“The RoseBouquet”

Little by little, sacrificing some of my supper/kitchen time after I get home from the office, I’ve managed to seed a flowerbed here and there. I’m not all done, but making progress.

There is a heady scent of lilacs in the air around here these days though! Maybe they are long finished in your area, but here in Saskatoon, it is lilac time.

Last week one day I got home and chatted with my neighbour over the fence, and said, “All the way walking home, I smelled an odd smell - made me think of laundry detergent.”

Yesterday I smelled it again, but was also noticing that there were lilacs in bloom along every block. Even on some properties that looked like they were never cultivated much. Ah-ha! It’s the lilacs giving off that fresh clean smell!

I have a lilac bush on my property too, right near the south-west (back) corner of my house, but guess what; it leans over to my neighbours’ Penny and Joe’s place, and all the blossoms this year are hanging over their back yard, while my side has none! Can you imagine?

Mind you, as Joe pointed out, there is a big tree beside it and it is blocking the sunshine from the east and south. So there is an explanation.

There is another one just outside my gate in the back alley. (Not sure if that’s mine then). It is blooming nicely too, but I have to go out to the alley to see it.

In my front flowerbeds along the fence my pink tulips are finally blooming this week. I’ve been taking pictures almost every day, and even paused as I headed out for the office to have one more glance/snapshot looking back.

As for my garden, I haven’t planted my tomato seedlings yet, but probably will this week yet. I should go looking for kale yet too. I hear that’s wonderful.

I hope all my American friends had a nice long weekend. Yesterday was Memorial Day in the USA. That always comes a week after our Victoria Day long weekend.

As usual, I’ve been working on many fronts. Setting up more data feed stores, a quarterly report, Q&A pages on one site, and exploring how to use Facebook and LinkedIn (haven’t tried the latter yet) for business purposes.

I think I’ve finished with the Spanish tracts for a man wanting to take some along to Mexico. But I was also putting Spanish pages on another site (others provided the translated material).

Usually I just pick one thing to tell you about. Today it’s harder to decide what it should be.

Normally, I avoid responding to ads, but on the weekend I was intrigued enough to click on one, and found a business woman’s site where she openly shared her faith. I admired her for that, and followed another link or two out of curiosity. Her mentor’s site had some great copy and again, I clicked, but discovered it would cost so was closing that tab, when the man (via video) stopped me to offer me the same deal for $1 to explore for 10 days. I decided to bite. I figured I could probably read his e-books in ten days and then cancel.

Well, yesterday I got more than half done with his main book, and I have to agree with what he says, but most of that - I already knew. I think I see what his marketing plan and secret is, and I just feel confirmed that I’m best off staying with SBI and SiteSell.

He admits that he spends thousands of dollars on other people’s training materials or ’systems’ to stay on top of things. So I think I’ll do him a favour and send him this link;
networkmarketing.sitesell.com/

One thing I was doing this past week was research where to find free computers that could be donated to a certain Christian charity in Africa. I was surprised to find that there are a number of organizations working towards this goal of providing free computers. Mostly it is a matter of paying the shipping costs. (Even that can be too much of an expense for some).

If you have an older computer sitting around, you can keep it out of the landfill or dump by donating it.

Here’s some links to check out in this regard;

www.freebyte.com/free_computers/”
www.rehabtool.com/forum/discussions/194.html
opencollector.org/freecomputers.html
www.worldcomputerexchange.org/cost-sheet
www.heartsandminds.org/nphelp/supplies.htm

http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/hardware/archives/page9660.cfm (old)
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Technology/Computers_for_Learning_pro.html
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/AboutUs/investors2.htm

I haven’t got to those flowerbed yet that I dreamed of last week, but I did use this long weekend we’ve just had to get my bigger backyard garden seeded.

The weather was perfect on a fine, sunny Saturday. The temperature was up to 29C in the afternoon (that’s 84+F), but there was a breeze, which meant it was very comfortable. Joe had tilled the garden for me with a borrowed rotortiller on Wednesday just before supper, so the soil was black and soft. I raked it out more evenly and began towards 11 am on Saturday - first by drawing some loose lines with my hoe. With my small blade spade I opened up holes along the first four rows on each side of the path. There I dropped a purple potato or two into the holes, trimming down the long roots that had started in my basement.

