Shubinesque

18 Tools I Can’t Blog Without

February 5, 2009 – 3:31 pm

Well okay, that might be a bit of hyperbole. Although I could blog without these, why would I want to? I’m sure this will be of interest to about zero people (maybe one), but I’ve decided to put it here so that a) I don’t forget what I did to my blogs this week so that next time I have to go revamp a blog I don’t have to try to remember and look all over, and b) it’s in a nice list for any other bloggy people should they be remotely interested.

Everything on this list is free except for aWeber, which has a monthly fee dependent on the package you sign up for. I think mine is $15 or $20 a month and I use it all the time.

WORDPRESS BLOG UPGRADE:

Automatic Upgrade Plugin ~ The newest version of WP comes with a built in automatic upgrader, but if you are running an older version, this plugin makes upgrading a snap (takes maybe twenty seconds).

WordPress Themes for giving your blog a makeover.
Plugins I use:
- Akismet for trapping all those spam comments
- Add sig automatically adds your customized signature to every post. Works for multi-author blogs.
- Category Posts for adding a Favorite Posts list
- FeedSmith is for running your blog through FeedBurner, which is blog stats and stuff
- Google Analyticator for Google site stats
- SnapShots adds those neat popup things to outside links that give a preview of the site the link goes to.
Publicity:
- aWeber.com for emailing your posts to an email subscriber list (make sure you put a web form box at the top of your sidebar menu. If you have two menus, put it at the top of the left one)
- hootsuite.com for automatically posting links to your blog post titles to your Twitter account (also has good Twitter blog stats and pays you for adding an ad bar to the top of your links)
- twitter.com/widgets Twitter widgets for posting your Twitter updates back to your blog sidebar.
- Facebook badge for your blog sidebar
- Import your blog posts to your Facebook wall as notes: http://screencast.com/t/9UKFu0uNu2f. I can never remember how to do this, so I just made a short vid to show you (it’s in a really not-so-obvious place so this seemed easier).
- Add your blog to Facebook Networked blogs to get it on your FB sidebar
- FeedBurner.com for thorough tracking of all your blog stats and where they are coming from (even the ones that get read through aWeber emails) and lots of other neat features (like an email signature scrolling headline to put in your siggies.

Browser addons for posting automation and organization (these are all for Firefox. I don’t know what they have for IE so don’t ask.):
- Scribefire for Firefox lets you post to all your blogs (and edit, delete, add categories, upload pictures, etc.) from one popup bar at the bottom of your screen. I never, ever go to my actual blog admin panels to post. Ever. It’s what I used for this post.
- TwitterFox lets me post to all of my Twitter accounts from a little popup dealy.
- Facebook Toolbar for Firefox lets me post status updates from my browser bar and see all my friends’ updates without ever going to the FB site.

Okay, well I think that’s my big list. Now I see why it’s been averaging me about five hours per blog to do a complete revamp. Having all this in a nice list will probably make it much easier and faster. Of course, now that I’m done with all of mine, I don’t need it! Maybe it will help some of you guys.

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Favorite Posts | Tagged blogging, WordPress | Comments (0)

Portland Area Kid’s Consignment Event Dates

February 4, 2009 – 12:29 pm

So last fall when I had my what-are-my-kids-going-to-wear flip out, I ended up consigning a bunch of stuff at local consignment events and then buying new stuff at the same.

The payouts for these are much better than consignment stores, averaging between 65% and 80%. For stuff I had floating around that was too ancient for eBay but still in good condition, it worked beautifully. I think I made around $400 which immediately got spent at the next sale.

I found a lot of really nice things at great prices and am never buying shoes at Payless again because I found tons of really good quality things for between $5 and $10 (got Kyra a pair of gorgeous red leather boots from some European brand for $5. Pretty happy about that!).

So the other day I checked up on the dates for all the biggest ones and thought maybe some of you guys would like that information as well. I am a bit behind on a few of my kids’ summer wardrobes and am planning on filling in the rest at the consignment sales (except for Georgie who I found nearly nothing for last year).

