“The RoseBouquet”

Oh Sugar! We had a Board meeting last night for W.T.M., and I forgot to tell them about the bat of last week. I had intended to ask for some committee to be formed to go around finding and closing off all holes where they might enter.

Maybe I can add a note when I send out the Minutes later today after I’ve typed them up.

Let’s see, what else has been happening - particularly in my home life?

Well, I gave up my personal house-cleaning hours on Saturday for a mission project. I had designed a job for a volunteer, and wanted to set up one of my spare laptops for her. (I have not bought one yet). Five have been given to me as cast-offs. The oldest one still works, but has limitations in size, and will only take floppy disks, has no USB port, etc. The other four were considered useless. Garbage. But at various times I’ve fixed them and got them working. Then something else would go wrong.

I’d brought home two of them on Friday, thinking I’d take them to a computer repair place on Saturday and pay to have someone see if they could be revived at all. But as I prayed on Saturday morning I felt that I should have another go at it before I spent money on this.

I tried the other oldest one, the CTX-Ez-Book, and found I had put Windows 98 back on it, but the mouse was wild. Couldn’t click on anything and windows were popping up all over the screen. Yuck! It needs a Linux system on there again, I decided, but since the hard drive is so small, I turned to my desktop and searched on line for new but specific distributions that were for old laptops with little space. I started the downloading of two of them.

Then I turned to the other two. I had put their hard drives back inside them at the office, but it occurred to me that I might have reversed them. Both seemed to have NO hard drive when I tried them. So I turned them over face down and undid those teeny weeny screws, and removed and switched their hard drives.

Voila! when I plugged in the Acer up came Windows XP and - oh yes, this is where I put that huge genealogy database so that I could have it with me if/when I travelled! I’d forgotten. All right, this one is working again. I put a label on it; GRANDMA 6, to remind myself what that was for.

I plugged in the old HP and it had a broken Windows system on it. It booted up over and over again.

Most of my stash of linux operating systems on CDs or DVDs was at the office, but I found an openSUSE 11.2. I put that disk in and hey, it did a fine installation that took a little more than an hour. When I turned around from further research online for the CTX, I saw that openSUSE 11.2 had booted up and that ol’ HP was ready for business! Well, I spent a little time in fine-tuning colours and designs and so forth… until I realized that it was almost supper time, and I should really be sweeping and washing floors.

Aside from an hour in the garden before this “electronic afternoon” I had not got much domestic work done, but I felt it had been well-spent and without spending money. Hurrah!

Well, I may treat both of those laptops to a small USB mouse when I find them on sale somewhere.

And, if it works out, I may install a new system on the CTX this long weekend. I just have to burn a CD for both the new Puppy and the Peppermint Two distros, and see which will work best.

See, not being allowed to toss your old electronic stuff in the garbage is not such bad news. You can give that ol’ desktop or laptop a new life. You can explore free open source while you are at it, having a fun time thrown in gratis.

If you should want to give it away, I know a poor pastor in Tanzania who would love your old working computer or laptop. He’s always asking me to send him some. (I grimace at the shipping costs, but if you want you can ask me for details).

It is hard sometimes to discern what is ready to be announced to the public. The better part of discretion would say that it is not wise to blurt out things that are still works in progress. I have a number of those. Rest assured that there is some progress on many fronts.

This past weekend was not the right one to be preparing my monthly garden photo story as we had our mission’s annual Appreciation Tea on Sunday afternoon. Maybe this long weekend it will be possible. You can watch for it next week.

The leaves are beginning to fall, sprinkling lawns and sidewalks with yellow. The potato plants in the garden are drying off and lying down, which means the potatoes are ready to dig up (have been enjoying some and giving some away). These all indicate that the gardening season is going to wind down soon. But there is still the harvest season to handle in earnest. More tomatoes are ripe every day, and I gave away jumbo cucumbers on Sunday. The watermelon are getting larger all the time!

In fact, this morning as I started out for the office, trundling my backpack on it’s wheels behind me, I saw that the traffic towards the nearest high school was very heavy. I believe this must be the first day of school there.

No doubt the changing seasons means a shift in activities for you too.

I sincerely hope you were not affected by that Hurricane Irene if you live in the devastated areas.

I was surprised when a new contact in India wrote on the weekend to say they were praying for my safety in Irene. I had to give him a little geography lesson and explain where I live in relation to the Eastern seaboard of the USA and Canada. I hear about those things on the news, but wasn’t touched. We had lovely weather on the weekend.

If you are into online business, you have discovered that you mainly have to do marketing if you want anyone to join you and for any profit. Well, I’ve just learned that the founder of TheCustomerAdvantage.com (which is free to sign up for) has lined up 6 experts to offer training in the best online marketing techniques to the TCA members. It is called the Founders Pack. You can only get access to this by first becoming a TCA member. bouquet.TheCustomerAdvantage.com

The sessions are all by video, so you don’t have to go anywhere. Learn at your own pace.