This year I want more flowers so I sowed a row of flowers on each side, before I did another row of vegetables. After each row or two I closed and watered them with my watering can, using rain water from my barrels. Then I paused to pull out my cards out of my apron pocket, on which I was recording what I had sown.

About 12 noon I was getting tired and hungry so went into the house for lunch. I had made some fruit soup the day before with nan king cherries from the freezer. It was delicious and so I finished off the last two bowls full.

A little bit of re-organizing of seed packets and containers in my big apron pocket and I was ready to go out again. Only this time as I kept stooping to put seeds in, my stomach began to feel awfully bloated. After a few more rows I gave up and went inside and threw myself face down on my bed.

Whew! That was better. But minutes later I scrambled up to get to the bathroom. I was emptied in short order. I’m guessing it was those fine cherries that did the cleanse.

I rested a while, then worked in the kitchen to prepare supper because I was feeling strangely hungry. After supper I went out to the garden and put in a few more rows, so that I could say I got more than half done.

I needed to keep a promise to a client for some work that night, or I would have been glad to finish up the last 5 and 7 rows up to the back of the house. Fortunately, there was the promise of the holiday Monday, Victoria Day.

Sunday was another lovely, sunny-and-breezy day. But Monday was cool and over-cast and either misting or raining as it’s moods came upon it. When the temperature changes from 29 down to 6 C it feels fairly drastic and cold. My hands were freezing just handling my hoe and rake, and the watering can, but I got in another 4 rows, leaving space for my tomato seedlings when they will be ready, and the zucchini which I had used up last year, and my sister had advised me to try kale, which I would have to buy first too.

I put in sweet peas along the wooden fence, but then gave up and decided the rest of my flower seeding in this corner and that, would have to be squeezed in over the next few days when I get home from the office.

Speaking of the office, that’s where I came yesterday afternoon. I had managed, on Sunday evening, to do some serious email cleanup and filing on the home computer. My inbox which most often has a backlog of unanswered and unfiled emails to 143 or 178, or some number like that, got reduced to just four! I wanted to do that on this office computer too.

But that’s easier said than done!

First, why does it get like that?

1. I get more emails than most, as I maintain correspondence with people responding to various websites, I have clients with questions and issues, and I have friends, (who unfortunately, often get ignored while I deal with business issues first).

2. There are several people with missions and ministries in third world countries who keep sending me photos and reports and pleas for funds or help in various ways. I’ve learned to discern which ones I can ignore for a while, but out of respect I try to save their photos to specific folders and to file their emails, often answering two or three at a time, but it takes time to deal honorably with them. When I get busy, these can back up for months.

3. My designated/planned time to answer emails is the last 2-3 hours in the afternoon at the office, but sometimes when there isn’t enough time I forward it to a hidden email that I only answer from home, and if I can snatch some minutes I’ll answer it from there. Sometimes I’m checking emails on Sunday night at home and realize that I can only deal with that at the office so I forward those to the office computer. But all that can cause duplication. That adds to the clogging at both computers.

(I keep intending to figure out how to use ‘remote access’ - in case that would be a solution).

Anyway, yesterday afternoon I was printing out the grant application letters for the client I worked on Saturday evening, and I wanted to print the envelopes. But for some reason my OpenOffice program crashed every time I tried to click on that feature.

I went online to see if others had experienced this. Apparently it needed the database installed. I also saw that downloading the latest version from the main site was highly recommended. I tried that, but it would not install for me. It wanted the old version uninstalled first. However, YaST the software manager would not let me uninstall the older version. All these steps were interspersed with trying to clean up the inbox, and I was getting frustrated.

I decided to install KWord, which is another wordprocessing program I’ve used before. That allowed me to open the envelope feature, but I couldn’t find how to get it to print, and when I wanted to open “help” it was not there. So I went back into YaST and let it install LibreOffice which is a newer version than the one I was using, but not quite the same as the latest version from the other site. It handily over-wrote the old one.

