Very Informative Letter

Yesterday I got a letter from the Census department. It read, in part:

"Dear Resident,

About one week from now, you will receive a 2010 Census form in the mail. When you receive your form, please fill it out and mail it in promptly." Etc etc.

Only the government would send me a letter to notify me that they'll be sending me a letter.

Random Stuff

Random Item #1

This is Ben checking himself out after getting his eyes dilated.

He wasn't super crazy about the glasses he had to wear to protect his eyes from the sun.

This kid's eyes are (in a word) terrible. His prescription is strong even for an adult. John will be getting glasses soon too. Apparently no one wanted to inherit their mother's perfect vision. I suppose Chris could end up having my good eyesight but I'm not holding my breath.

Random Item #2

Brian and I attended the stake's Marriage Relations Class the last couple of months. I hear there's a stigma attached to these classes, that it's only for folks with marriage problems but that's not true. It's a great class for anyone to take. Good stuff.

Anyway, the last class is held at the Pierson's home where they feed us a delicious steak dinner. Very yummy. Poor Brian had to miss the class because he was short-staffed at work and had to dispatch (for Pete's sake), but I decided to go without him anyway. I'm glad I did. The food was excellent and the last lesson was helpful.

Plus, they have this cool slide in their house. It's for the grandkids and goes down to the basement. It's a tight spiral all the way down. You know I had to try it out!

Now that was fun!

Random Item #3

I'm learning there's a lot to launching a website. I'm getting all kinds of bugs worked out. First, it took awhile to get the site approved through Norton Safe Search. That's the thing that puts a little green check mark next to your site when listed on a Google search. The technicalities of getting that done was a bit of a pain, but it's all taken care of now.

Then I used a free credit I had for an SSL certificate, not really realizing that I do NOT want that on my website, because first of all, I don't need it and second of all, when that certificate expires in a year people browsing to my site will get a warning saying my certificate has expired. Well, I don't want that, so I called and cancelled it. I figure, better to take care of it now while I'm getting pretty much no traffic instead of having that kind of glitch after I've been promoting the site for awhile.

Well, unfortunately my Internet browser's cookies and history was remembering the address for the secure site, so when I tried to pull up my site it wouldn't work.

Now, that's not something I wanted to see.

I called GoDaddy (I've been on the phone with them A LOT the past week) and they told me I had to clear my cookies and history. So that's what I did. And now I can see my site again. Thank goodness for that!

Meanwhile, I discover that if you type "personal progress honor bee" into Google, I'm now on page one of the results.

Victory!

But the link wasn't working.

Not good.

One phone call later and I learn what the problem was. I'd changed the name of the file for that particular page of the site, which Google doesn't like. So I changed it back and now the link works.

WHEW!!!

So glad I decided to go live with this site before it was all the way done, so I could get all these bugs worked out BEFORE I started promoting it to death.

Meanwhile, I've had zero problems with the America Jane Speaks blog, so that's my favorite site. Nice and easy. Ahhhhh!!!!!

Speaking of which, I thought I'd spread the word about a contest I just blogged about. If you know anyone who has a teenaged daughter, Jo-Ann has this contest for girls that sew their own prom dress. There are several prizes, but the grand prize is $50,000 for college and a $1000 Jo-Ann gift card. How cool is that???

Looky What I Did...

Holy cow, has it really been a month since I last posted? If so, that means it's been a month since I've checked anyone else's blog too, which means I'm up for a few hours of catching up. Hmmm.

For the record, that picture is not what I did. I don't have a picture to go with this post, so I decided to torture myself with a picture of what I wish I could have for lunch. Chimichangas. Mi Amigos. Ah heaven.

I'm really hungry.

Anyway, here's a brief update on a few things that are new with me.

For those of you who don't know, I'm working during the days now. Kind of. I work for a market research firm a couple of days a week, and only during school hours. I don't know how they're going to feel about this arrangement once summer vacation starts, but they knew what they were getting into going in. :) Anyway, I like the work and everyone is really nice, which always helps.

I'm also freelancing a bit. (Have I mentioned this already?) I'm writing these little web content articles for DemandStudios.com They set the titles, I write the articles, and then they pay me money. It's not the most literary work I've ever done (*cough*) and I get tired of their titles sometimes (*shrug*) but some of the work has been really fun and I like getting paid without even having to leave my house. I'm really grateful for it.

But here's the exciting news. Are you ready? Are you???

(Oh man, does anyone think I'm pregnant? That just occurred to me.)

No, I didn't create a baby, I created a website!! And a blog to go with it. It took me quite a long time to get this baby (no pun intended) going and I'm not even halfway done with everything I plan to do. But the first part is up and ready for hits (hint hint).

You wanna check it out right? Right???

I thought so. :)

Go HERE!!!