3/13-3/15 Gresham Armory ~ Super Kids Resale
3/14-3/15 Red Lion at the Quay (Vancouver) ~ Kids Konsign NW
3/28-3/29 Oak’s Park ~ Pass It On Sales
4/17-4/19 Washington County Fairgrounds ~ Pass It On Sales
4/24 -4/26 Expo Center ~ Just Between Friends

These look like the biggest. The other ones I scoped last year either aren’t there anymore or have no spring info on their site. If you would like to consign and need a tagging gun (you can use safety pins but if you have a lot of stuff that becomes a huge headache really quick), you can get one here for $7.99 including shipping, barbs, and all that. It takes a couple weeks for it to ship so order it early:
Tagging Gun.

Also, Old Navy stores give away free hangers when they are done using them and I hear that OshKosh and I think Carters outlets do the same. Just ask an employee when you get there. Dollar Tree and Bi-Mart carry pretty cheap kid sized hangers too.

So mark your calendars and don’t buy the stuff I want to buy (but you are allowed to buy what I’m selling).

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Thriftiness | Comments (0)

And For My Next Miracle… The Exploding Brain!

February 3, 2009 – 6:37 pm

Oh, my brain is fried. Happily, it isn’t really required for the laundry folding that I have to do this evening. I’m still working a gazillion hours on web stuff, and I will be so happy when it’s pinned down and I can move on to something else.

Today my big project was revamping the Gymboree News Blog. I upgraded my blog software; switched out the template to a snazzy new one that I really like; got rid of the unnecessary stuff on the sidebar and added important things like email signup, Favorite Posts, and a Twitter feed box; hooked it up to my email service so the blog posts automatically go out to people on the list; hooked it up to Twitter so blog post titles will be tweeted for people there (increasing exposure and readership); added a little advertising here and there; added stats to everything so I can tell how many people are reading the emails, blog, and tweets; deleted some old pages that didn’t need to be there; updated the About the Author page; and generally cleaned up and revamped the entire thing. It took about seven hours. Then I fed Henry some oatmeal and took a power nap.

Even though I’ve been doing web stuff for six years now, I still always underestimate how long projects will take. All of those things on that list are easy enough to do, but getting them all done and figured out and cooperating with each other without breaking each other is a bit more complicated (upgrading is notorious for breaking stuff all by itself; happily it went smooth as could be this time). Plus, just keeping track of all the little pieces is a headache.

But it’s all done now, which is great because I’m picking up a new blog editor this week to run the GNGC blog (swapping for a link back to her site on each post) and now it’s all cleaned up, spanking new and ready to go. Yay!

Okay, I’m off. Must go make dinner and put Mr. Cranky Pants to nap before he hits my caps lock again.

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in News a la Familia | Comments (0)

I Kill, I Conquer, I Come Home Happy!

January 31, 2009 – 10:16 am

Yeah, okay so the men are supposed to be the hunters and blah blah blah. Well, yesterday I conquered the shopping beast and it was awesome!! Brief backstory (stop laughing. I can be brief if I want to!):

Usually I buy the kids clothes for the following year at the end of the previous season because it’s much cheaper (so in January when winter stuff is on clearance, I buy it all up for them to wear the upcoming fall).

Last year we were uber-broke and I didn’t do it, which made last fall when the economy worsened and took our finances with it really unpleasant.Vowing to never make that mistake again no matter how broke we are, I have been consistently swiping a little bit of each paycheck for the kids’ clothes and filling in their boxes a bit at a time. $5 sweaters and $6 pants from Old Navy, $4 shirts and $8 pants and dresses from Gymboree have been pretty consistent price points.

Which brings us to today. Our brilliant government has decided that
everything that can be sold to or for children under age 12 has to be tested for lead and that the law is retroactive so if stores have stuff that was in production prior to the law that wasn’t tested, they can’t sell it. The law goes into effect February 10th. Baaaaad for businesses; today, good for me (after the 10th, not so good).

Gymboree, my favorite kids’ clothes store, has their semi-annual sale going on and their markdowns have been good. Yesterday though, they marked down about a gazillion things to $1.99 at both their retail store and their outlet stores.

Many of the marked down items have rhinestones on them, leading to speculation that these items were would be problematic under the new law. Other rumors are that the economy has made Gymboree’s earnings post badly and they need to unload as much as possible before the end of their fiscal year.

In the seven years I have been buying Gymboree for my kids, I have never seen them mark down this much. After calling the local stores to get a sense of what their inventory was like, I headed out to the Clackamas Town Center store, which didn’t have a whole lot at $1.99 but a few things, and then on to the Troutdale outlet which had tons. What did I get?

