it would work out, we are in the middle of slowly doing the house up, and if a good offer came along, would it be a good enough offer to get us out of this house and onto land without extra penalties? That is the question that drives any answer to any offer ;)

Do we even want to go where it is that possible job would want him to be (a general area, not specificly specific), but further from where we are now, facilitating a need to move out of the general region. Q’s Q’s Q’s Q’s and more Q’s.

On another note, pun intended, we are desiring to geer up and get me singing and out there and do a demo. A demo of my voice, singing whatever. I have old recordings on tape that I need to convert to digital.

My real hope is that I’ll get original material to work with, that I can arrange. I have no music room, no piano, and haven’t worked much with music for several years. The last time I sang in public was when I was pregnant with Russell. He turns 9 years of age on Friday, April 29th. :veryshocked:

So it’s been longer than I’ve even thought. I am very shocked at the time.

My last performance was evening church, when I was fairly newly pregnant. I practiced with a friend up to 4 months of pregnancy, then no more. :(

Friends move away. We moved away. That kind of kills motivation and connections and all that.

I am an introvert and do not promote myself well. I need a manager, and Frank promised to be that years ago, and has re-promised just the other day to get up and do it now. :)

I really miss singing. I really desire to record. I’ve wanted to do that since I was a young teen. I had great dreams. My first dream was to be a clarinet player in orchestras. My instrument broke in the Spring concert of my 5th grade school year. That was the end of my clarinet dream. No one understood how important it was to me. It was a “oh well, too bad” situation. So I turned to singing after that. In 6th grade I had the lead in our Spring Musical, I was Alice In Wonderland. It wasn’t that I didn’t sing before the clarinet incident, I did. I just was a whiz clarinet player for the first time that 5th grade school year. It was great. I loved it, and loved singing. The instrument was more useful for me though. Without an instrument I had to do it all with my voice.

My voice is a good one. I am not bragging, just stating the facts. God gives us talents and we should use the talents he gives us. So that’s where I am, at 38 years of age, striving to dig out of the hole I’ve been in and … do what it takes to do what we dream of.

I am wanting to do solo work, but also am interested in doing band work. My style is adaptive. I prefer certain types of music though. I can’t say as to how I would prefer to sound, but I will be doing “modern” things and updating old songs for modern use as well.

I like alternative types of music. I like acoustic types of music … in that vein. I like some goth/punk type sounds in the alternative edges. I kind of want to get something in a niche there … something different than is out there now.

Wordings which are to Glorify God, but they won’t be “worship” songs. It’s music for all of life. It can contain explicitly Christian lyrics, or not. It won’t be music that is simply negative or man-centered. It can be love songs, or songs of low times, happy times, or a story about whatever. A hymn jazzed up and mellowed out lyrics with liner notes referencing where the ideas are from. Always having God in the forefront, but not wearing him as a record label. Why? Because I don’t see life as secular/sacred split up. It’s all sacred. All we do is sacred. My God is with me in all I do. When I listen to any music, God is with me. His hand is in me and everyone. Everyone is religious, just that not everyone serves the same god. Not my God. Not the True God. That’s what I want to get out there. That my music is music for all, if you like my style. Listen to it and see what it offers, and get a glimpse of the world I live in. Let it help if it can, help you to seek the one true God. That’s my hope. That it will speak to folks on some level.

We may attempt to self-publish/produce. We don’t know exactly where we’ll go, what we’ll do. We are just in the “OK we are going to do something” stage.

So ultimately this means we will eventually “go on the road” at some point, at different points. We used to want to get an RV and travel. So maybe we will do that. Homeschooling is great, isn’t it? It will work, nothing much will change, only change for the better if anything. We can still do my dream and have a farm. I know that we need something to pay for a farm, and this could help. I know that even if we had a farm and I always stayed there, I’d still need what we’d need to travel — a caretaker, or a couple, young or older, to take care of the animals and such in our absence and do some regular chores daily. Hired Help, in other words.

I’m writing this as a record of intent. That’s why I’m publishing it on this blog, to get it out there.

The Kitchen: We have the fridge

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The fridge I had written about not too long ago, but I took those words out of the posts before it came, was brought over a couple of days ago finally.

It’s nice. Nicer than our regular fridge, so it’s now our primary refrigerator. It’s a side-by-side, probably 25 cubic feet space inside. It has an ice maker, and ice and water through the freeser door … but that stuff isn’t hooked up yet. The fridge is in a temperary spot, and wil not be hooked up to water until the kitchen stuff is moved that needs to go, then we can do the plumbing that we need to do.

The color of it is white, and it’s just like our other fridge in that way, it’s that bumpy white finish. The housing for the ice/water on the door is discolored, and a bit cracked on one corner, but that’s rather “normal” in wear … plastic stuff like that goes ugly eventually in different ways, looking bad. The door could be replaced, for $400+ … ha ha ha. No way we NEED to do that. It’s not as clear whether or not we could replace just the housing for that area … but it’s fine the way it is, over all.

We also took out more of that wall we are removing. Piece by piece, slowly “just in case”, but it’s rather mostly sure that it’s not a load bearing wall. It’s just part of this whole remodel, slow and some here, some there, and by and by it’ll all get done. The cabinets I painted before may be far along now to be sanded and repainted now. That will be tested this coming week. Once I get that done it’ll be that the upper cabinets there will also be painted, and we can get things measured out and hang those there and get some electric done and a few other things moved too.

The wall by the steps that hugs the one end of the kitchen is a partial wall, and it’s loose … it moves too easily. We were going to make it a full height wall … so seeing how it really is it will be needed to be torn out and replaced totally. No big deal really.