Nothing too dramatic at my home, but yesterday we had some excitement at the office yesterday. I was just carrying my lunch downstairs to join my friends Priscilla and Anne for our lunch time visit and chat. But as I closed the door at the top of the stairs I had the sense that something had fallen just behind my left side, so I turned to see what I had dropped.

Gasp! Oh no! A bat! I have never seen one before, but I knew by the long, gossamer thin wing stretching as the creature crawled under the door, - that is a bat!

I went downstairs in a hurry, hoping that Barry, Priscilla’s fiance was still there as he had been earlier. (Sometimes he joins us over lunch too). Barry has been an exterminator before, so he would know what to do.

He wasn’t there, but Priscilla was on the phone with him, and she quickly relayed my news to him. He advised her to throw a towel over the bat. So she grabbed a tea towel, and I followed her back up the stairs to see what would happen.

When she dropped the towel on the exposed wing, the bat merely crept under the inch-high gap under the door and - oh no! “I left my office door open!” I cried!

Priscilla opened the door and saw it spread out right there on the floor, so she tried dropping the towel on it again. It crawled out and flew away.

Just as fast we closed the door and went downstairs. Priscilla called Barry and he promised to come look after it for us.

I went ahead to Anne’s office and of course, blurted out this news. She is terrified of bats, and declared that she would die if she saw. And it would not do for her to die on her birthday. We must keep it from her!

Priscilla and I went back to lay towels in front of both doors at the top of the two stairwells. Then we settled down to eat lunch while waiting for Barry. We agreed that bats are mice with wings.

Well, we’re very grateful for Barry’s bravery and good sense. He joined us at Anne’s lunch table before our lunch hour was over, and reported how he had followed it to the dark end of the hall, it had turned into the ladies’ washroom when he turned on the light, and he had followed it there, and found it staring down at him from on top of the door. He’d tossed a towel at it to make it fall, then covered it, and carried it gently outside.

He said they eat a lot of mosquitoes. But we should look for any holes where they may find their way into a building. They can get through holes about the size of a nickel. So I’m going to ask the Board next week to make that an urgent project. Maybe there will be volunteers tomorrow at the staff prayer meeting.

You know how I spread myself out to work on many projects and follow this principle of my great-grandfather’s, that if you give a regular little block of time to some project you WILL be able to accomplish great things. Well, I must confess, sometimes I have little niggling thoughts about whether this is the wisest way. Maybe I would have more accomplishments and make greater strides to success if I devoted all my time to one main project at a time.

However, this last weekend I realized that it’s all a matter of perspective.

For the last four years I’ve felt like I just didn’t have time to spend on my site http://generosity-alive.org (and cleaning up Dad’s estate and moving myself into the city WAS a huge, preempting project). A few months ago I decided that when I was caught up with some bookkeeping deadlines, my bookkeeping on Friday nights should not have to take all evening any more, so I’d use the time left over to give that site a make-over.

It took until June to reach that point, and I began to review my goals and plans for the site, then I hunted for a template to adapt, and I’ve got that done, and am about to do over the old pages with the new look and theme. When I consider that some weeks I get only 2 hours or less to work on this one site, I am pleased at the progress I can make, even with such a small block of time.

I was encouraged when I saw in my bookkeeping that my business income has picked up lately. Mostly through AdSense and some affiliate incomes. I was encouraged again when I saw that this site about giving wisely to others in need will soon contribute to that income too.

Persistence DOES pay off. Even when you can only give a small block of time to some work. If you guard that block of time, and keep plodding forward - you WILL succeed. In my case it will be multiple successes and streams of income. You know - like popcorn; you have to wait a while, but once the popping starts - whoopee!

You know, at the SBI forums we read of success stories all the time. If you go there often enough you begin to believe it is possible for you too. What’s more these successful people are very gracious about helping out the new SBI-ers when they start hanging around there asking advice.

This past week some of those success stories have been lifted out so that you can see them without signing up to be able to login. I want to pass on some of these to you too. Here’s just a handful for today.

No Such Thing As Luck With E-business Success

Business-Growing Lessons Of A Success Story (I really like this one!)

I Created My Retirement (At 39)

And a two-part saga;
It Is Not Always About The Money (Part I)

It Is Not Always About The Money (Part II)

If these stories lure you, go
here to see how it works, and how to get IN

Say! I’ve been shopping online for glasses and sunglasses, and look at one of the places I’ve found. You might find just what you are looking for there too.

If you are stuck wearing prescription glasses all day like me, you may not think of them as fashion accessories, but guess what - some people do. If you are one of them, you’ll like Proopticals. (Just click on the banner to go there directly).

Do my doings at my place strike you as rather boring? I’ve just been thinking that I seem to be either talking about my garden or my dealings with mice. Actually, I’ve been assuming that you are not going to be interested in my work on client sites, or my kitchen work, or my housecleaning.