1 dress
4 sweaters
8 pairs jeans
15 shirts

Regular retail price: $568. My price? $56. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!! I am the hunter back from the successful kill. Bwahahahaahhaaha! And here’s a picture of me with my plunder:

Every single thing on the floor there cost $1.99 (except for me). There are duplicates in different sizes in there, of course, which is not a big deal because I have a bunch of girls who will match and they like that. Plus, baby shower gifts! Yay!

Okay, so maybe the story wasn’t short. Ha! I actually condensed down 2/3 of what I originally had written so it is short. Well shorter. Okay, off to go pack all that stuff into the kids’ under-bed boxes for next year. Heehee! Yay!!

Rachel

P.S.
Gymboree will continue offering these items at this price point until
they are all gone so you might want to call around and see who has the most stock left. Generally lower traffic stores have better sale
inventory. The Salem store is pretty quiet and often has good clearance stuff, and the Troutdale outlet seems to have more clearance than the Woodburn one.

I’d also call the Vancouver store and maybe Pioneer Place and the new Bridgeport store. Clackamas is usually kind of medium and Tigard is almost always totally cleared out. Don’t know about the Lloyd Center one (I never go there).Good luck!

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Favorite Posts, Thriftiness | Tagged gymboree, shopping | Comments (0)

The Civilized Use for Frosting

January 26, 2009 – 3:11 pm

When Georgie and I returned from a brief shopping excursion the other day, we discovered the girls all dejectedly milling about the kitchen. They had wanted to make frosted graham crackers out of Anika’s cookbook but couldn’t find any graham crackers.

I headed upstairs to go monkey around for half an hour before dinner prep needed to begin and they played together nicely downstairs. I barely heard a peep out of them! When I came back down I found a bowl with hot pink goo that had been almost entirely scraped out of it.

Me: Umm, what is this?

Georgie: We made pudding.

Me: Pudding?

I looked around. Nothing on the stove or in the sink would indicate cooking pudding.

Me: That doesn’t look like pudding. That looks like frosting.

Trinity: No, see here’s the recipe.

Me: Umm yes, that says “icing.” Frosting is icing. You made a bowl of frosting. What did you guys put the frosting on?

Georgie: Plates. We had a tea party.

Me: Well yes, but what food did you eat off the plates?

Georgie: Frosting.

Me: What? So you just put a blob of frosting on a plate and ate it off with your fingers?

Georgie (looking completely horrified): No, Mom. Do you think we’re completely uncivilized? We used forks!

Now don’t tell me my children aren’t civilized! I’m fairly sure that my ten year old son was the instigator of a tea party consisting entirely of pink frosting for the meal. I’m really glad we put him in basketball this year.

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Favorite Posts, Kid Stories | Tagged cooking, kids | Comments (0)

Busy, Busy, Busy

January 14, 2009 – 5:55 pm

You know, I think I like this getting up at six thing. Since I’ve never been a morning person and have a long track record of scowling at silly people who are cheerful before the sunrise, I thought this adjustment would be much harder than it is.

On the other hand, this month is website work month for me and after working maybe two or three hours per week for the last two years or so, things have finally come to the point where pretty much everything needs revamping, recoding, or worse. So my waking hours have all been spent doing that.

The older kids are in school in the afternoon when the little ones are napping, and they’ve all been fairly well put together in the mornings. Plus, George and I have both been home so even though we’re both working, we are also both able to keep an eye on things. Yay for working from home!

Almost all of the work on my first site, HiddenAuction.com is done, and now I’m about ready to move on to Gymboree News. There is so much to do there that I’ve been procrastinating it for oh, about two years now. But I’m going to spend the whole rest of the month on it, race through, and hopefully get it all up and running properly by February 1st. Then I can go back to two hours a week. And then I’ll have all this extra time from getting up early that I’ll be able to use on non-computer activities (that’s the plan anyway). I’m so excited!

Okay, well in addition to writing the opening for Gymboree News and publishing the newsletter tonight and the fiddling with the HiddenAuction.com home page and hiring a coder for some custom programming that I did this morning, today I also have to get my marketing package for Gymboree News organized. This is the busiest time of year for that and I saved my whole package from last year (which I completely redid from the year before and which worked very well) so it shouldn’t be too bad. I hope.