So things are moving along. Slow, but moving. We have electric that we have to do, then plumbing … then it’ll really be moving … plumbing is the biggy … the thing that means we’ll have to move the sink, or get the bar sink and that inner L counter built and installed … or some configuration so that we have water and a sink to wash with there.

Right now we have nice opening in the wall though, we have two ways to go into the kitchen, so when I am at the stove I don’t have to have people going past me … everything isn’t in place as it’ll be later, but this set up is more like it than not … I’ll have the stove there abouts, and there will be that other way of coming in and out of the kitchen area down near the door to the garage. It’s coming together and even though it’s all in chaos, it’s so much nicer than when we had vinyl flooring and everything in it’s place and a little tiny living room with carpet right next to it with that wall between.

We have a dining/living space now with a large opening to the kitchen, no large wall between. It’s like there is more space now, and we will have more when it’s further along. It’s all about how things are in a room. What place they sit in means a lot. I don’t do that chinese FS stuff, but what I do know about it seems to have “common sense” in some of it. Flow and light and air, they say the energy flows or doesn’t based on what’s placed where, how the room is built, etc.

Our front door opened and right there the house went right back to the french doors, it felt like everything went right out of the house, right away. We took those French Doors out and a board is there now. That’s the place where our kitchen is moving to, it feels so much better. There is no “right out the door” feeling there now. It’s cosy. That’s just one of the things that I felt interesting to mention, it’s just regular “how space feels” that you can figure out without mystical religious symbolism ;)

I have to download pictures off the camera tomorrow, then I’ll take some pictures of the new fridge and get them up here.

Finding the CMOS battery in Sony Vaio GRV550

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Picture One: My GRV550 doesn’t have a keyboard, so if yours does, just ignore the bottom portion of the picture. You see at the top left the top-left part of the body of the Vaio GRV550 … with the “speaker grille” flipped up. To do that, find the little screw on the left side, which is under the flap which is over the I-link, which is next to the USB flap cover. Remove the screw and carefully pull up on the speaker grille thingie.

There you will see the left edge of the computer at the top, and then some of the parts, to the right is a green thing, that’s the CMOS battery.

Pictures Two and Three: Close-ups of the CMOS battery. You have to lift up a black thingie to get to it. In order to take it out you just have to get the little jumper cable and take that out, and pry up the battery. It’s two batteries in a shrinkwrapped plastic thing, the green stuff is that.

To get out of a bind, as some of my posts have gone over, take out the CMOS battery and put it in the freezer for about 10 minutes, then reinstall it. That fixes some of the problems of getting the computer to boot up. I’ll link to those posts later.

Picture Four: A different perspective from the left looking right, you can’t see the CMOS battery, it’s more to the right. You can see the jumper cable and where it plugs in, for the CMOS battery though. It’s the last jumper thing at the top right, a two pronged whitish thing connected to a black wire and a red wire …

Spring Colds

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A few days ago Asa sounded kind of sick, then he started sneezing and was listless for a day or two (nice in a way since he didn’t get into the usual trouble he does … he’s still at that age … 4). He coughed up some chest congestion Saturday night and so with that going on and the occasional sneezing that was still happening, I stayed home with him, and Russell began sneezing a lot that morning so he stayed home too. DH and Victoria when to church in the morning.

DH is out of town today now. I woke up not feeling right. Just that feeling, you know you are coming down with something. It’s a high-pitched-sounding-feeling. It is a floaty-heavy-loss-of-energy feeling … just a bit. Anyhow, I got down in the kitchen and spoke my first word and that’s when I knew how bad it was already. My voice is really low and thick and gravally. I do know that for me it’s not just sickness, but a combo of that and regular spring allergies. Russell too. Asa hasn’t showed any allergies yet, I have hopes for him not to since he was a natural baby, no shots. Victoria shows signs of allergies and is just different. Russell’s are more in the forefront. I know for me and him then, a cold on top of allergies is just more of what we are used to, with more bothersomeness added to it and just no fun.

So this morning Victoria is also sneezing and acting a bit more grumpy than usual.

Things usually go wrong when Daddy is away. Already it’s been harder than usual, and I’ve had to clean up some stinky paint that V. got into. I do not understand how children do not understand not to do some things. They know to do or not to do something, but don’t seem to know that it should or shouldn’t be done. Urgh. Asa is feeling better. He’s getting into everything and going nuts.

Top off the colds and the allergies with a HOT day. It’s supposed to get to 81 F. Earlier this morning it was already 73 F. outside. The house slowy heats up and there is nothing you can do about it if it’s that hot out. The night is cool enough for the house to cool down overnight, and the morning is alright, but the afternoon to early evening is hard to deal with on days like this. We have a better thing going with the lack of French Doors on the back of the house now. They were a great source of heat via sun growing as it goes though the glass, and hot air flowing into the messed up seals. Just removing the doors and a piece of plywood in that place has made it better.

Upstairs, bedrooms, it’s much hotter though in the warm months. It’s too hot for me already today to be there. Living floor, kitchen/livingroom/dining room it’s coolish, but slowing ramping up to hotter. There is little air flow on such days as this. Flowing hot air isn’t very nice anyhow, except in the oven. Our house being an oven is not in my best intrest. I cook faster than some folks do.

It’s just a not as nice day to have it be the hottest of the year, the first really hot day. Being just under-the-weather with a light-cold, a spring-cold with allergy counts high … and this hot air thing, very sunny and hot, and V. played with the stinky oil-based paint and so it’s stinky and getting hotter in here. :(

Asa is full of energy and I feel like something the cat dragged in. Not THAT bad, but close enough. Asa has a head start on the cold, he was first and that’s not in my best interest. His either. But I’m the only one who cares about that. He sure doesn’t. :(