Ah, now I could access the envelope feature, however, instead of printing on the envelope I had prepared, it printed the addresses on a sheet of paper. At that point I gave up for the day. I had some shopping to do yet. It’s a problem I still need to solve today!

I bet that’s not how you like to spend a holiday, is it? I know. But then, I don’t care to have such a learning curve interrupt my usual work day either.

Perhaps you don’t save and file as many emails as I do, but you deal with messy inboxes all the time too, and wonder how to cope. Most email programs allow you to drag emails to the folders on the left side, and you can easily create new folders and even folders inside of other folders. Personally I have found that in a computer crash those emails are often empty after wards, so I like to save them as text files on my hard drive outside of the email program itself. That’s just my way of ensuring I really have them.

Either way, the secret to being well-organized is to set up your own filing folders system. If you use someone else’s you’ll get frustrated and upset and soon stop filing. I read somewhere once, that you can generally divide the categories in your life to about seven main groups, and then try to keep the sub-groups under each of those to about six or seven. If you stop to think about it, most anything that comes up is actually a sub-category of one of your main or secondary folder titles. So go inside that folder and create a sub-folder in there for it.

In my world my main email categories are; Biz, Blogs-Ezines, Church, FRIENDS, Missions, Relatives, Sites, WTM. Inside FRIENDS, I create a folder for each friend by name. Some of them are more prolific than others, so inside their folder I have sub-folders for date ranges such as, Jan-Mar-11, Apr-Jun-11, etc. (or even one month at a time).

This way, if I ever have to find an email and I know who it was from, and about what time of year, with about three fast clicks I’m looking in the right folder.

This works with every other area too. My Mailbox folders are separate from my Documents, where I have another folder system for every document that I produce. All my photos, and websites are the same way.

If you always file away everything as soon as you are about to stop working on it, then aside from a backlog of emails in the inbox, you really will always be current with your computer files.

I hope this will be helpful to those who need it.

Summer is on our doorstep. The weather has warmed up in the last week or so, and the leaves have burst out on the trees. The grass is green, and my thoughts are turned towards gardening. However, this last Saturday I did not get started yet. My neighbour has not tilled my garden, so it still looks very unattractive with all the compost I tossed on it during the winter. Joe says he’s going to get to it this week - as soon as his friend drops off the rotortiller he wants to borrow.

Instead, I spent this last Saturday fetching a dear elderly woman friend, and doing a sewing favour for her. She took me out to lunch, and then I dropped in on a piano recital for a very bright little girl from our church, after which I made some shopping stops. I didn’t feel I had worked hard at all, but I felt tuckered out when I got home.

Last night though I could not hold back any more, so spent my supper/kitchen hours scooping dirt out of a large stone crock planter that had cracked around the bottom, and distributed that dirt among several other white pails and containers. I stopped for a quick supper and then enjoyed seeding various flowers into the containers.

Because of the strong drying winds all day I had some in the front porch and some in the back.

On Friday I had bought two rose impatiens and a strawberry plant, and two herbs. I planted the first three, and then sowed small patches of brachycome, thyme, cilantro, forgetme-nots, and baby’s breath into the rest of the containers. I have not tried such combinations before, but I’m hoping it will make for airy pink and white displays growing up and spilling over the edges of the containers. The darker forgetme-nots will add a bit of contrast.

You realize of course, that for the most part I work with what I have on hand. My parents taught me not to splurge on a lot of new stuff if I hadn’t used up the old supplies.

My flowerbeds in the front need some weeding already, but are also showing great promise of my pink tulips and lots of white daisies. I had sown quite a bit of poppies last year, and they usually don’t show up until the following year, so I hope they will make an appearance too. They used to show in in Dad’s potato patch like tall carnations with full-double-well-ruffled pink heads bigger than carnations.

