Updated Relief Society Blog

After getting all five boys down for naps today (my nephew, Jaden, spent the night last night and part of the day with us today), I sat down at the computer with a whole list of little things that I needed to get done. Now that I am 2 weeks and 3 days away from my due date, I have started to think about the last few things I wanted to make sure I get done before the baby is born: getting all of his clothes out of the storage bins, finding him a baby book (after I got baby books for the first three boys, Hallmark stopped making them, and I want them to all be the same size book, so I need to take a look on eBay and see if I can find another matching one), and I want to schedule a date a few weeks after the baby is born to go and have photos taken of all 5 boys together, plus I had some other non-baby-related things that I needed to get done.

But when I sat down at the computer I noticed an e-mail about a man from church who had passed away, so I decided that I needed to post that information to the blog that I am in charge of for the Relief Society (women’s organization) at church. After posting that information, I saw a few other things that needed to be updated on that blog. So now it is a couple hours later, Jaden’s dad came and picked him up, I had to move Kolby into my bedroom to finish his nap (not that he actually slept at all during naptime today) because he and Camden kept getting up and playing and reading together (yes, very cute to go in and see them sitting in the dark reading a book together, but not so cute later on tonight when they are both grumpy from not having taken a nap today), Camden got up for a diaper change, Eli is helping Isaac get up from naps now, and none of the things on my list have been completed.

But I have updated the Relief Society blog, not only adding new calendar information and removing some outdated events, but messing around with the blog’s template HTML until I got the text and sidebar widths adjusted to my liking and then re-doing the blog header. I didn’t really change the header drastically, but when I changed the text and sidebar widths the header needed to be larger to fit on the page, so I had to make a new header. I didn’t want to spend too long doing it, so I didn’t change the picture or anything, but I added a striped background and I think it turned out pretty cute.

Anyways, that’s what I spent “my” naptime doing (it’s “my” naptime, not because I take a nap, but because the boys take a nap and so it is my time to do what I want). Oh, and here’s a random tip: (maybe all of the other PhotoShop users out there already know this, but I just learn new things in PhotoShop as I’m going along, so I thought I’d share). So, the other day I discovered PhotoShop’s color replacement tool. It is one of the options under the brush and pencil tools, and I thought it was pretty cool. You can choose any color and then use the color replacement tool to replace the color in a picture with the color you chose – but it doesn’t erase the picture, it just changes the color of it. So, for example, I used it when I made the new R.S. blog header with the striped background. Originally there were a lot more orange and yellow stripes, but I wanted them to be more pink and red, so I just used the color replacement tool on the stripes that I wanted to change. Pretty cool, huh? (I know, I know, I’m a total computer geek, but oh well, I like that kind of stuff).

SiteMeter

So, lots of our friends have started making their blogs private, but I’ve not wanted to do that because it makes it a lot harder for friends to find your blog (I have enjoyed reconnecting with several old friends by finding their blogs, and I also like how easy it is to get my friends’ new blog posts e-mailed to me so I can keep up to date on what’s going on with everyone, but if they have private blogs they don’t come across on the e-mails). Anyways, I was thinking about a friend of mine, who decided to make her blog private after she tracked who was coming to her blog and found that more than one person in locations where she didn’t know anyone had Googled the word “diaper” and then spent a significant amount of time on her blog. Although making our blog private would be very inconvenient, I have thought about that friend, and wondered if I should be more careful about what I post on our blog. One blog feature that I really like is our SiteMeter ticker at the very bottom of the page (where it says “17,717 visitors since May 1, 2007”). If you’re not familiar with SiteMeter, it is a free counter that not only tells how many visitors have visited the blog, but you can click on that number at the bottom of the page and get information on who is visiting your blog. It doesn’t give a person’s name, but it does list just about any other information you could want to know about your blog readers, such as where in the world they are located, how long they spent on your blog, what website they visited before they came to your blog, etc. I like the map feature – you can tell it to show your most recent visitors on a world map, and then you have the option to click on each of the little dots on the map to get details about each blog visitor. I hadn’t looked at this information for a while, but since my friends’ experience I decided to see who was looking at our blog.