Oh, perhaps you would like to watch me make my batches of greeting cards on Sundays? But I like my quiet time in the recliner first….

Anyway, my strong sense of morality and ethics keeps me from inventing stories, so you are sort of stuck learning here about the ordinary and domestic kinds of things I do, which rise to the surface when I ask myself what’s been happening at my place.

The last two Saturdays I’ve taken to hiding from the heat in the afternoon by working in the basement to do a thorough cleaning section by section of my storage shelves. Two Saturdays ago I was cleaning the shelf unit where I store paints, and decided to carry two armloads out to the car trunk to take to SarCan, our recycling agency. I also cleaned off, and sorted through the next shelf unit where I store mostly craft supplies, and boxes of table games.

That’s where I discovered a lot of mouse crud! So I brought down my box of mouse/rat poison and carefully poured some of the pellets into plastic lids and empty supplement bottles, which I placed by the foundation and on top of the beams overhead. Then I left the box with the several more paper pouches of pellets on the paints shelves for when I would continue cleaning.

Well! This last Saturday, when I went to look for those pellets to put behind the next unit of shelves where I store boxes of archived correspondence and drafts of my book - lo, and behold! that box of poison had been chewed into and two pouches emptied, a third was about half empty and another one had a corner chewed off. Two other pouches of pellets remained intact.

“Oh my, the mice discovered the candy store!” I exclaimed.

I wasn’t sure how effective these things are, but as I continued to clean I found an open box of craft supplies with a desiccated mouse in it. I discarded the whole box, and soon saw a lot things that were not worth keeping any more! By the end of the afternoon I’d set aside enough garbage to completely fill the black bin that I have to roll out to the alley on Thursday evenings for Friday morning pickup.

On Monday a man joined our staff lunch table, who used to be an exterminator. I asked him how effective he thought those pellets from WalMart are. I told him my story. He assured me that the mice had not eaten all those pellets at once and survived. They carry them away to their nest. (Probably shared them with the family). He said, “You don’t want them to all die right there anyway, do you?”

So I am slightly reassured. But I am now motivated to do MORE deep cleaning! I should get more plastic bins with tight lids too.

As you know, I spread myself quite thin in my work agenda. I have only a few mornings to work on my own web businesses, some evenings for clients, and in between all that I try to do my mission work, and keep caught up with emails, which is my ‘public relations’ time, I tell myself. But that means I still have some of my own sites on a back burner, waiting until I can afford employees so I can delegate them to work at some of them.

However, on Sunday night I got the distinct impression that someone was trying to hijack one of those back burner sites. I received an email (one connected only to that one recipe site) apologizing that an email had not got through to its destination. When I studied the email I KNEW I had not sent it, but a spammer had.

Oh no! That means someone has taken over that email and is using it for their own nefarious purposes! I quickly went to the cPanel of that site, was able to login, so I changed the password pronto. Then I went to delete that email and created a new one to replace it.

I’d also noticed when checking the STATs that there were a lot of visitors to a certain membership area’s login page. But no evidence that anyone had signed up to become a member. That could only mean someone had hacked their way into that area! So I disabled the login page completely.

I see in the STATs too, that the pages that have links to this site almost all have the .ru extension to the domain name; that tells me what country those tricksters are in. Well, I hope I have foiled them!

You may recall that I’ve mentioned “TheCustomerAdvantage” before, right? Well, they’ve got it rolling now.

They began in two communities. Now it has expanded to great deals in Colorado, California, Nevada, Florida, and soon Maryland and Washington are to be added.

However - Ta-DA! The current offer is considered available nationally across the USA. It sounds fantastic!

Unlimited use of this Vacation Club deals (up to 80% off) - No Maintenance Fees, No Exchange Fees, No Additional Fees. Just Click on desired Worldwide Resort Week, pay and go.

This is not in timeshare sales– it’s a wholesale resort weeks website which allows you to book the lowest deals (up to 80% off) on condos anywhere in the world. Why, so much cheaper? Because through this TCA offer, they have eliminated several middle-men, which makes the usual price a couple of thousand dollars.

The example they give is a vacation week in a fine condo in a resort area for $149 instead of $1500, the regular price. You know, that’s actually 90% off!

You do travel, or want to, so this is absolutely the best way to do it! Exotic resorts all over the world at up to 80% less! This is the inside source most people will never have access to. Buy at wholesale.

Take as many vacations as you want anywhere in the world and Save up to 80% on each one. Just think, You will take 4 exotic vacations for the same price everyone else takes one!

How can you get this deal? Sign up for free as a member of TheCustomerAdvantage then as soon as you’ve confirmed your email, you can login to your Back Office and look for the deal with your special link to it. Hopefully it will not be closed any time soon! There is no end date on it right now.