Soon!

To our servicemen and women, come home soon!  We haven’t forgotten you and are waiting and praying for your safe return from duty.

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Hardcore!

In case anyone was, you know, wondering. 

 

You Are 95% Conservative, 5% Liberal

Social Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal Personal Responsibility: 75% Conservative, 25% Liberal Fiscal Issues: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal Ethics: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal Defense and Crime: 100% Conservative, 0% Liberal

How Liberal Or Conservative Are You?

 

 

 

You Are 92% Republican

You are a card carrying Republican, and a pretty far right one at that! There’s no chance anyone would ever mistake you for a Democrat.

How Republican Are You?

Marriage and money

I did something stupid.  Yeah, quit nodding your head and laughing, it doesn’t happen all that much. 

I’ve been trying to set up FireFox and other programs on my own profile that my Beloved set up for me on his computer.  You know I love my FF add-ons!  Well, they had a new one for something called Buxfer.  It’s a financial site that tracks all your finances.  You can set up bill reminders, bill payments, balance your account, do budget stuff – all kinds of neat things and I recommend it to those who are interested.  You can go to www.buxfer.com for the full site, and you can find the FF add-on here.  It wasn’t setting it up that was stupid – it was not discussing it first with my husband.

See, here’s the thing: we keep all our financial stuff separate.  It’s something we learned after going though our respective divorces.  It wasn’t a “prepare for the worst” type of thing, it was a protection type of thing.  Our past credit history was tied to our exes, and if anything either of our exes did messed up one of our credit histories, if we had anything in joint credit, it would mess it up for the other.  Boy that came out confused!  In a nutshell, if my ex got into financial trouble, since my credit past was tied to him, if Darc and I had joint credit on anything, something my ex might do could potentially affect Darc.  Make better sense now?  Keeping separate credit on everything is something I highly recommend to married couples.  No joint financial stuff – not even the house.  You can set up other legal documents in the event of death or divorce.  If one of you loses your job, then your spouse is safe, and you may need the safer credit to help rebuild your life.  It’s just a practical thing.  And that’s a long way to explain that our finances are separate, but now you understand why.  That being said, I’m the numbers person in the family, and while our financial stuff is separate, I do ALL the budgeting and bill paying.  Essentially I run Darc’s finances. 

So I set up his financial stuff on this Buxfer site and didn’t ask him first if he was okay with that.  He’s not big on keeping financial data online, for obvious reasons.  He was falling asleep and I didn’t want to bother him and frankly, since I’ve been doing all the financial stuff for over a decade now, I just didn’t think he’d have a problem with anything I did.  And after the meltdown of my computer this week – my computer that contained ALL our financial – I figured keeping that kind of stuff in an online-accessible place was a good idea. 

Well, Darc wasn’t happy with me, and told me so, in the nicest way possible you can tell somebody that you’re not happy with something they did.  I apologized, and he understands my reasons for doing what I did.  And I wouldn’t have even considered signing up on the site if they didn’t have a nice little delete button for those who change their minds about it.  Keeping financial stuff online is a risky venture.  Not keeping it online where you can get to it in the event of a computer failure is also a risky venture.  It’s all about picking  your poisons and knowing you’ll have to choke down one of them.  In a perfect world, my bank would have a FireFox add-on I could use.  In the meantime, we’re going to give Buxfer a try.  If for any reason one or the other of us gets uncomfortable with it, it’ll be deleted pronto.  Surely it can’t be any worse than when our bank got hacked into, right? 

Right??

~~Ness~~ 

When it rains

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you sit down at your computer and your screen looks like a long desert highway on the hottest day of the year – all wavy and shimmery.

You know the day is going to be a lot worse when you reboot and get a “Boot Disk Failure” message.  Yeah.  Big time FAIL.

My Beloved and I – you know he’s a former computer tech, right?  We did a lot of troubleshooting and at this point we know the problem is either the hard drive or the motherboard, so he wants to throw my hard drive in his computer to see if it can at least be read and we can pull my stuff off of it and onto his computer so that it’s not a total loss.

In the meantime, he’s insisted I use his computer.  Perhaps I’ll have him create a profile for me on his, so that I don’t mess up all his stuff – you know, all his auto-login things.  Can I say what a pain this is?  Can I say how awful this is?  I run everything from my computer – I have all the household chores on there, I have all the financial data on there, I have all the pictures on there.  And while there’s never a good time for something like this to happen, it certainly couldn’t come at a worse time, given our current situation.  It makes for a foul Falcon, that’s for sure.

So if I’m slow to respond to your comments, blogs, and email, please be patient.  I don’t know when I’ll ever get back up and running again on my own.  In the meantime, Darc’s computer will be doing double duty.  All I can hold on to is that God brought me chocolate when I needed it, perhaps He’ll fix this situation too.

~~Ness~~

It’s official

I have long said that give me a minute and I can probably relate pretty much anything to gardening somehow.  I love to make the similes.  This is like gardening, that is like gardening – life is like a garden and here’s how … .  I love gardening, it’s one of my passions.  I just can’t do it right now, but my love for it hasn’t diminished.  So any way I can relate something to gardening is how I learn to understand that thing, and/or help someone else understand it.  We can all relate to dirt and growth, right?

I realized tonight, while losing myself watching webisodes of Deadliest Catch, that I am officially passionate about this show – I made a simile in my head while I was watching.  I was trying to think of what I could blog about and the thought came to me that trying to find blog ideas was kind of like pulling up a crab pot – you never know what you’re going to get or if it’s going to be any good. 

Did you know there’s a CatchCon now?  One day a year, you can meet the captains and buy stuff at the CatchCon!  I wonder though – if the Star Trek convention folks and fans are called Trekkers, what are Deadliest Catch fans and convention goers called?  Catchers?

~~Ness~~ 

Crab and bad guys

Darc and I spent basically the whole weekend crabbin’.  We’re pretty much caught up on the entire series now – all 5 seasons, except they didn’t show the King Crab season of ‘07 for some reason.  It’s amazing how much we love that show.  You should hear us while it’s on: “EDGAR!  Be careful, dammit, you scared the crap out of me!”  The only episode we skipped was the 2nd show from the current season, as it detailed the loss of the crew from the Katmai, that sunk in a storm in Oct ‘08.  Seven of 11 men were lost, and while the efforts of the US Coast Guard were extraordinary, I just sat there and wept the entire episode, so I didn’t want to watch it again. 

It was in between a couple of episodes though that I heard something.  After one show ended, and before we could que up the next one on the DVR, the TV reverted to whatever channel it was on.  Two women were talking and one of them said maybe the stupidest thing I have ever heard.  She said – and I’m paraphrasing, “One of the problems in society today is that we think of criminals as ‘bad guys’, without being aware of their redeeming qualities.”  I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t speak for several moments. 

It’s now a problem to think of criminals as bad guys?  Somehow this makes sense to people?  Stupid people.  It’s a major “DUH!” that pretty much everyone has at least 1 redeeming quality, but if a person doesn’t have enough of them, or the desire to be an upstanding citizen, then yes, they ARE bad guys.  I wonder if this woman would want such a person dating her daughter?  If she would be willing to live next door to one?  My guess is no. 

I think this woman needs some serious critical thinking skills, and she needs to ponder something My Beloved is fond of saying: If a man steals a horse, does that make him a horse thief or prove he’s a horse thief? 

Stupid is as stupid does, and bad guys are as bad guys do. 

~~Ness~~

Memorial Day

To all who have served, and given the highest sacrifice in honor of our country.  Thank you.

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