I was rather relieved with what I found. Although most of my recent blog visitors were from the U.S., there were four from around England, one from South Africa, and another from Australia. As far as I know, I don’t have any friends living in those locations, so I took a look at their details first. The one in Africa visited our blog for less than 1 second (which I am assuming means that they Googled a topic and clicked on our blog, and then left right away when they found out that it wasn’t what they were looking for). The one in Australia had also spent less than 1 second on our blog, and it said that they had Googled the words “Michael Bradshaw piano” (I wonder if there is a Michael Bradshaw who is a famous Australian pianist???). And the ones in Europe had come to our blog after visiting FamilySearch.org (where I have posted my genealogy files and a link to our blog in order to make contacts for genealogy research, so I think it is great that several people have been able to use the blog to contact me about genealogy lately). I also found several people in the U.S. who had visited our blog after looking at my genealogy info. I didn’t take the time to click on every U.S. visitor, but the ones that I did look at had found our blog when they Googled things like “Ideas for New Years Family Goals,” “Dermatology Interviews,” “Different ways you can spell the name Kolby,” “Double Swaddle for Baby,” and “Gospel ABC Book,” (you would be surprised at how many people have seen my post from last year about the cute little Gospel ABC book that I got from Heather Dawson and have written to ask me if they could have copies of it). And there are also several that came to our blog by clicking on links on our friends’ blogs too. But nothing alarming that I could see. I’ll just have to continue to check on that every once in a while and make sure there are no weirdos out there looking at my kids in an inappropriate way or anything.

What I've Been Working On

So, I’ve been busy the last few days with a new project. They handed around a sign-up sheet in church a couple weeks ago with lists of possible Relief Society Enrichment activity ideas, and everyone was supposed to mark which activities they would be interested in participating in, and if they would be able to teach about any of the topics. One of the activities listed was “How to Make a Blog,” and I marked that I would be able to teach people how to do that. So, I got a call the other day from Dorene Lynch, a sister in the Relief Society presidency, asking me if I would make a Relief Society blog for our ward. She came over a couple days ago with some ideas of what she wanted included, and we got the blog all set up. It was pretty basic and plain-looking in the beginning, and I wanted to make it look nice. So I went online and spent quite a while searching for a template that would add a nice background and design to the new blog. I found nothing that I thought looked nice and was appropriate for a Relief Society blog. So then I decided to teach myself how to make my own background by using one of the basic templates that blogspot provides for you (I love that searching on Google will almost always help you figure out what you want to learn to do on the computer). So, after messing around with the HTML code for the blog template for a while, I finally figured out how to change the background image. Then I spent another couple hours yesterday (during the boys’ nap time) designing a header for the blog. I have to say I was pretty pleased with how it all turned out. Last night and this morning I added lots of links and made a slideshow from photos that that sister from the Relief Society presidency e-mailed me for the blog, and I figured out how to add a calendar, so it’s pretty much up and running now. So, that’s what I’ve been working on the last few days (I promise, I will get the rest of the San Diego pictures and some fun Halloween pictures of the kids posted eventually).

http://www.wv4th.blogspot.com/

Disclaimer

Just to explain the post below, I didn’t write that. My dad asked me to show him how to make blog posts, and I had him do a test post on my blog. When I showed him how to post photos, he posted a few from his computer from their trip to Europe. Then he got the idea to make it a joke. So, for those of you who were confused, that’s what all that was about.

"On Call"