Oh! Part of my grand, take-over-the-world marketing plan involves Facebook so I’ve been monkeying around on there quite a bit. So in my doodling, I found these really cool Facebook badges that are now on the side of my Shubinesque.com website. You can see some of our recent pictures from the snowstorm and if you are say, my mother or grandparents, you can sign up for Facebook by clicking on my or George’s name. So go do that.

That’s about all the news around here. Time to go make biscuits to go with dinner. Mmmmm, biscuits….

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in News a la Familia | Comments (0)

Georgie and Faith, Definitely Related

January 12, 2009 – 10:19 am

Overheard this morning:

Faithy: Bad Georgie. Bad Georgie!

Georgie: No, not Bad Georgie. Bad Faithy. Bad Faithy!

Faithy: Hey, I’m not bad Faithy. DON’T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT!!

Faithy’s almost three. Not so much of a pushover that one….

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Kid Stories | Comments (1)

My New Reading List

January 5, 2009 – 8:53 am

Yes, I’m always on the prowl for good stuff to read, particularly if it has half a dozen books in a series (that way I don’t have to try to think up something new to read too quickly), doesn’t put me to sleep, and isn’t a romance novel (’cause, um, yuck).

Of course, I haven’t had much reading time lately with holiday and all that yap, but the slow days of winter fast approach and I need something to curl up on with on the couch that doesn’t start climbing on me and kicking me in the head within three minutes.

George found a great list of sci-fi books that non-sci-fi people will love so that’s going to be my new reading list. Well actually I’ve read a bunch of the stuff on the list, but there’s a bunch more to go through. Yay! If you are a sci-fi or good book enthusiast, here’s the link: 10 Sci-Fi Books That Even Non-Geeks Would Love. Actually, that whole website is full of fun stuff too. Ciao!

Rachel

P.S. My 6am wakeup is going well. Managed Friday, Saturday, and today (Monday) at 6. George asked me to set the alarm for 7 on Sunday. Day of rest and all that.

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Random Rachel | Comments (2)

Six AM For Dummies

January 2, 2009 – 9:40 am

I hate getting up early. This likely is directly proportional to my enduring love for staying up late. However, with the whole six kids thing and all, it has been increasingly apparent to me that my time is really not my own. When they’re up, it’s theirs. Sure, I got a desk off Craigslist a few months back (awesome red one) and can now work upstairs in our bedroom where I am at least not in the direct line of traffic, but this still has a couple of disadvantages mainly relating to the fact that children are such children.

What usually happens is one of two things: I close my door and work upstairs for a little bit and they open it right back up and waltz in with dollies, bionicles, Cheerios and whatever else they have managed to pick up for their daily household item relocation project at that moment. Then they sit on my bed or eighteen inches away from me at the floor to play or talk or fight. This entirely defeats the purpose of having a desk away from the main floor.

So eventually I shoo them back out and tell them to go clean their rooms or something. This works for a few minutes and then either Kyra takes something or Georgie starts bossing people around or Faith won’t eat her breakfast and they all start yelling at one another. Or they’re all quiet for a lovely amount of time and when I go downstairs I find that they have taken out every single toy they own and built a city where the kitchen floor used to be or trucked out every stitch of bedding to build an impassible wall in the hallway. Then the noise comes from me!

None of these solutions are great. After long days of re-cleaning messes in places that were cleaned half an hour before; laundering clothing for a houseful of people; fighting with my checkbook; kissing fingers with small, nearly invisible owies on them; and hugging and smooching several charming children and one husband, I tend to want to decompress at the end of the day and not spend the evening working. The only place to add more hours to my day was in the morning.

Alarm clocks are stupid, loud, and I have a really terrible habit of slapping them until they shut up and then promptly rolling back over to sleep for just a couple more hour-length minutes. If I’m going to get up early, I have to figure out how to fix this. Last week I found this article about How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Clock Goes Off. The guy who writes the blog is one strange, anti-religious duck; however, he does seem to have a plausible solution to my alarm aversion.

Last night I set my alarm for 6am (my first thought was 5, but then I decided I didn’t want to give myself a total heart attack and it was 12:30am already). After running through in my head a few times how the alarm would sound, how I would sit straight up, turn off the alarm, take a deep breathe and stretch, and then pop right up and go take a shower, I zonked out.

