What I've been up to

If people are looking here, my blog, or other forums I visit and wondering, where o' where has she been...

It's getting towards summer like weather.  I'm outside more doing random stuff, usually related to gardening, sometimes taking photos, or just being outside.  I'm also a bit more active when it's warm. I get more cleaning done, pot or repot house plants.  I've got over 50 african violets I grew from seed. These seeds came from African Violets I cross pollenated, then I waited several months for the seed pod to grow and ripen. The seeds are tiny!  They are about the size of a grain of sand if not smaller.  I didn't expect much, so I planted the whole pod.  The first batch yielded under 20 but over 10. The second batch yielded over 50. I have 49 of those potted in individual solo cups.

The ones I planted earlier are growing bigger. I expect to see some blooms in about a month or less. I'm excited to see what colors I get for flowers.  Since it's warming up in my room, this means having to water them more often. That takes a bit of time to water those + my several varieties, but it is well worth the time spent enjoying the beautiful flowers I have right now. There's 21 of them in bloom in my room right now. I plan to upload some pictures.

Wed-Friday from 1pm- 4, I am busy with a work study program at our local Goodwill/Easter Seals building. My name finally came up from the waiting list. I've already worked two days. So far the job seems to be okay, but I am in a warehouse on my feet a lot. By the time I get home I don't feel like standing anymore.  I help with the E-commerce. It means a bit of measuring stuff, sorting items, and my favorte so far, sorting through jewelry.

My attention to fine detail and  excellent fine finger moter skills pays off. I can spot the little 925's on the jewelry without a magnifier. I have my life of picking up ants with my fingers (and not injuring them!) to thank for that skill.

I also have a beef with my supervisor.. I don't like the lack of care he shows when he tosses items (delicate ceramic sculptures, etc) into bins after he sorts through and picks out the stuff that he likes... It's one thing if these items are going out to the trash, but if they are going out to the store...Oh my...

I sort of wondered why sets may be missing pieces or broken... That may be why...  I really hope to get something resolved. I like to take my time and carefully handle things as if I owned them.  It doesn't make sense to be reckless...

This weekend I was busy doing boring utility things... It needed to be done... My old virus scanner kicked out (expired) so I needed a new one. I installed it, scanned for viruses and spyware. Surprisingly nothing found... I must be a very good surfer to have gone a couple months without an updated virus scanner and not picked up anything even though I was on nearly all the time.

Other boring things that needed to be done:

drives checked and defragmented... Drive "C" has structural errors...so it had to be disk fixed first... Surprisingly no problems found and no lost clusters, go figure...and it went through the defrag the second time okay. I tried the early failure warning... Drive "C" didn't respond, but drive "F" reported that it seemede to be in okay shape. Drive "F" is where I store my stories, art and all "important" files... I don't trust my "C" drive.

Optimization: I went through various registry cleaners, etc... My computer still runs slow and lags on occasion...  I guess there isn't much I can do about that...  It's like watching paint dry when I type sometimes... Perhaps it's because this computer has to be over 4 maybe 5 years old. It functions and has windows xp. From what I've seen of Vista, it's enough to scare me away from saving up for a new machine, lol...

So anyway my net time is greatly reduced. Soon it will get very hot upstairs without an air conditioner, and I probably won't be up on my computer those days until evening. That will resuce my net time more. In the mean time life goes on and I do other hobbies.

I'm not leaving but I may be slow to answer pms or post on the message boards.

P.S. DONT get the latest xp service pack from Microsoft...  After about 4 hours of downloading the darn thing crashed in an endless loop of errors... I had to unplug the machine to get it to reboot......then wait another hour for windows to undo the partial update it tried to install.  Microsoft recommended to go back and try the update again...  Umm...yeah sure...no thank you. I don't think so.

Apparently Microsoft has something needing to be "patched" or fixed...before I dare try again.