If care of these flowerbeds doesn’t eat up too much time, I have a mind to bring the spade forward and dig up more of my lawn into flowerbeds. I’m debating between one along the sidewalk, filled with french marigolds for passersby to enjoy - or, if I have enough energy and time, a large round one in the middle. When I can afford some large stones for paths between the beds, Joe won’t have to come mow my lawn any more.

(Sigh). Mom always said my imagination runs away with me, so I’m not sure if I’ll pull it all off. Let’s wait and see.

First off, my apologies. Last week I told you about my datafeed store for Bibles that I had set up on
intimacy.Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/Bibles.php Well, friend/subscriber Robin from South Africa wrote and said he got a 404 page there. I went to check, and sure enough I did too.

What’s up? I began to search in several ways. Since I did it from home I checked there too, to find out what happened to it. There it was. It appears that I had forgotten to upload it. I may have felt I had run out of time at the last minute, or had meant to add some banners on the side columns. Somehow though, I remembered it as if it were done. Naturally, I quickly uploaded the Bibles.php page, and if you went to check after that, it would have shown up. I am sorry for making that announcement too quickly.

On Thursday and Friday I was preparing another such datafeed store - this time on shoes, and ran into a problem with it not showing up at all in the setup stage. So I’ve had to face the fact that there is still more for me to learn about this. The extra research stage is good for me, so I’m trying to take this all in stride. In due time I WILL be very knowledgeable and adept at this kind of web business work.

That reminds me. On Friday night I was doing my weekly bookkeeping and discovered a deposit in my bank account that I had not expected. Hmm… I decided to login to my ClickBank account and check this out.

Oh, what a silly goose I am!

It was commissions I had earned from some new ad widgets I had recently put up on the aloe vera site. - Well, in that case, I going to put more of those up! To switch metaphors, if ClickBank is going to be a goose that lays golden eggs, I need to encourage and assist the goose.

The friend Robin who gave me the heads up last week, also sent a link to a video he has produced about a discovery that he and his wife Joy have made, that is giving them a good income now too. It is really quite well done, and I know they wouldn’t mind if you see it too;
Robin and Joy introduce themselves

(Note: I liked his joke about his secretary near the end of the video )

Speaking of videos, my youngest sister sent a link yesterday that had me laughing aloud. This one is strictly for fun; Is This Good Manners?

On Sunday, after I got back from a picnic supper with my brother Tom, in the park to celebrate Mother’s Day, I was back on the computer trying to catch up with a huge backlog of emails. Earlier already, I had given the computer permission to download some updates in the background.

I did notice that one update would call for a reboot, but I ignored it and went on until I found myself dozing off and I shut down for the night.

Yesterday morning I opened up the computer as usual for my devotional Bible study and prayer time, expecting to see the weathernetwork first thing so I would know what kind of weather to expect, but Firefox could not go online. I checked settings and discovered that I would need a missing file, but I couldn’t go online to download it.

I would have to download it at the office and bring it home. However, just to be sure, I decided that I would take the car and bring home an extra computer in case it proved more difficult.

It sure appeared so. I set up the extra computer which could go online, but was dreadfully slow. I tried this and I tried that from before 6 pm. I won’t bore you with all the steps and efforts, researching online on the spare computer, and growing weary with despair when nothing seemed to work, or some of the advice was just too complicated to understand.

I was sighing prayers, when suddenly, after 8 pm, I spied something and remembered a bit of advice I’d read at the office before I came home when I started to research what to do if an internet connection failed after an upgrade of the kernel. A man had advised someone on a forum to see if the setting was at “ifup” or if it was at “Network Manager” - which ever it was, switch the radio button to the other one, and try that.

Mine was at “ifup.” So I made the switch, and rebooted the computer. Presto! Hallelujah! it was able to go online immediately.

You can only imagine my relief. Nor can I take any credit for it. It was a God-moment!

After tidying up the mess on my desk, I went to stack dishes by the sink, and decided to skip doing them so I could get to my scheduled work on the Kids’ Korner section of the WTM website. An odd tiredness hovered over me as I set up a jokes and riddles index and began to gather some put there.

Do you ever get computer solutions from above?