It’s 11:30 at night, and there really isn’t any good reason to be up anymore. It’s not especially late yet, but I’m sitting at the computer, the blog updated with the latest photos of the kids, my e-mail checked (and re-checked, just in case someone wrote me while I’ve been sitting here tonight), my blog feed subscriptions updated (yes, I have all of my friends’ and families’ blogs e-mailed to me, so I don’t have to go look at them all the time to see if they’ve posted anything new or not), and I have even checked on eBay and think I may have found the perfect Halloween costume for Kolby – yes, for October. My problem: Michael is on call at the hospital. [For those of you who have not lived through medical school, internship, residency, etc., “on call” is a deceptive term. No, it does not mean, like it sounds, that the intern is at home, enjoying time with his family and waiting to be paged and rush into the hospital if needed. No, “on call” means that the intern is in the hospital, waiting to be paged for the next possible surgery case, at and time, day or night.] It’s really not been that bad of a month – surgery has been a nice enough schedule, although Michael is more tired from having to get up early in the morning, but most nights have not been late. Except he’s on call (overnight) every few days. Which isn’t all that terrible, either, really. I just can’t go to bed at a normal time when Michael’s not home at night. I mean, I can, but what for? With the kids all in bed hours ago (counting my blessings), there’s no one waiting for me to say prayers, no one wanting me to go lay down with them for the night (well, technically Kolby is waiting in my bed – this is the second time Michael has been on call and I have let Kolby sleep with me for the night). Kolby got really sad earlier when Michael wasn’t home to say goodnight, and after a long explanation of what “on call” means, how the doctors have to take turns staying overnight at the hospital to help the sick people, that the doctors don’t have to wait in line to take these turns, what surgery is {note to self: an explanation that doctors cut into people, fix them up, and then sew them back up is probably not the best idea for a 4-year-old, even if you try to make it sound less scary by saying that the doctors are helping, and this only happens to people who are really, really, really, really sick or hurt. Oops, I guess you learn as you go, as with everything in parenting}, and that doctors who perform surgeries use special tools from the hospital and not the tools that Grandma keeps in the garage for gardening; I was able to get Kolby to go to bed by telling him he could sleep in my bed tonight. Why not? Anyways, it’s now 11:48, and I am starting to get that faint sick feeling that I used to get when I would pull all-nighters to finish procrastinated homework assignments in high school (it’s really not all that late yet – what happened to those days when we were dating and it was an early night if we got in by midnight or 1am?) Anyways, good night.

A Nice Idea

I saw this link on my friend's blog, http://www.blurb.com/create/book/blogbook?tag=3_sf, to have your blog printed and bound in a nice book. It actually looks like a really good idea. It even gives you the option to use a lot of different formats to make the pages of the book look nice, and not just everything listed in a long row like blogs often are. Anyways, i thought it looked like a nice format to preserve our family journal (our blog), and thought I'd share it in case anyone else was looking for a good way to do the same thing. (Maybe we'll actually be able to use it to print our blog once we have a real income someday). :)

Re-Connecting

So, a couple weeks ago I was catching up on the lives of some of my friends by looking at their blogs. One girl, Audrey, who I met on an archeology trip and knew for a short time at Ricks College, sometimes writes about her family and posts to her husband’s family’s blog. So, I was just checking quickly to see if Audrey had posted anything recently to that blog. I didn’t notice anything from her, and was about to close the internet page, but saw a photo of a girl that I thought I recognized. When I looked closer, I confirmed that it was a photo of my old friend, Becca Floyd (who has since gotten married and is now Becca Doolittle), who I was good friends with during high school back home in San Diego.

After searching around that blog and the blog that I found for Becca and her husband, Jason, I concluded that Audrey’s and Becca’s husbands were brothers. I couldn’t believe that I was able to reconnect with a close friend from California who I had lost touch with through a girl who I didn’t know for very long at college in Idaho. I was excited to e-mail Becca and tell her how I had ‘found’ her on the internet. I looked at her blog a little and soon realized another huge coincidence: Becca and her husband moved to Milwaukee earlier this summer for his veterinary medicine internship. So, I e-mailed her, and today Becca was able to come to our home and visit with me, and meet my family. It was really fun to talk with her, and to catch up on everything that has happened to each of us in the last 5 or 10 years. Although her husband has a difficult schedule with his internship right now, we are hoping to get together for dinner sometime soon.

Although I feel like it’s worth it to keep up on our blog because I print out everything that I write here and keep it as a sort of family journal, I sometimes feel like it’s silly to write so much and post it on the internet because I don’t know how many of our family members and friends really read it. Also, although it is a very convenient way for me to keep in touch with friends and keep family updated on what is going on with us, I sometimes wonder if it is less personal that sending a letter in the mail or calling people. But it’s kind of cool to think that using these blogs can not only help me keep in touch with and ‘find’ old friends, but can sometimes lead to being able to get together with them in person (and what could be more personal than that?)