Six o’ clock came and that is exactly what I did: sit up, breathe, stretch, pop up, shower. I think this may have been made slightly easier by the fact that I used the alarm on my cell phone which is really loud and sounds like a phone and it scared the crap out of me. Actually, I think who it really startled was George who I had not directly mentioned my experiment to. He showed up in the shower about ten minutes later.

I’m planning to try this whole six o’ clock thing through the rest of January and see how it goes. Then I’ll either try moving it back an hour or will give up in disgust and go back to my lazy ways. So far it is now 8:44 and I’ve been up for nearly three hours. This is going to be my lead for next week’s GNGC edition, so now I don’t have to worry about that next week. Yay!

I’ve already organized bills stuff for this week and am generally enjoying having had some time to hear myself think before the swarming masses wake up and crowd out whatever conversation myself and I were having.

Ahh, and here’s swarmers #1 and #3. Guess it’s about time to go. Ha! We have a little bit of snow again this morning (under 1″). Georgie’s reaction: “Oh no! Not again!” What kid reacts to snow like that? Apparently one who spent two weeks stuck in the house.

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Random Rachel | Comments (1)

How Many Days of Christmas?

December 30, 2008 – 6:44 pm

After much thought this year, I’m beginning to see the logic of having twelve days of Christmas instead of just one. I always assumed that the twelve days referred to the days leading up to Christmas, but this is not so. They are the twelve days from Christmas to Epiphany, which is January 6th. The four weeks(-ish) prior to Christmas are the season of Advent, which looks forward to the coming of Christ.

Anyway, due to weather-related peculiarity our Christmas seemed odd this year. We were stuck in the house for all but one day for the entire two weeks prior to Christmas Day, which meant no shopping (hurray for Amazon or we’d have no presents!) or visiting friends or going to church or anything at all. Very weird.

Thankfully the snow began to melt enough on Christmas Eve for my family to make it here and happily a bit more on Christmas Day so we could get to Hubby’s family’s house on Christmas Day.

I like playing hearts with my side of the family and Dutch Blitz with my SIL’s on Hubby’s side on holidays. When my Dad’s parents lived up here we used to hang around with all Dad’s brothers and his parents and play hearts (at least that’s how I remember it), so now playing hearts says Christmasy, family things to me. However, holidays also involve a lot of things like eating good food, opening presents, and other non-cards activities. Besides that, I think I may be the only one on my side who has such a strong attachment to playing hearts.

Moving to a Twelve Days of Christmas type of schedule would take care of this because then we could spend all day in the kitchen on the holiday for those who like to do such a thing and I could get my cards fix later. Plus, no more problem of scurry, scurry, scurry, oh look it’s over already. I hate that.

I may have to do some thinking about how to do Christmas on a more leisurely schedule. Wouldn’t that be nice? I think so. I was poking around today looking for websites on twelve days of Christmas things, and found some interesting things. One of them was about the Twelve Days of Christmas song. Apparently there is some dispute about the origin and meaning of the song, but one of the ideas is that the numbers in the days are all used to help catechize children.

The numbers help remember things like this: Four Calling Birds reminds us of the Four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), Five Golden Rings reminds us of the Five Books of the Law (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), Six Geese-A-laying reminds of the Six Days of Creation, etc. Pretty neat! I’m always up for cheesy memory helps. Here’s the link in case you’re interested (scroll down to the bottom for the song): Twelve Days of Christmas. I’m going to have to put that in my Christmas box for next year so it doesn’t get lost and I can teach it to the kiddos.

Actually, they probably already have all this stuff memorized due to our excellent RCC Sunday School program. So nice! I think the sum total of what I learned in all my Sunday School years growing up in a non-Reformed church was that Jesus loved me and the song, “Father Abraham had many sons.” So sad. Now I’m going to have to go quiz the kids and see what they know.

Well, we are having what seems like it’s going to be about a gazillion people here tomorrow night for New Year’s Eve, so I’m off to go clean some more. Downstairs is about done. I love that the children like to mop and don’t complain too much about helping when we ask them to! It’s especially nice since, you know, three-fourths of the mess is from them in the first place.

Rachel

Fiendish friend for effusive fun!

By Rachel | Posted in Random Rachel | Comments (0)